ABSTRACT
After reading the 1984 introduction to The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual in preparation for these comments, I remembered my first response to reading Cruse in the late 1960s while a student at Clark Atlanta University. It was simply this-that there was a major oversight in an otherwise incisive analysis of the failures in black leadership over the preceding three decades or so. Though the women’s movement was in its embryonic stages and though Toni Cade’s pioneering text The Black Woman was not to be published until three years later (1970), I recall being disappointed at the invisibility of African American women-except for Lorraine Hansberry, who is mostly vilified in Cruse’s massive tome on black intellectuals. I was attempting to do a master’s thesis on William Faulkner’s treatment of women in his major novels without the benefit of feminist literary criticism, but I was beginning to understand how important a gender analysis would be in fresh interpretations of the “masters.” I wondered to myself why it would not also have occurred to Cruse that a comprehensive discussion of black intellectuals should not have been an exclusively male discourse. Eventually I finished the Cruse text and the thesis, got a teaching job, and embarked upon (with a colleague) the arduous task of making visible to my students at Spelman College the forgotten tradition of black women writers, having discovered that my students’ knowledge of the black literary tradition focused entirely on men. I thought about the Cruse text during
those years Roseann Bell and I were working on Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, a corrective, we hoped, to the notion that only men had written anything worth reading in our communities. Many years later I was to be reminded by Alice Walker, who was a sophomore at Spelman when I was a freshman, that she had not heard of Zora Neale Hurston until after college, a situation that my colleague and I teaching freshman English at Spelman hoped none of our students would replicate.
