ABSTRACT
No one was subjected to more vituperative denunciation in the pages of Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual than Paul Robeson. Branded an integrationist communist dupe, for Cruse, Robeson “remained an unoriginal thinker and social critic who could do no more than expound elaborately muddled variations on the interracial themes already laid down for him by the Communist leftwing.”1 Indeed, Robeson epitomized for Cruse the untethered and naive black artist. There is powerful evidence that Cruse’s views on Robeson were animated by a deeply personal vendetta, nursed from the days when Cruse was a bodyguard for Robeson. Moreover, subsequent scholarship on Robeson, including work by Sterling Stuckey, Martin Duberman’s biography, and recent work on Robeson’s anticolonial politics has shown Cruse’s characterizations of Robeson’s politics to be so wrong headed as to be ludicrous.2 But if in retrospect Cruse’s misreading appears as transparent as it is blatantly personal, it was hardly idiosyncratic or accidental. Cruse’s reading of Robeson was dependent not only on a selective presentation of Robeson’s activities but on a profound blindness to the new American political, economic, and military global dominance that was rapidly transforming the international dimensions of politics and culture. In this essay, through a discussion of Robeson’s anticolonial politics, I will argue that Cruse’s attack on Robeson’s reputation was symptomatic of the Cold War conditions in which historical amnesia thrived; and this habitual silence on black and anticolonial struggles starkly inform Cruse’s truncation of black nationalism and black independent radical politics in the pages of the The Crisis.3 The Crisis can be read not only as a quintessential American exceptionalist document but also as a Cold War text.
