Herbert Aptheker

Herbert Aptheker
Aptheker transferring W. E. B. Du Bois papers to University of Massachusetts, 1973
Born	(1915-07-31)July 31, 1915 Brooklyn, New York
Died	March 17, 2003(2003-03-17) (aged 87) Mountain View, California
Alma mater	Columbia University
Occupation(s)	Marxist historian, editor, activist
Notable work	American Negro Slave Revolts, Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, History of the American People, The Correspondence of W. E. B. DuBois, Anti-Racism in U.S. History
Political party	Communist Party USA, Peace and Freedom Party
Spouse	Fay Aptheker (1942–1999)
Children	Bettina Aptheker

Herbert Aptheker (July 31, 1915 – March 17, 2003) was an American Marxist historian and political activist. He wrote more than 50 books, mostly in the fields of African-American history and general U.S. history, most notably, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943), a classic in the field, and the 7-volume Documentary History of the Negro People (1951–1994). He compiled a wide variety of primary documents supporting study of African-American history.

From the 1940s, Aptheker was a prominent figure in U.S. scholarly discourse. David Horowitz described Aptheker as "the Communist Party’s most prominent Cold War intellectual". Aptheker was blacklisted in academia during the 1950s because of his Communist Party membership. He succeeded V. J. Jerome in 1955 as editor of Political Affairs, a communist theory magazine.

Biography

Early life and education

Herbert Aptheker was born in Brooklyn, New York, the last child of a wealthy Jewish family.

In 1931, when he was 16, he accompanied his father on a business trip to Alabama. There he learned first-hand about the oppression of African Americans under Jim Crow Laws in the South. The trip proved shocking and life-altering for Aptheker, who upon his return to Brooklyn began writing a column called "The Dark Side of The South" for his Erasmus Hall High School newspaper

Aptheker graduated from high school in the spring of 1933 but was unable to gain admission to the main campus of Columbia College. It had already filled a quota set for Jews by college president Nicholas Murray Butler. Instead, Aptheker was relegated to enrolling at Seth Low Junior College in Brooklyn Heights, a satellite school established by Butler as a de facto dumping ground for Jews and Italians admitted in excess of Butler's quotas.

During his time at Seth Low, Aptheker was first drawn into political activity, helping to organize anti-war rallies and speaking on behalf of the communist-backed National Student League (NSL) and the socialist-backed Student League for Industrial Democracy. He began reading the Communist Party's daily newspaper, The Daily Worker, at this time as well as the party's literary-artistic monthly, The New Masses, although he did not yet become a member of the party.

After two years at Seth Low, Aptheker was allowed to enroll at Columbia's main campus in Morningside Heights in Manhattan, but not with full status as a member of Columbia College. Instead, he was a "university undergraduate", which placed him on track for a lesser Bachelor of Science degree rather than the higher-status Bachelor of Arts, which he received in 1936. At Columbia, Aptheker continued to engage in the anti-war movement, both through the NSL and the American League Against War and Fascism, a broader mass organization of the Communist Party.

Aptheker earned his Master's degree from Columbia in 1937 and a Ph.D. in 1943 from the same institution. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in sociology in 1945. In September 1939, he joined the Communist Party USA.

Marriage and World War II

In 1942 Aptheker married Fay Philippa Aptheker (1905–1999), a first cousin who was also a native of Brooklyn. She was a union organizer and also an activist. They were married for 62 years, until her death. Their daughter, Bettina Aptheker, was born in 1944 at the U.S. Army Hospital in Fort Bragg, North Carolina during his service in World War II.

Aptheker participated in Operation Overlord, the invasion of northern France; by 1945 he had been promoted to the rank of Major in the artillery. He commanded the all-black 350th artillery unit. In December 1950, after failing to respond to the U.S. Army's letter of inquiry about his Communist political activity, he lost his commission after an honorable discharge.

Work in the South

Returning with his family to the South after the war, Aptheker became an educational worker for the Food and Tobacco Workers Union. Shortly afterward, he served as secretary of the "Abolish Peonage Committee." "Peons" in the South, the vast majority of whom were African American, were typically sharecroppers who became tied to plantations by the debt they owed to the plantation owners. This practice effectively maintained slavery beyond the Civil War in all but name.

