In the middle of the 1960s, Harold Cruse was angry with his fellow “Negro intellectuals.” “The Negro movement is at an impasse,” he wrote in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, “precisely because it lacks a real functional corps of intellectuals able to confront and deal perceptively with American realities on a level that social conditions demand.” When his book was published in 1967, American race relations seemed to be vectoring toward another nadir. Urban unrest, declining job opportunities for African Americans, the escalating war in Vietnam, and the civil rights movements’ divide over “Black Power” were only parts of the “crisis” Cruse identified. To him, black intellectuals had failed to wrestle with the particularities of racism in the United States and thus had failed to offer meaningful solutions beyond what he deemed to be the dead-end roads of integration and black nationalism.Footnote ¹

As Cruse saw it, too many Negro intellectuals were beholden to sociological or economic perspectives such as Marxism that bore little relation to the real lives of African Americans. These scholars had largely failed to recognize that the “race problem” could only be solved with attention to “the economic, political, cultural, and administrative social organization of this country.” These forces were webbed together. The only hope was for Negro intellectuals to “locate the weakest sector . . . and strike there.” That weakest link was “the cultural front . . . films, theaters, radio and television, music performing and publishing, popular entertainment booking, performing, management, etc.”Footnote ²

Whether or not one agreed with Cruse's diagnosis or his prescription fifty years ago, it is evident that his call has borne scholarly fruit. Intellectual history is now full of books by and about African American history, economics, and culture. Many of these works, moreover, bring together a variety of approaches to offer multidisciplinary perspectives on African American life. These books win the highest literary prizes, such as Annette Gordon-Reed's Pulitzer Prize for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. These books generate social action, such as Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, which is being used extensively by organizations driving for prison reform.Footnote ³

Four recently published books on African American life, culture, memory, identity, and thought signal how large and impressive this body of scholarship has become. In and through them, we find intellectual history tied directly to issues of culture, politics, performance, and geographical space. We find not one, but many, African American intellectual histories. If there is “a crisis” for and about African American intellectuals today, it is certainly not the same as the one articulated by Cruse. Scholarship on African American intellectual, social, political, and economic life often pays close attention to culture and cultural expressions, and there are more approaches and solutions than Marxism, integration, and black nationalism. These four books allow us to consider how far African American intellectual scholarship has come since the middle of the 1960s. They also point to problems that still remain, such as the all-too-easy neglect of women, religion, agrarian culture, and the West.

Taking cues and his title from Richard Wright, whom Cruse chided for never fully emancipating himself from the Marxism of his youth, Jonathan Scott Holloway examines what stories African Americans tell about themselves, what stories they keep hidden, and who has the right to tell or edit those stories. Holloway uses a variety of sources, including personal memories, novels, magazines, dramatic performances, films, and heritage tourism. Jim Crow Wisdom begins in 1940 with the end of the earlier New Negro Renaissance, the publication of Wright's Native Son, and the rise of A. Philip Randolph's plans for a march on Washington. Holloway traces how social scientists edited the stories of black identity to project images of who was the “right” kind of person, what was the “right” kind of organization, and what were the “right” sets of mores. He then examines tales of black identity through the Negro Digest's series “My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience.” The cast of mostly black male authors constructed “solidarity narratives” where their “humiliation” symbolized what the United States had lost and how these black men should be its interpreters.

Holloway also does a masterful job of interrogating the role of black bodies in the fantasy lives and projections of white Americans. Whether in the Negro Digest's other series, “If I Were A Negro,” or in books like John Howard Griffin's blockbuster Black Like Me or Grace Halsell's Soul Sister, the desire to comprehend and capitalize upon blackness by performing it in literary venues was a vital part of the age. This intersected with a growing scholarly debate in the 1960s over who had the right to write and teach black studies. Did the expertise bestowed upon Eugene Genovese and David Brion Davis by their scholarly research allow them to address black intellectual life and history or need one be authenticated as black to do so? Should the University of Michigan have hired Harold Cruse to the faculty even though he had never completed his undergraduate education, let alone any advanced university degrees?

In his concluding chapters, Holloway centers upon ballet innovations of blackness from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, in particular their performances of Black Suite and Revelations. He then examines what it meant to be a black scholar as black studies programs rose; how certain narratives made their way into the civil rights struggles and others did not; and the emergence of heritage tourism that fixated on slavery, segregation, and the horrors of America's racial past. In this slim and moving volume, Holloway not only addressed most of the cultural entities Cruse called for in the 1960s, but also linked them to issues of economics, memory, and identity.

