ABSTRACT
One major oversight in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual is the absence of a serious consideration of the politics of liberal African American intellectuals during the twentieth century. Such a consideration would have not only necessitated engagements with some of the major African American liberal theorists and political activists of the twentieth century but would have demanded that liberalism as embraced by blacks be analyzed in terms of its historical relevance to black political advancement during the twentieth century. Cruse could not have pursued such an analysis without first situating African American liberalism within the various historical contexts in which it arose, flourished, and floundered. Only then could Cruse have discussed the comparative viability of liberalism versus other ideological approaches to black advancement. Mistakenly, Cruse analyzed African American liberalism and various other black intellectual agendas as if black intellectuals were confronted with an unlimited range of feasible ideological options at any given time. Instead of trying to discern why African American intellectuals adopted a specific ideological posture, Cruse merely informs us that the ones they usually adopted were not in the best interest of African American emancipation.
