This article revisits an historic exchange between two black ex-communists, Harold Cruse and Harry Haywood, a debate that prefigured many of the central contradictions of the black-power era. Their exchange followed Cruse’s influential 1962 essay for Studies on the Left, ‘Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American’, which declared that the American Negro was a ‘subject of domestic colonialism’. Written against the prevailing liberal integrationist commitments of the civil-rights movement, his essay called for black economic and political independence, and inspired many of the younger activists who would give birth to the black-power movement. In a series of essays for the Bay Area black radical journal Soulbook, Haywood criticised Cruse’s mishandling of class politics among blacks, and his retreat from anti-capitalism. This forgotten episode is important on its own terms, for what it says about the character and limitations of left-political thinking during the sixties, and equally for understanding and contesting those commonsensical notions of African-American public life in our times which too often remain rooted in the vanished social context and political realities of the twentieth-century racial ghetto.
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Cruse 2009c, pp. 84–5.
Gosse 2004, p. 38. For more insight into Cruse’s life before the publication of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, see also Cruse 2009b; Cruse 2002b.
Gosse 2004, p. 106.
Davis 2001.
Gosse 1998, p. 107.
Davis 2001; Gosse 1998, pp. 102–6.
Jackson 2011, p. 303.
Cruse 2009a, p. 8.
Cruse 2009d; Clarke 1961b.
Cruse 2009d, p. 73.
Cruse 2002c; Cruse 1967, pp. 356–7; see also Jones 1966; Clarke 1961a; Gosse 1993; Young 2001.
Cruse 2002c, p. 11.
Cruse 2009c, p. 75.
Cruse 2009c, pp. 74–5.
Cruse 2009e, p. 143.
Lichtenstein 2002, p. 99.
Cruse 2009c, p. 96.
Bell 1961; Johnson 2011.
Cruse 2009c, pp. 75–6.
Cruse 2009c, p. 76.
Cruse 2009c, p. 77.
Cruse 2009c, p. 76.
Cruse 2009c, p. 90.
Cruse 2009c, p. 91.
Cruse 2009c, p. 94.
Black Panthers 1970, pp. 3–4.
Bloom and Martin 2013, pp. 22–3.
Cruse 2009a, p. 19.
Cruse 2009c, p. 78.
Haywood 1978a, pp. 1–4, 81–8.
Haywood 1978a, p. 25.
Makalani 2011, pp. 45–69.
Haywood 1978a, p. 109; see also Storch 2009.
Haywood 1978a, pp. 148–75; Carew 2010, pp. 27–48.
Klehr and Tompson 1989, p. 354. See also Record 1951; Solomon 1998, pp. 68–91; Berland 1999–2000; Berland 2000.
Klehr and Tompson 1989, p. 358.
Quoted in Klehr and Tompson 1989, p. 356; see also Haywood 1978a, pp. 124–8.
Haywood 1978a, p. 137.
Lenin 1991, p. 286.
Haywood 1978a, p. 119.
Haywood 1978a, pp. 218–22.
Quoted in Klehr and Tompson 1989, p. 359.
Haywood 1976.
Haywood 1978a, p. 331.
Haywood 1976, p. 70.
Hirsch 1998.
Johnson 1991.
Haywood 1966.
Haywood 1966, p. 71.
Haywood 1966, p. 72.
Haywood 1966, p. 73.
Gosse 2004, p. 35.
Cruse 1967, p. 8.
Cruse 1967, p. 64.
Haywood 1978a, p. 637.
Cleaver 1967.
Johnson 2007, pp. 43–4.
Gosse 1998, p. 115.
Smith 2012.
See Reed 2015a and 2015b.
Cruse 2009c, p. 96.
Wacquant 2008 and 2010.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
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This article revisits an historic exchange between two black ex-communists, Harold Cruse and Harry Haywood, a debate that prefigured many of the central contradictions of the black-power era. Their exchange followed Cruse’s influential 1962 essay for Studies on the Left, ‘Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American’, which declared that the American Negro was a ‘subject of domestic colonialism’. Written against the prevailing liberal integrationist commitments of the civil-rights movement, his essay called for black economic and political independence, and inspired many of the younger activists who would give birth to the black-power movement. In a series of essays for the Bay Area black radical journal Soulbook, Haywood criticised Cruse’s mishandling of class politics among blacks, and his retreat from anti-capitalism. This forgotten episode is important on its own terms, for what it says about the character and limitations of left-political thinking during the sixties, and equally for understanding and contesting those commonsensical notions of African-American public life in our times which too often remain rooted in the vanished social context and political realities of the twentieth-century racial ghetto.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 1888 | 441 | 24 |
Full Text Views | 348 | 6 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 277 | 17 | 0 |