ABSTRACT
When published in 1967, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual was one of the very few texts that treated African American intellectuals as intellectually significant. The longstanding racist marginalization of African American intellectuals within mainstream American intellectual discourses came under intense attack during the 1960s and ’70s, at least within black intellectual circles. Neither an announcement for the “death of white sociology” nor a declaration of the irrelevance of white literary assessments of black literature via the invocation of a black aesthetic, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual was nevertheless partner to this black nationalist intellectual moment insofar as it constituted a call to arms for African American literary and artistic autonomy.
