Robert Greene II responds to Chapter 8—The End of Universalism (1962-1990s) in Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History
Black Intellectual Life, 1962-1990s
Chapter eight of Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s book The Ideas That Made America, titled “The End of Universalism: 1962-1990s,” details the efforts of American thinkers in the late twentieth century to handle social and intellectual change. One group of intellectuals—and Americans—arguably experienced the greatest amount of change and tumult during this era: Black Americans. From the 1960s onward, they found themselves confronted with two broad but important questions: what was the mission of Black American intellectuals; and what, exactly, was their relationship to each other? These questions caused more debate and discord, it seemed, than genuine agreement. Tracking the way key African American intellectuals addressed them helps us perceive not what Ratner-Rosenhagen calls “the end of universalism,” but rather the continuation of a long-running effort to create a multifaceted world of ideas and possibilities in Black American life.
An era Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen calls the end of universalism was, in fact, a phase of continuously just getting started on the topic of racial justice, democracy, and equality, both in thought and in practice.
Ratner-Rosenhagen is correct in that “1962 does not announce itself as a significant turning point in history” in order to note the arrival of a number of important texts in U.S. intellectual history that year, but history certainly was happening: the Civil Rights Movement was in full tumult and uncertainty.[1] The Albany Movement of 1961-62 was coming to an end, and it appeared that the growing effort to end Jim Crow segregation in the South had suffered its first significant setback. The riots on the campus of the University of Mississippi in the fall of 1962 showcased just how difficult desegregation would be on college campuses, never mind the glacial pace of ending racially separated primary schools. Meanwhile, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, was consumed with internal debates about strategy and tactics, splitting the difference between investing time, energy, and people in the Voter Education Project and continuing to utilize nonviolent agitation and protest to organize people in the rural American South. Alongside the Cold War’s Cuban Missile Crisis, the Civil Rights Movement stood at a crucial historical juncture in 1962.
Into all this, and more, entered Black intellectuals. Long considered key members of the vanguard in the struggle for Black freedom, Black intellectuals were increasingly questioning their role in the movement—and in American social and intellectual life. Two essays from the 1962 and 1963 period come to mind. E. Franklin Frazier condemned what he saw as the weak state of Black intellectual life in the United States. In the pages of the Negro Digest, the more intellectual magazine of the Johnson Publications Company umbrella (which included the more famous Ebony and Jet magazines), the sociologist best known for his work on the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case of 1954 questioned whether or not Black intellectuals had given up their responsibility to Black American society at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. “Since integration has become the official policy of the country,” Frazier wrote, “[Black intellectuals] have shunned more than ever the study of the Negro.” Frazier continued, “They have remained intellectually sterile while propounding such meaningless questions as: Should Negro scholars study the Negro? Should Negro painters paint Negro subjects? Should Negro writers and playwrights write Negro novels and plays about Negroes?”[2]
Frazier believed that Black American intellectuals had failed to speak to the majority of Black America due to their own middle-class orientation and origins. They had also, in Frazier’s estimation, not measured up in any way to their African counterparts in terms of developing intellectual currents that might stand against the rising tide of assimilation of Black life into the West. While Frazier critiqued Black intellectuals for their lack of intellectual independence, historian John Hope Franklin dared to ask the question Frazier thought foolish for seeming naïve and even too earnest: just what were the responsibilities of Black intellectuals in the early 1960s? For Franklin, who by the early 1960s had become the dean of Black history in the United States, the answers to these matters were not so simple.
