ABSTRACT
In 1968, Harold Cruse’s classic study The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual became an immediate best seller, capitalizing on the popular mood of militancy, black power, and angry disenchantment with the gradualism and limitations of the reforms achieved by the 1960s-era social contract between corporate liberalism and the civil rights establishment.1 Cruse’s text presented itself as bolder and more radical than other approaches to African American liberation popular in black intellectual discourse of the day.