Jim Crow Wisdom could become a new standard for thinking about American life, culture, and thought after World War II. Holloway ranges from the culturally particular of ballet body movements to the broader theorizing of pivotal sociologists; he analyzes the contents of the civil rights archives and wonders how the archives themselves were made. While Cruse spent most of his pages attacking African American intellectual and cultural expressions for what they failed to accomplish or see, Holloway tends first to look for and appreciate the work they were and are doing.

Less ambitious is Daniel Matlin's On the Corner: African American Intellectuals and the Urban Crisis. The title is somewhat misleading. On the Corner largely focuses upon three African Americans—Kenneth Clark, Amiri Baraka, and Romare Bearden. The urban crisis, moreover, emphasizes Harlem and the pivotal position it played during and after the 1964 uprising. With close and careful readings of Clark's writings and organizing; Baraka's poetry, plays, short stories and crucial role in the operations of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School; and Bearden's complicated and variegated collage productions, Matlin upsets an array of scholarly apple carts. Clark was not simply a liberal integrationist who trafficked in black pathologism. Instead, he was a radical integrationist who envisioned political power in the therapeutic and in the masses. Baraka was an innovative writer and organizer, but his work and that of other Black Power radicals built upon earlier traditions of self-help and self-transformation. Bearden steered between the Scylla of misery and the Charybdis of celebration with “realism” in collage form. The multilayered medium of collage allowed Bearden to demonstrate the multiplicities of life, experience, and thought in Harlem of the 1960s.

Matlin's decision to emphasize New York City in general, and Harlem in particular, furthers the long discussion of geographical place in African American intellectual and cultural life. Cruse had fixated on Harlem too, which had some reviewers in the late 1960s praising him and others critiquing him. Michael Thelwell, who helped form the Afro-American studies program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1970, wondered why Cruse selected Harlem for the basis of his study. Unlike Atlanta, Harlem lacked a university dominated by African Americans. Many leading civil rights organizations, moreover, made their homes outside Harlem.Footnote ⁴

Cruse fixated on Harlem, and so does Matlin, in part because of the mythic power of the place. It is unclear, however, if Harlem should necessarily be viewed as the epicenter of African American life. In the early twentieth century, Chicago rivaled it for prominence, and sociologists were just as likely to set their sights there as they were on Harlem. Black Metropolis (1945), for instance, was about Chicago.Footnote ⁵ The phrase “Harlem Renaissance,” moreover, was rarely used in books before 1960. As a shorthand for the cultural, intellectual, and political innovations of the early twentieth century, it grew rapidly in the middle of the 1960s. It then surged after 1980 as scholarship on African American history grew by leaps and bounds. Matlin is right to draw our attention to “Harlem” as an imagined centerpiece, but he does not explain how and why it can be treated distinctly in the middle of the 1960s.Footnote ⁶

While debates about which city best represented African American intellectual life or which community was most influential may be interesting, there are other avenues to approach the problems of place. When scholars claim that location is central, they often assume it more than they show it. Moreover, their claims are often connected to their particular circumstances, as they are to the historical record. In the early years of the Cold War, Perry Miller was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and there he established the New England colonies and their puritanism as central to the birth of the United States. He did so, in part, by minimizing the role of the southern colonies, even though Jamestown had been established long before Massachusetts Bay or Plymouth. Miller also emphasized “America” as an intellectual and religious experiment. His New England-centrism deemphasized both slavery and race, and it was particularly conducive, if not purposefully so, to white Americans’ endeavors to play deaf to Soviet criticisms of racial issues within the United States. In the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” he also applied the puritan language of the “city upon a hill” to the United States.Footnote ⁷

Even Miller's students, like Edmund Morgan, seemed beholden to this intellectual New England-centricism. It was not until the 1970s that Morgan located the story of American slavery and American freedom in the soil of the South. His geographical turn, however, minimized intellectual history in favor of the social history of cotton prices and African bodies. The Miller–Morgan approach largely left New England with a mind and Virginia with a body. What neither Miller nor Morgan wrestled with extensively was that the South had an intellectual history too and that New Englanders owned slaves.Footnote ⁸

Returning to the 1960s and scholarship on it, we can wonder, why was Harlem the place of black “arts,” while the South was the locale of black “spirit”? The geographical splitting of African American history leaves plenty of fissures. It underplays the dynamics of mobility that scholars like Ira Berlin claim have been essential to African American history. The splitting devalues the cross-pollination of experiences and insights that have seemed to define African American intellectual history from the Middle Passage to the present. W. E. B. Du Bois, for example, was born in rural Massachusetts, went to college in Tennessee, and moved back north to attend Harvard University. As an adult, he taught in Ohio, Philadelphia, and Atlanta. He also lived in New York City, to say nothing of his international sojourns.Footnote ⁹ Place matters in African American intellectual history, but the places were porous because the people, ideas, and productions were highly mobile.