Black intellectuals and scholars, argued Franklin, never had much of a choice in joining the intellectual battle against white supremacy. “They had to combat the contentions of Negro inferiority. They had to demonstrate that Negroes were capable of assimilating ideas and of contributing to mankind’s store of knowledge.” For Franklin, this meant that Black scholars were simply not allowed the time to devote to anything else. “For such a dialogue left little or no time,” Franklin wrote, “for the pursuit of knowledge as one really desired to pursue it.”[3] Franklin himself understood the need for Black scholars to contribute their expertise to the battle for Black freedom—after all, he participated in the Civil Rights Movement as a scholar, using his history to bolster the arguments against segregation. However, Franklin asserted that, despite the challenges facing Black scholars, they did have an obligation to serve. “I now assert that the proper choice for the American Negro scholar,” he decided, “is to use his knowledge and ingenuity, his resources and talents, to combat the forces that isolate him and his people and, like the true patriot that he is, to contribute to the solution of the problems that all Americans face in common.”[4] Frazier and Franklin would have disagreed over what, exactly, Black intellectuals owed American society, but they agreed that they played a role in that society. They also agreed that this role was important despite an anti-intellectualism that intellectuals of all sorts, regardless of skin color and ethnicity, have complained about in the United States for generations.
The question remained: what could—and what should—Black American intellectuals do during the dramatic shift in Black life in America in the 1960s and subsequent decades? What happens when we shift the issue of the era from universalism’s supposed end to this particular area of intellectual inquiry? Sketching out some—but certainly not all—the debates that consumed Black intellectuals in the transition from the fall of Jim Crow segregation to the heyday of Black Power and Black liberalism to the Reagan Revolution and its determined opponents, one notices a mélange of arguments, ideologies, and belief systems struggling to keep up with a rapidly changing nation—and an even more briskly evolving Black America. Making sense of even some of them helps us see not the end of universalism, but perhaps efforts to bring it about at long last. Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen raises the question, in her introduction, of “how or why ideas have had the power to make Americans change their minds about—or take action on—a particular issue.” By turning to Black intellectuals, we see precisely how, in the late twentieth century, they repeatedly changed their own minds as they debated matters.[5] Their efforts, hardly uniform or homogeneous, were in turn part of a larger project to shape, and reshape, the larger Black American mind.
The Crisis of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual
By the time Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual was published in 1967, Black intellectuals found that the contours of their questions about what was to be done for Black America had shifted, but the heart of the inquiry—whether or not Black intellectuals had a genuine role to play, and what that role should be—had not changed at all. Cruse’s magnum opus argued for a critical definition of Black nationalism that would stand up to the challenges of the late 1960s. Cruse believed that pro-integrationist groups such as the NAACP could “hardly be said to reflect the pervasive sentiment of an ethnic group as large and as hardpressed as the American Negro.”[6] Because of this, Cruse cautioned against assuming that prominent Black intellectuals necessarily represented the masses as well. But while Cruse believed intellectuals played some role in the movement for Black freedom, it was less clear what that role would be.
Nor was it clear that Cruse’s singular focus on Harlem-based intellectuals was even a good idea. “The way Harlem goes (or does not go),” Cruse surmised, “so goes all black America.”[7] Vincent Harding, a historian and a confidant of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., argued that Cruse’s focus on Harlem misjudged so much of Black intellectual life in the United States. “His single-minded focus on Harlem,” Harding wrote in the pages of Motive magazine, “eliminates treatment of that crucial group of black intellectuals who have operated in the South for the last decade, and who have much to do with the latest resurrection of blackness.”[8]
Harding’s was not the most stringent critique of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. In the pages of Negro Digest—which, in 1969, would be renamed Black World—writer Julian Mayfield lamented Cruse’s work even more fiercely. Mayfield, a writer of several novels and screenplays, and one of numerous Black Americans who traveled to Ghana after its independence, was stunned by the relatively low ambitions of such a large tome. He called it a “glaring failure” and a book written not to inform, but rather to dismiss “a long list of artists and intellectuals, many of them dead, whom Mr. Cruse happens not to like.”[9] Mayfield condemned Cruse’s singular focus on what the latter saw as an ongoing battle between Black nationalists on one side, and a coalition of white Communists and their Black allies on the other. Mayfield pointed out, after all, that Cruse had a personal stake in these battles, and yet sought not to put himself in them in his own book: Cruse, huffed Mayfield, “shows a strange reluctance to appear on stage himself.”[10]
What this all indicated was both an understanding of some of the key ideological battles among Black intellectuals during the Cold War years and an understanding of just how many differences could be found among those intellectuals. A modern critique of Crisis points out that Cruse continued the traditional dividing of Black leaders between those devoted to integration, juxtaposed with (and sometimes outright opposing) those who favored a Black nationalist approach. As pointed out by Black intellectual historian Pero Dagbovie, the generation of historians covering Black intellectual history after the 1960s was largely suspicious of this dichotomy, preferring instead to understand the rich diversity of thought among Black intellectuals, scholars, and activists.[11] Indeed, the publication of August Meier’s Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington in 1963—a year after the release of the two aforementioned essays about the place of Black intellectuals in the struggle for Black freedom—shows again how scholars and activists alike were looking to the past to figure out what, exactly, they should have been doing in the present.
