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it’s too bad that the inaugural post to this blog is an obit, but
i’ve learned enough to know that life doesn’t really care about your
own individual sense of timing. i learned yesterday that harold cruse,
the critic, playwright, essayist, activist, professor and intellectual
curmudgeon had passed.
i first encountered him on the far
wall in the “politics” section of a pyramid bookstore in washington,
dc. this was back in the late 1980s when that entire canon of stuff —
ben-jochanon, john henrik clarke, cheikh anta diop, etc. — was all new
to me and i had set out to methodically devour all of it. cruse was not
of that ilk — even tho he and clarke had been friends back in the 1950s
and 60s. he was travelling a different road and i passed over the
massive “crisis of the negro intellectual” in favor of some other
now-forgotten piece of afrocentria.
 i came across the book
years later, in my mid-20s and the flair, originality and straight-up
acidity of his prose left my head spinning. like a cat had took the
dozens and applied them to intellectual discourse. communists,
liberals, muddle-headed race officials of all political stripes — it
didn’t really matter what they were calling themselves ‘cause cruse
analytically gin-su’ed them anyway.
i think cruse was
probably one of the primary reasons that i wound up writing a doctoral
dissertation on african american anticommunists. when i was researching
that project, i came across a cache of cruse materials that had never
been published. i wrote him a letter and asked if he would consider me
as editor of a harold cruse reader. i really didn’t expect him to
agree, but when he did it was probably the best day of my grad student
career.
the thing that cruse brought to the table was a
commitment to resolving the issues that he saw as undermining black
leadership — and thereby black people — for decades. and unlike a whole
lot of other cats who were that mantle of public intellectual, cruse
actually laid down a blueprint. crisis of the negro intellectual was —
along with “wretched of the earth” and “the autobiography of malcolm x”
the required reading for black powerites.
he followed crisis
with “rebellion or revolution?” and then, in the mid-eighties, “plural
and equal” both of which elaborated on the themes he had put down with
crisis. a few months ago he gave me a call and told me that he was
working on a book that would respond to his many critics and that he
might need my assistance in researching it. and, man, he had some cats
in his crosshairs.
even then he was in poor health and i
didn’t know if he was physically strong enough to see the project thru
to completion. but i tell you, there’s some degree of comfort to be had
in the fact that his life expired long before his willingness to start
an intellectual brawl ever did.
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