He attended the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and was part of the school's JV and Varsity soccer and baseball teams.
[4][2] For his dissertation Cripps wrote "The Lily White Republicans: The Party, the Negro, and the South in the age of Booker T.
[5][6] Cripps was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center from 1980 to 1981, focusing on the topic "A Social History of Blacks in American Film, 1942 to the Present".
[7] Prior to this he was awarded the 1962 George Hammond history prize for a paper he wrote on his studies of the critical black reaction to the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation by D. W.
[1] In 1982 Cripps received the Charles Thompson Prize from the Organization of American Historians and the National Archives of the United States.