With the passing on March 25 of Harold Cruse, one has to take note of the post­civil rights black intelligentsia and ask, "What has it developed in the last 40 years?" Interestingly, not much of anything except a great deal of attitude in the works of Cornel West, bell hooks and Michael Eric "Why I Love Black Women" Dyson.

Cruse, however, was a true public intellectual not a market intellectual, like the current crop of usual suspects. He wrote for popular periodicals and some left-of-center journals. His greatest claim to fame, in my view, was his seminal 1967 book,  The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual , the most searing indictment of the black intelligentsia.

 In short, Cruse argued, the black intelligentsia is incapable of having original ideas and perspectives as they pertain to the African-American situation in America. Believing in equal opportunity, Cruse also scorched and burned the Neo-African cultural movement and its questionable embrace of Afrocentrism and Kwanzaa, neither of which has led to anything noteworthy beyond greeting cards and various forms of Afro-kitsch.

 Cruse was an original thinker and non-academic who pissed off everyone in the 1960s (though after his book came out, Cruse was given a professorship at the University of Michigan, despite having no advanced degrees). He saw the Black Power movement as all slogan and no program, much like today's hip-hop politics: attitude but no ideas or programmatic approach.