Why Revolutionary Movements Fail

In 1967, Marshall Lee was living in Philadelphia and becoming a Black revolutionary.

“We were crazy, involved in a whole lot of stupid stuff,” Lee told me.

“If it had not been for The Crisis ”—Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual , published that same year—“I do not know what would have happened to me.” Lee thinks he might have ended up in prison, or dead.

Instead, he became a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, where he studied with Cruse—“somebody who helped to bring some clarity to Black revolutionary movements.” In the late 1960s and through the ’70s, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual helped give shape to the aspiring Black revolutionary movement.

It also became a cornerstone of the new discipline of Black studies; Henry Louis Gates Jr. was assigned the book in three different classes at Yale.

Cruse’s work circulated so widely in part because it cut across truisms of radical movements and therefore made people angry: Audre Lorde described The Crisis as rife with “inaccuracies, misrepresentations and plain lies.” In the 2010s and early ’20s, young Black radicals were again talking about the intersection of class and race, criticizing the politics of respectability, and questioning whether white liberals would ever concede power.

But few of them were talking about Cruse, whose polarizing qualities had helped consign him to obscurity.

They should have been.

The Crisis tells three stories at once: Cruse’s own story, the story of his generation of Black people in Harlem, and the story of Black America.

All three narratives seem to culminate naturally in 1967, when militant Black nationalism was capturing the public imagination.

Really, they’re all still culminating today.

And Cruse, I think, might have helped explain why the Black struggle for progress—and broader American efforts toward equality—seem stuck in the same cycles that plagued the movement six decades ago.

He might also have had some unwelcome suggestions for how to break out of them.

Harold Cruse was born in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1916.