Black radicals were uniquely positioned to Americanize Marxism within the early party

Evidence

Harold Cruse’s, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, William Morrow, New York, 1967, pp. 147-70. Cruse argues that in the first three decades of the movement, the party’s most successful period, ethnic nationalism defeated the attempt at Americanization: “It evidently never occurred to Negro revolutionaries that there was no one in America who possessed the remotest potential for Americanizing Marxism but themselves. Certainly the Jews could not with their nationalistic aggressiveness, emerging out of Eastside ghettos to demonstrate through Marxism their intellectual superiority over the Anglo-Saxon goyim. The Jews failed to make Marxism applicable to anything in America but their own national-group social ambitions or individual self-elevation. As a result, the great brain-washing of Negro radical intellectuals was not achieved by capitalism or the capitalistic bourgeoisie, but by Jewish intellectuals in the American Communist Party” (p. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2251

Categorization

• QUESTION: Cruse’s claim that Jewish intellectuals brainwashed Negro radicals is heavily charged and contested; worth verifying against Epstein and other accounts of the early CPUSA period.