While Matlin and Holloway emphasize a host of influences upon African American intellectual and cultural life after World War II, they largely avoid the role of the government and the backdrop of the Cold War. For Richard Purcell and his Race, Ralph Ellison and American Cold War Intellectual Culture, the Cold War was anything but ancillary. It was primary. Ellison's writings and his intellectual dialogues, Purcell suggests, often took place within contexts influenced by covert CIA operations. Of particular importance was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, founded in 1950, and those who took part in it, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Lionel Trilling, Hannah Arendt, and Robert Penn Warren. Using little-known and unpublished documents by and to Ralph Ellison, especially Ellison's syllabi and lecture notes from his participation in the American Seminar in Salzburg in 1954, Purcell locates connections among Ellison's writing, the literary circles in which he moved, and United States anticommunist covert operations. After reading Purcell, it is clear that African American literatures during and after World War II were not simply responding to politics or speaking politically. They were political and politicized constructions embedded in Cold War ideological struggles.

Purcell does not suggest that Ellison worked for the United States government or that he was a secret literary agent. Instead, Purcell maintains that covert operations like the Congress for Cultural Freedom influenced the spaces where intellectual discussion took place, the locations where ideas were published, and the recognition that certain writers and ideas received over and against others. These government agencies recognized that the United States was profoundly undemocratic, but wanted to capitalize on black cultural genius as evidence of America's goodness and democracy's potential. Ellison became a literary ambassador within the nation and beyond its borders because he had the ability simultaneously to expose the nation's hypocrisy and to validate the glory of democracy. Purcell positions this politicized literary culture as central to Ellison's debates and dialogues with key thinkers of the age, including F. O. Matthiessen, Robert Penn Warren, and Hannah Arendt. For instance, Purcell looks closely at Ellison's place and words in Robert Penn Warren's Who Speaks for the Negro (1965). There, Ellison and Warren discuss Hannah Arendt's 1958 essay “Reflections on Little Rock.” Although they form no agreement over what kind of discourse should be used in the civil rights struggle, the three express great skepticism for the rising Black Arts movement, Black Power, and anti-colonial political movements.

In addition to emphasizing the role of covert Cold War operations in playing a role in the literary and intellectual world Ellison moved within, Purcell also gives a new spin on what Ellison called his “dilated realism.” For Ellison, surrealism was the best way, perhaps the only way, in which African Americans could describe adequately their lives amid the “bewildering state of affairs” of the postwar era. Before him, as Sonnet Retman has shown in Real Folks, writers like Zora Neal Hurston had turned to a variety of genres, including fiction and ethnography, to attempt to represent the lives of everyday “folk.”Footnote ¹⁰ According to Purcell, Ellison seemed to know that it was “the state” that was behaving mysteriously and that individual lives were pushed and pulled by forces they could not see. Ellison did not seem to realize fully, however, that he was one of those individuals too.

In his conclusion, Purcell discusses, as many writers are wont to do since 2008, what Ellison has to say to the so-called “Age of Obama.” Although Ellison and his integrationist sensibilities made him persona non grata during the identity politics culture wars of the 1990s, he reemerged with the rise of Barack Obama and the publication of his unfinished novel Three Days before the Shooting. In these years, Ellison has been remade into a “herald of anti-identitarian and pragmatic neo-liberalism” (25), the precise politics Obama seems to desire to perform and enact. For Purcell, this fails to conform to how Ellison imagined himself or his literary legacy.