Black Women Intellectuals
Into this equation of what Black intellectuals thought they should have been doing during an era of social upheaval also entered the variable of gender. In August 1966, as part of a special issue on “The Negro Woman,” Ebony ran an essay on the role of Black women intellectuals. For them, it was quite simple: Black women intellectuals were “expected to be action-oriented, to translate the ideas she creates into practical and socially useful programs.”[12] Leaders such as Pauli Murray, Constance Motley, Patricia Harris, and Marian E. Wright were included in the categorization of “Negro woman intellectual.”[13] Intellectuals cited in the article argued that sexism was a critical impediment to their career paths. Poet Gwendolyn Brooks lamented, “It is hard for the world to believe that a female is capable of thought.”[14] Yet, race—and not gender—was supposed to be the primary preoccupation for Black female intellectuals. “But for every one of her,” wrote Pierce, “hundreds of others struggle for sheer existence, and she feels (or is expected to feel) an obligation to channel her time, talent and energy into the struggle for Negro equality.”[15]
Whether it was the pages of Ebony, Negro Digest, or various books, it was clear that the idea of the Black intellectual was intricately tied to the struggle for Black freedom and self-determination in American society. In the 1970s, these questions were turned upside down by the end of the Black Power movement and the rise of New Right conservatism. Both posed vexing questions about the future of Black America itself. The “long 1970s,” as posited by Derrick E. White in his book The Challenge of Blackness brings home just how important this era was for Black intellectual history. Defining it as a period that “began with King’s assassination in 1968 and lasted until Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980,” White’s idea of a “long seventies” links together various strands of Black intellectual history into one coherent, lean analysis.[16]
New Clocks
During the 1970s, a range of events would further challenge Black intellectuals. The 1972 Gary Convention’s refusal to create an all-Black political party—and decision by Democrats there to tie the fate of Black political power to the Democratic Party—seemed to augur something dangerous for the future of Black America. Despite the election of Democrat Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential election, based in large part on the strength of the Black vote decisively in the Georgian’s favor that year, 1980 Black America found itself largely on the outside of power looking in. The New Right’s champion, Ronald Reagan, won the presidency on a decidedly conservative platform that had a strong edge of racism to it. “It’s hard to tell time by revolutionary clocks,” Ebony editor and historian Lerone Bennett wrote in 1969, at the beginning of this long seventies for Black America. “Everything, including time, changes in a revolutionary time, and the clocks inherited from the old regime are usually too slow or too fast.”[17] So too with counterrevolutions. By 1980, it seemed Black intellectuals were in search of a new clock by which to measure anti-revolutionary time.