In 1907 the Department of Justice had conducted an investigation of peonage on a plantation in Arkansas owned by LeRoy Percy of Greenville, Mississippi, after Italian immigrants complained to their embassy about getting trapped there as workers. Their consul pressed the case with the United States government and President Teddy Roosevelt ordered the investigation. No actions were taken against Percy because of his influence.

Research in African-American history

Aptheker's master's thesis, a study of Nat Turner's slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831, laid the groundwork for his future work on the history of American slave revolts. Aptheker revealed Turner's heroism, demonstrating how his rebellion was rooted in resistance to the exploitative conditions of the Southern slave system. His Negro Slave Revolts in the United States 1526–1860 (1939), includes a table of documented slave revolts by year and state. His doctoral dissertation, American Negro Slave Revolts, was published in 1943. Doing research in Southern libraries and archives, he uncovered 250 similar episodes.

Aptheker challenged some writings, most notably those of Georgia-born historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, who was considered part of the Dunning School. Phillips had characterized enslaved African Americans as childlike, inferior, and uncivilized; he argued that slavery was a benign institution; and defended the preservation of the Southern plantation system. Such works had been common in the field before Aptheker's scholarship.

Aptheker long emphasized W. E. B. Du Bois' social science scholarship and lifelong struggle for African Americans to achieve equality. In his work as a historian, he compiled a documentary history of African Americans in the United States, a monumental collection which he started publishing in 1951. It eventually resulted in seven volumes of primary documents, a tremendous resource for African-American studies.

Post-war activism

During the 1950s and the period of McCarthyism, Aptheker was blacklisted in academia because of his membership in the Communist Party. He was unable to obtain an appointment as a university lecturer for a decade. Aptheker served on the National Committee of the CPUSA from 1957 to 1991; for several years in the 1960s and 1970s, he was executive director of the American Institute For Marxist Studies. In 1966, he ran in the U.S. House of Representatives election in New York's 12th Congressional District for the Peace and Freedom Party; he received 3,562 votes.

A strong opponent of the Vietnam War, Aptheker lectured on the subject on college campuses nationwide. From 1969 to 1973, Aptheker taught a full-year course annually in Afro-American History at Bryn Mawr College. Aptheker died at age 87 on March 17, 2003, in Mountain View, California. His wife had died in 1999.

Allegation of child abuse

Bettina Aptheker is a professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In her 2006 memoir, Intimate Politics, she claimed that she was sexually abused by her father from the age of 3 to 13. Her memories of the events began to arise in 1999, after her mother's death and when she was working on a memoir. She sought counseling for her dissociation and recovered memory. She also wrote that she and her father reconciled before his death in 2003.

Her assertion caused great controversy among historians and activists. Some raised questions about her credibility; others questioned the Old Left's desire to bury the news, and still others wondered at how to look at Aptheker's work in view of this information. The historian Mark Rosenzweig wrote, "the truth about Herbert and Bettina is inaccessible to us."

In her memoir, Bettina Aptheker wrote more at length about her father's work on African-American history. She thought that he celebrated black resistance in part "to compensate for his deep shame about the way, he believed, the Jews had acted during the Holocaust."

The controversy about her claims about her father continued for months, with many essays and letters published on the History News Network hosted by George Mason University. In November 2007, the historian Christopher Phelps published an overview of the issues. He also wrote that he had interviewed Kate Miller, who had been present during Bettina Aptheker's 1999 conversation with her father about the abuse, and confirmed her account.

