Abstract

The achievement of African-American former Communist Harold Cruse has become a reference point for a large measure of scholarship addressing Black Marxism and the communion between African-American and Jewish American leftists from the 1920s through the 1960s. Yet Cruse's work is marred by a lack of accountable documentation, allegations of offensive group behavior by Jews and Afro-Caribbeans, and the claim that Black Communist cultural workers produced art that was "integrationist" and middle class. The authority of Cruse's work stems from its anger about the failure of an adequate response to the cultural consequences of racism in the United States, which arises out of his personal experiences with African-American Communist writers of the post-World War II years. Therefore, an alternative means of appraising Cruse's claims is by placing them in the context of the imaginative work of other Black radicals — Chester Himes, Alice Childress, John O. Killens—who address similar issues, and whose creative writings dispute Cruse's characterizations.