In fact, by the 1980s, there seemed to be a new urgency to calls by Black intellectuals for their educated class to do something in the face of what seemed, to some, to be the rise of a resurgent far right in the United States and throughout the Western world. Manning Marable came to be a tribune of the Black intellectual left during this era, often writing forcefully against the right-wing currents he and others observed. “The historical predictions of race war, genocide and destruction, the darkest fears of previous Black generations, seemed to many to have become reality in the 1980s,” Marable wrote in How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America. Released in the early 1980s and building from Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, the book was not only Marable’s reflections on Black history, economics, and sociology, but also his meditation on the sorry state of affairs facing Black America during the Reagan years. Just as Marable warned, events such as the Greensboro Massacre of 1979 and reports of anti-Black violence across the South in the early 1980s joined the Miami Race Riot of 1980 and the 1986 murder of Michael Griffith in Howard Beach, Queens—just a few of the incidents that pointed to the deterioration in race relations.[18]
Marable would eventually be part of such an attempt, with the founding of the Black Radical Congress (BRC) in 1998. The BRC was not only part of a mission to bring together and strengthen the various strands of the Black intellectual left against the resurgent right-wing’s racism, but, like the Combahee River Collective twenty years before, it was also part of an attempt to expand for whom Black intellectuals would be openly fighting. The Combahee River Collective’s statement, released in 1977, explained very clearly what they saw as the limits of Black intellectual and activist-oriented life in America up to that point. They developed their praxis to be “anti-racist, unlike those of white women, and anti-sexist, unlike those of Black and white men.” Having worked in the previous twenty years on civil rights and women’s rights movement campaigns with all these groups, Combahee River Collective members now sought to fashion their own distinctive place between the problems of racism and sexism.[20]
Marable’s quasi-apocalyptic vision was, by the 1990s, joined by a genuine concern about the very links between Black intellectuals and the larger Black masses. Adolph Reed’s stunning indictment of Black intellectuals in the pages of the Village Voice, “What are the drums saying, Booker?,” prompted a response by Marable that was a call to understanding by Black intellectuals of their current vexing place in Black society, and how they got to that point. While Reed condemned public intellectuals such as Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. for being too cut off from the mainstream of Black America to make any difference, Marable argued that it was important to understand why that was the case. “Unlike W.E.B. Du Bois, C.LR. James and E. Franklin Frazier, many of today’s black middle-class scholars are not organically connected to the problems and struggles of the African American community,” Marable wrote. But he also concluded that these intellectuals “should not be the primary objects of his political scorn and contempt at a time when we need to construct a new left-of-center paradigm” in the battle against a growing conservative movement.[19]
Likewise, the Black Radical Congress released a “Freedom Agenda” after their first conference in 1998 that was designed to showcase how wide-ranging they saw the problems facing Black America at the end of the twentieth century. The agenda included sections on foreign policy, defending affirmative action, and condemning police brutality—alongside sections uplifting the Black LGBTQ community, remembering and defending the rights of Southern workers, and pushing for greater environmental protections.[21] The Congress’ future was ultimately derailed by the backlash against radicalism in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks and the War in Iraq. Still, their efforts reveal a link between the Black radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s and the rise of Black Lives Matter in the 2010s.
Hopes and Concerns
Perhaps the plight of Black intellectuals may best be seen in the career of John Hope Franklin. We return to the beginning—but, in this case, to Franklin’s role in the Bill Clinton White House in the late 1990s. In 1997, Franklin was named the Chair of the Clinton White House’s “Initiative on Race.” Designed to be a forceful statement about how far the nation had come on race, and how much was left to be done, Franklin’s experience on the Initiative board demonstrated that, even with the hard work pursued by Black intellectuals and the Black freedom movement, there remained far too much left to be done. Franklin believed in the mission of the Initiative, which released a report titled One America in the 21st Century: Forging a New Future. Franklin’s letter at the start of the report indicated that he, and the rest of the board, understood that their report was but a beginning of a much longer conversation—where they knew that “many challenges remain and these challenges cannot be resolved overnight.”[22]
In his memoir, Mirror to America, Franklin was even more forthright about the problems the Initiative faced, especially from President Clinton’s political enemies. Criticizing an essay co-written by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and anti-affirmative action intellectual Ward Connerly, Franklin felt that their critique did not come from genuine concern, but rather to score political points: “This sort of quasi-pietistic, politically motivated criticism was only the beginning of what became a concerted effort to undermine the position the advisory board took on virtually any matter that came before it.”[23] Pushing the board to become a genuine force for change would become a difficult task for Franklin and the rest of the committee.