Works

• Afro American History: 1910-1932, (Citadel Press: New York, 1951)
• History and Reality,
• The American Revolution 1763-1783,(International Publishers: New York, 1960)
• American Negro Slave Revolts (1943), (Cameron Associates: NY, 1955)
• Documentary History of the Negro People, 7-volumes, (Carol Publishing Group: NJ, 1951–1994)
• The Truth about Hungary, (Kraus Reprint: NY, 1957)
• And Why Not Every Man?, (Seven Seas Books: CA, 1961)
• Dare We Be Free?, (New Century Publishers: Dublin, 1961)
• Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion: Including the 1831 "Confessions", (Dover: NY, 1966)
• "Imperialism and Irrationalism", TELOS 04 (Fall 1969)
• The Urgency of Marxist-Christian Dialogue, (Kraus Reprint: NY, 1970)
• American Negro Slave Revolts, (International Publishers: New York, 1974)
• Early Years of the Republic: From the End of the Revolution to the First Administration of Washington, (International Publishers: New York, 1976)
• Negro People in America, (Kraus Reprint: NY, 1977)
• The World of C. Wright Mills, (Kraus Reprint: NY, 1977)
• American Foreign Policy and the Cold War, (Kraus Reprint: NY, 1977)
• Unfolding Drama,(International Publishers: New York, 1979)
• The Nature of Democracy, Freedom & Revolution,(International Publishers: New York, 1981)
• Racism, Imperialism & Peace: Selected Essays,(MEP Publications: MN, 1987)
• Abolitionism: A Revolutionary Movement, (Twayne Publishers: CT, 1989)
• The Literary Legacy Of W. E. B. Du Bois, (Kraus Reprint: NY, 1989)
• To Be Free: Studies in American Negro History, (Citadel Press: New York, 1991)
• Anti-Racism in U.S. History: The First Two Hundred Years, (Praeger: CT, 1992)

Works featuring an introduction or foreword by Aptheker

• Washington, Booker T., Herbert Aptheker (Foreword), The Negro in the South 2nd ed., (Carol Publishing Group: NJ, 1989)
• Du Bois, W.E.B., Herbert Aptheker (Introduction), The Quest of the Silver Fleece

Works Edited by Aptheker

• Du Bois, W.E.B, Herbert Aptheker(Ed.), The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century, (International Publishers: NY, 1968)
• Du Bois, W.E.B, Herbert Aptheker (Ed.), The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques, 1906 - 1960, (Monthly Review Press: NY, 1973)
• Du Bois, W.E.B, Herbert Aptheker (Ed.), Contributions by W. E. B. Du Bois in Government Publications and Proceedings, (Kraus-Thomson Organization: NY, 1980)
• Du Bois, W.E.B, Herbert Aptheker, Bettina Aptheker, David Graham Dnm Dubois (Ed.),Prayers for Dark People, (University of Massachusetts Press: MA, 1980)
• Du Bois, W.E.B, Herbert Aptheker (Ed.), Selections from the Crisis, (Kraus-Thomson Organization: NY, 1980)
• Du Bois, W.E.B, Herbert Aptheker (Ed.), Writings by W.E.B. Du Bois in Non-Periodical Literature Edited by Others, (Kraus-Thomson Organization: NY, 1982)
• Du Bois, W.E.B, Herbert Aptheker (Ed.), Creative Writings by W.E.B. Du Bois: A Pageant, Poems, Short Stories, and Playlets, (Kraus-Thomson Organization: NY, 1985)
• Du Bois, W.E.B, Herbert Aptheker (Ed.), Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887-1961, (University of Massachusetts Press: MA, 1985)
• Du Bois, W.E.B, Herbert Aptheker (Ed.), Newspaper Columns, (Kraus-Thomson Organization: NY, 1986)
• Knutson, April A., Herbert Aptheker (Ed.), Ideology and Independence in the Americas, (MEP Publications: MN, 1989)
• Du Bois, W.E.B, Herbert Aptheker (Ed.), The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois, (University of Massachusetts Press: MA, 1997)

Further reading

• Anthony Flood, "C. L. R. James: Herbert Aptheker's Invisible Man", The C. L. R. James Journal, vol. 19, nos. 1 & 2 (Fall 2013), pp. 276–297.
• Robin D.G. Kelley, "Interview of Herbert Aptheker," The Journal of American History, vol. 87, no. 1 (June 2000), pp. 151–167.
• Gary Murrell, "Herbert Aptheker's Unity of Theory and Practice in the Communist Party USA: On the Last Night, and during the First Two Decades," Science & Society, vol. 70, no. 1, (Jan. 2006), pp. 98–118.
• Gary Murrell, "The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States": A Biography of Herbert Aptheker (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015).

Research resources

• "Herbert Aptheker Papers, 1842-2005" (122 linear ft.), Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA.

External links

• Bettina and Herbert Aptheker, History News Network.
• Christopher Phelps, "Herbert Aptheker: The Contradictions of History", Chronicle of Higher Education, 12 July 2006
• Anthony G. Flood, "Herbert Aptheker: Apothecary for a Red Teenager", Anthony G. Flood website