LIVES

APPRECIATION

Harold Cruse: Social Critic

It was fitting that I encountered Harold Cruse first through his writing, years before I met him in person. At the time I was an aspiring scholar who lacked the funds to pay for my senior year at Howard University. I stumbled across Cruse's masterful 1967 opus, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, in 1993 in the old Pyramid Bookstore near campus, and the caliber of his intellectual abilities was searing. For me, a young man struggling to finish college, the brilliance of those 594 pages - authored by a man who had not taken a single college class before he became a professor at the University of Michigan - reminded me that education and schooling were not the same thing. Cruse's significance transcended the lesson I gleaned from his book. Not only did The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual become a central text of the Black Power movement, Cruse himself became a central figure in the dawning discipline of Black Studies. Cruse died on March 25 from congestive heart failure at the age of 89,

Not all the adjectives applied to Cruse were complimentary: He was variously termed acerbic, bitter or mean-spirited. But truth be told, he was more unsentimental than anything else. He understood that decades of sustained assault and false propaganda had left the Black community fiercely defensive of our heroes and leaders; but he also understood that we set ourselves up for defeat if we fail to analyze the shortcomings and failings of those men and women.

I met him years later, when I was a Ph.D. candidate in history at Rutgers University. I was editing a collection of his essays and writing a dissertation that was largely influenced by the questions he'd raised in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. I spent a weekend in March 2000 talking with the then-84-year-old sage who displayed that same intellectual verve and willingness to slaughter sacred cows that had defined his earlier work. He was in poor health, but he propped himself up on an elbow and explained at length the virtues and shortcomings of playwright August Wilson's body of work, his disdain for the reparations movement and his ideas about the Black studies department at Harvard University. At some point in that conversation, I realized that Cruse was still an important example for me. But this time, I was not referring to his scholarship.

- William Jalanl Cobb is an assistant professor of history at Spelman College and editor of The Essential Harold Cruse: A Reader.

The Johnnie Cochran I Knew

I was an undergraduate at Stanford University in the early 1970s when I first heard about this extraordinary lawyer, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. What I found to be so amazing about Johnnie was his commitment to raising the visibility, image and reputation of Black lawyers in America. This talented attorney who demonstrated what a difference Black lawyers could make in ensuring justice for our community, died March 29 at the age of 67 from an inoperable brain tumor.

While virtually every report of his death focused on his role as the lead attorney for OJ. Simpson in his murder trial, the references failed to capture Cochran's enormous contributions to the practice of law. The Johnnie Cochran I knew was truly the people's lawyer. He handled far more pro bono cases than celebrity cases. More than a pre-eminent criminal defense attorney, Johnnie was a legendary civil litigator. He won then-unprecedented verdicts on behalf of victims of police brutality, particularly of the often lethal chokeholds. As a result of Cochran's advocacy, police departments around the country have eliminated these deadly practices.

The Johnnie Cochran I knew was exceedingly generous in providing support for churches and talked to my students about the ethical responsibilities of lawyers and the need to give back to the community. He reminded them that they could not use race or gender as an excuse not to be excellent advocates on behalf of their clients. Johnnie served as a mentor to a generation of lawyers, an aspect of his career and life that has largely gone unnoticed.

In 2003, I began to represent the survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riots, which occurred after an African American shoe shiner was falsely accused of assaulting a White woman. As a result, a White mob burned down the Greenwood section of Tulsa, known as "Black Wall Street." Black-owned businesses that thrived were destroyed, hundreds of Blacks were killed and 8,000 Greenwood residents were left homeless. Johnnie was the first to volunteer the services of his firm to assist survivors of the riot in their quest for reparations.

Johnnie Cochran was an outstanding lawyer in spite of, not because of, his race. He is a role model for all of us, lawyers and non-lawyers alike, and his commitment to fairness and justice reminds us of how great he was in changing the way people regard the legal profession.

- Charles J. Ogletree Jr. is Jesse Climenko Professor of Law, Founding & Executive Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute of Race & Justice at Harvard Law School and author of All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half Century of Brown v. Board of Education.

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated May/Jun 2005
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