By the end of the board’s life in 1998, Franklin was convinced that the media’s coverage of the committee was sensationalized and missed the point: this was merely the beginning of a national conversation on race, not its middle and certainly not its end. “The problem of race in America has been, and continues to be, an American problem,” Franklin lamented, “and the conversation the board began was, and remains, the means to a national solution. Regrettably, those facts did not become the story reported.”[24] Early in his career, Franklin warned scholars that the road to activism and public action was one that could be treacherous. Now, near the end of an illustrious career, Franklin could look back on a life of dedicated scholarship and public service and still worry that it was not enough. This is the true and final story of the Black intellectual at the end of the twentieth century. So much left to be done, but so much also written, studied, and criticized. An era Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen calls the end of universalism was, in fact, a phase of continuously just getting started on the topic of racial justice, democracy, and equality, both in thought and in practice.
About the Author
Robert Greene II is an Assistant Professor of History at Claflin University. He is co-editor, along with Tyler D. Parry, of Invisible No More: The African American Experience at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Greene II is also the President of the African American Intellectual History Society, and Publications Chair for the Society of U.S. Intellectual Historians. He also serves as the Lead Instructor for the Modjeska Simkins School of Human Rights for the South Carolina Progressive Network. Dr. Greene II also co-hosts the award-winning podcast, Our New South, which is currently in its second season. He has also written for various publications, including The Nation, Dissent, Jacobin, and Oxford American. Currently, Dr. Greene II is working on his book, The Newest South: African Americans and the Democratic Party, 1964-1994, which details how the Southern leaders of the Democratic Party in the post-Civil Rights era crafted strategies to attract, and hold onto, the Black vote across the nation.
Notes
[1] Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 153.
[2] E. Franklin Frazier, “The Failure of the Negro Intellectual,” Negro Digest XI, No. 4 (February 1962), 32.
[3] John Hope Franklin, “The Dilemma of the American Negro Scholar,” in Race and History: Selected Essays, 1938-1988 (1963; reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 299.
[4] Franklin, 307.
[5] Ratner-Rosenhagen.
[6] Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967; reprint, New York: New York Review of Books, 2005), 4.
[7] Cruse, 12.
[8] Vincent Harding, “Beyond the Black Desert,” Motive, March 1968, 47-48.
[9] Julian Mayfield, “Crisis or Crusade? A Challenge to a Bestseller,” Negro Digest, XVII, No. 8. (June 1968), 11.
[10] Mayfield, 13.
[11] Pero Dagbovie, “African American Intellectual History: The Past as a Porthole into the Present and Future of the Field,” in The Black Intellectual Tradition: African American Thought in the Twentieth Century, eds. Derrick P. Aldridge, Cornelius L. Bynum, and James B. Stewart (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021), 25-28.
[12] Ponchitta Pierce, “Problems of the Negro Woman Intellectual,” Ebony XXI, No. 10 (August 1966), 145.
[13] Pierce,146.
[14] Pierce, 148.
[15] Pierce, 148.
[16] Derrick E. White, The Challenge of Blackness: The Institute of the Black World and Political Activism in the 1970s(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), 3.
[17] Lerone Bennett, “Of Time, Space and Revolution,” Ebony XXIV, No. 10 (August 1969), 31.
[18] Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (1983; reprint, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015) [], 208.
[19] Manning Marable, “Black Intellectuals in Conflict (1995)” in Beyond Black and White: From Civil Rights to Barack Obama (New York: Verso, 2016), 173.
[20] “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” https://americanstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Keyword%20Coalition_Readings.pdf, 2, accessed 26 January 2025.
[21] “Black Radical Congress Freedom Agenda,” https://www.obs-stl.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Black-Radical-Congress-FREEDOM-AGENDA.pdf, accessed 26 January 2025.
[22] John Hope Franklin, One America in the 21st Century: Forging a New Future, https://clintonwhitehouse4.archives.gov/media/pdf/PIR.pdf, accessed 26 January 2025.
[23] John Hope Franklin, Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), 351.
[24] Franklin, 356.