Reflections in Black: Harold Cruse

Harold Cruse was born in Petersburg, Va. in 1916 and would become one of the most important Black historians of the 20th century. He served in the Army during World War II, and attended City College of New York for a short time. In 1967, he published The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, a collection of essays that criticized Black and Jewish intellectuals of the time. The attention from the published work gained Cruse a teaching job and later a full professorship at the University of Michigan despite never earning a degree himself. In 1970, he founded the Afroamerican and African History department at the University of Michigan. This is his story.