By including government structures, money, and influence, Purcell adds an important layer to considerations and critiques of Ellison. Harold Cruse was not fond of Ellison or Invisible Man. “The Negro people need Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man,” Cruse wrote, “like we need a hole in the head or a stab in the back.” For Cruse, Invisible Man was a dreary distortion of black life. It bore little relationship to how African Americans felt, and Cruse resented its popularity. But Cruse did not share the critique of John Henrik Clarke and John O. Killens. They were frustrated that as Ellison longed to craft art that was not racial, he did not join “the struggle” and put his pen to work for racial justice for nonwhites at home and abroad. Clarke, instead, considered Ellison simply hypocritical. Ellison's works were racial in content, emphasis, and narrative.Footnote ¹¹ But what Clarke, Killens, and Cruse missed was how easily Ellison and his work were deployed in the international Cold War. His “American” identity and “nonracial” approach were emphasized to combat communism, rather than in favor of decolonization.

If Purcell finds politics structuring literary culture, then Nick Bromell discerns ways that African American literatures can inform political theories. While Cruse in the 1960s saw African American intellectuals as the problem, Bromell finds them and their writings to be the solution. He reaches deeply into the literatures and imaginations of African Americans from the past two centuries to critique contemporary American politics and to offer ways for moving forward. Frustrated that American political theory continues to be beholden to white thinkers, such as James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Dewey, and John Rawls, Bromell suggests that we look instead to African American men and women for the resources to transcend our contemporary right–left stalemate and to counter the radical conservatism at play today in movements like the Tea Party. Bromell does not offer new political programs, but rather calls for new political sensibilities.

From his readings of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, Harriet Jacobs, Malcolm X, and many others, Bromell suggests that democratic culture and practice need to be reconsidered. Individual liberty, for instance, has long been a hallmark of American political theory. To it, Bromell adds indignation. African American writers have suggested that liberty cannot be practiced without recognition. When recognition is withheld, moreover, the best way to make change is through indignation. Democracy, another trait of American political culture, must be paired with dignity. When communities claim to prize democracy, but do not dignify the positions and experiences of others, they end up behaving in hypocritical ways. And finally, religious faith can be a productive player in the public sphere. Attempts to push religion to the periphery or to ban it from the public square ask individuals to censor themselves, fail to dignify individual and communal senses of meaning, and miss the energy that comes from the life and traditions of faith.

Of the four books, Bromell's is the most expansive chronologically. He reaches back to the antebellum era of Maria Stewart and Frederick Douglass, travels throughout the age of Jim Crow and the writings of Charles Chesnutt, and jumps into the modern civil rights era. Bromell discusses women writers as often as he does men. He is just as likely to develop political theories about indignation, dignity, and faith from Anna Julia Cooper as he is from W. E. B. Du Bois. Bromell's study is an extraordinary work that develops insights into democratic promise from those women and men so routinely marginalized in the so-called democracy of the United States. The Time Is Always Now could be read as a historical–literary political theory alongside Barack Obama's political manifesto Audacity of Hope as a centrist political effort rooted in black histories and experiences.Footnote ¹²

What is gained by historical breadth, however, may hide some particularities of place and some important changes over time. The politics of slavery were not the same as the politics of segregation, and the racial politics of today are equally distinct. Moreover, the politics of class may factor in the discussion far more than Bromell recognizes. In the twenty-first century, the United States imprisons a disproportionate number of African American men even though thousands of television viewers look to Melissa Harris-Perry on MS-NBC for intellectual direction. This may not be terribly new. In the early twentieth century, when the United States Congress refused to act against lynching, many northern whites read with appreciation Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk.Footnote ¹³ Recognition and dignity for educated, middle-class African Americans does not necessarily translate into political concern for all African Americans.

Taken together, these books suggest that the crisis imagined by Harold Cruse is over. What they fail to recognize, however, may reveal another batch of struggles for African American intellectual histories. First and foremost are the continued dilemmas of authenticity and obligation. Who has the right to write about African American intellectual and cultural life, and should all people deemed African American necessarily write about these topics? This is a common refrain in Holloway and Matlin, but unanswered by both. Does it matter that Bromell and Matlin would not be considered “black” by most people? Must Purcell and Holloway necessarily write about issues of race because broader social constructions may deem them African American? Which of these scholars are more likely to be asked to serve on diversity committees (or, more bluntly, any university committee at all) and how do reified notions of race continue to act as sets of embodied knowledge and expertise? Scholars in the 1960s had those discussions openly. Today, it seems, we have them privately and quietly. No one, however, seems to have a definitive answer.

