cover image Plural But Equal: A Critical Study of Blacks and Minorities and America's Plural Society

Plural But Equal: A Critical Study of Blacks and Minorities and America's Plural Society

Harold Cruse. William Morrow & Company, $22.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-688-04486-2

Cruse (The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual here examines the arrested progress of American blacks toward the equality promised by civil rights successes of the 1960s. This is an important and surely controversial study. Thoughtfully, and with fresh insights into forgotten bypaths, he examines the cyclic struggle of blacks from the preNAACP 1890s, when the Plessy v. Ferguson separate-but-equal doctrine set bounds until overturned by the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. He shows that the full spectrum encompassed by Martin Luther King's ""dream'' remains an unrealized, even deteriorating, hope and argues that today's failed black leadership lacks consensus as the need emerges for an ``obligatory'' independent black political party whose momentum, unlike Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, will not be diluted. (May 28)