Daniel Geary’s recent blog post (“Not a Classic” 9/18/17) criticizes Harold Cruse’s 1967 book, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual as bad intellectual history.  He accuses Cruse of doing something he had no intention of doing, however, and in the process, Geary fails to offer much background and insight regarding Cruse’s motives for writing the book, why it was so widely read and hotly debated at the time, and what impact it had on African American politics and letters in the years after.  In other words, Geary does not approach Cruse’s work with the seriousness and attention to historical context Read more