Plural but Equal

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Cruse (The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual here examines the arrested progress of American blacks toward the equality promised by civil rights successes of the 1960s. This is an important and surely controversial study. Thoughtfully, and with fresh insights into forgotten bypaths, he examines the cyclic struggle of blacks from the preNAACP 1890s, when the Plessy v. Ferguson separate-but-equal doctrine set bounds until overturned by the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. He shows that the full spectrum encompassed by Martin Luther King's ``dream'' remains an unrealized, even deteriorating, hope and argues that today's failed black leadership lacks consensus as the need emerges for an ``obligatory'' independent black political party whose momentum, unlike Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, will not be diluted. (May 28)

Library Journal

America's black leaders since the 1950s have ignored the lessons of the first civil rights cycle that ran from 1868 to 1896, Cruse argues. By doing so, they have fostered a legacy of illusion and innocence that mistakenly quests for racial equality through assimilationist integration, he charges. Enlightened blacks should see that equality in a plural, capitalist democracy can emerge only through racial solidarity and economic self-development, he concludes. His detailed and complex argument offers a sweeping, provocative revision of civil rights history and in many way is a sequel to his classic Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967). It is destined to be much discussed and required reading on the nature of 20th-century America. Recommended. Thomas J. Davis, African American Studies Dept., SUNY at Buffalo