Cruse's sweeping polemic, grown out of his 1962 essay "Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American," argues that Black intellectuals from the Harlem Renaissance to the 1960s failed their people by borrowing their frameworks from white liberals and the Communist left instead of building autonomous Black cultural and economic institutions. Its portraits — of Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, and many others — are appreciative and unsparing by turns. Controversial on arrival, the book became a founding text of Black Studies and of the cultural-nationalist argument in American letters.
Author: Harold Cruse · Original publisher: William Morrow (New York), 1967