Second, a clear gender disparity emerges from the four. Bromell incorporates female writers and Purcell places Ellison in conversation with Arendt, but, taken together, the works largely minimize the voices and actions of women. “[B]lack women were scarcely accorded the status of indigenous interpreters during the 1960s,” claims Matlin (10). One wonders, however, to and for whom? Black liberation theologians Albert Cleage and James Cone both credited their mothers with inspiring their social and intellectual critiques of white theology. Neither of their mothers served as a formal pastor or theologian, and hence did not leave archives that scholars typically mine. But does that mean that their intellectual contributions should be ignored?Footnote ¹⁴

Pauli Murray, a civil rights activist, lawyer, author, and Episcopal priest, left a wide range of written works. Her papers are held at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. And she lived in Harlem.Footnote ¹⁵ Yet Murray is nowhere to be found. At points, one wonders if a new edition of All the Women Are White, All the Men Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave is as needed today as it was when first published in 1981.Footnote ¹⁶

Cruse, for all of his irascibility, dedicated an entire chapter to the work of Lorraine Hansberry, who had died in 1965 at only thirty-four years old. If Hansberry had been considered deeply by any of these authors, their works would necessarily have been revised. Hansberry's short and brilliant career was marked by geographical cross-pollination. The title of her most famous work, A Raisin in the Sun, was inspired by Langston Hughes's poem “Harlem.” But the story was set in Chicago. Her literature made its way to Broadway and into music. Americans white and black were (and still are) educated about race by Hansberry and the cultural fruit of her intellectual legacy.Footnote ¹⁷

Third, with the exception of Bromell, the works reviewed here ignore religious ideas, leaders, movements, and organizations. Perhaps this is because so much of the literature on the civil rights movement has attended to African American churches or the role of Martin Luther King Jr. To discuss American life in the 1950s and 1960s without attention to these forces and factors, however, is a significant deficiency. For many Americans of the 1960s, Harlem's most famous (perhaps infamous) citizen was Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr. He was pastor of the nation's largest church and had been in Congress since the 1940s. He had risen to enormous power as chair of the House Committee on Education and Labor and was instrumental in Lyndon Johnson's “war on poverty.” When Congress refused to seat Powell due to a variety of legal and ethical questions about his behavior, it produced a firestorm. King received letter after letter assailing him for refusing to censure Powell. Histories of African American intellectual, cultural, and political life can incorporate religious actors and ideas without falling into the abyss of King or Malcolm X studies. Figures like Powell and religious sensibilities beyond Protestant churches or the Nation of Islam are available, and future works will benefit by incorporating them.Footnote ¹⁸

Fourth, these books tend to separate African American history from broader themes of multiculturalism. Each book assumes a white–black binary. Whiteness and blackness are fluid and contestable, but they hardly, if ever, interact with other racialized groups or concepts. Matlin, for instance, emphasizes the “indigenous” quality of African American intellectuals as interpreters to the broader white public. But at no point do indigenous Native Americans appear in any of these works. James Cone's black liberation theology inspired Native American writer Vine Deloria, and the American Indian Movement, which learned a great deal from the black freedom struggle, emphasized locations like Wounded Knee and Alcatraz Island. African American politics, culture, and intellectual life were never segregated from other groups as much as scholars tend to segregate them in professional publications.Footnote ¹⁹

The white–black binary, moreover, facilitates an East Coast bias that also pigeonholes African American life within the United States. Although Holloway mentions his time in San Diego, Purcell begins with American involvement in Asia, and Bromell discusses globalization, these four books tend to be geographically isolated east of the Mississippi River. The striking omission of the West leaves one wondering how the first college to have a black studies program was San Francisco State University. Moreover, these works often contain African American intellectual life within the borders of the American nation. The cosmopolitanism that scholars like Ann Douglas and Monica Miller identify is nowhere to be found.Footnote ²⁰

The crisis that Harold Cruse bemoaned in the 1960s is over, and the triumph of African American intellectual life is almost here. These works by Holloway, Matlin, Purcell, and Bromell, along with the broader pool of African American intellectual studies from which they emerge, weave together literature and politics, economics and art, the micro particular with the macro social. While they sometimes display how easy it can be to fall into the trap of believing that what one looks at is necessarily the most vital, and while they at times neglect groups or places of extraordinary importance, these books nonetheless signal how far the study of African American life has come. If Harold Cruse were alive today, he would probably find ways to critique them, but he would have to do so with different barbs than he did the generation of scholars that had come before him.