Herbert Aptheker | |
|---|---|
 Apthekerc. 1969 | |
| Born | (1915-07-31)July 31, 1915 Brooklyn, New York, U.S. |
| Died | March 17, 2003(2003-03-17) (aged 87) |
| 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. Du Bois,Anti-Racism in U.S. History |
| Political party | Communist(1939–1992) |
| Other political affiliations | Peace and Freedom(1966) |
| Spouse | |
| Children | Bettina Aptheker |
| Military career | |
| Allegiance |  United States |
| Branch |  United States Army |
| Years of service | 1942–1946 |
| Rank | Major |
| Unit | 92nd Infantry Division |
| Commands | 350th Field Artillery Battalion |
| Battles / wars | World War II |
Herbert Aptheker (July 31, 1915 – March 17, 2003) was an AmericanMarxist historian and politicalactivist. He wrote more than 50 books, mostly in the fields ofAfrican-American history and generalU.S. history, most notably,American Negro Slave Revolts (1943), a classic in the field. He also compiled the 7-volumeDocumentary History of the Negro People (1951–1994). In addition, he compiled a wide variety of primary documents supporting study of African-American history. He was the literary executor forW. E. B. Du Bois.
From the 1940s, Aptheker was a prominent figure in U.S.scholarly discourse. Aptheker wasblacklisted in academia during the 1950s because of hisCommunist Party membership. He succeededV. J. Jerome in 1955 as editor ofPolitical Affairs, a communist theory magazine.
Herbert Aptheker was born inBrooklyn,New York, the youngest child of a wealthyJewish family.[1]
In 1931, when he was 16, he accompanied his father on a business trip toAlabama.[2] There he learned first-hand about theoppression ofAfrican Americans underJim Crow Laws in theSouth.[3] 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 hisErasmus Hall High School newspaper.[4]
Aptheker graduated from high school in the spring of 1933, during theGreat Depression. Although admitted to Columbia University, he was unable to gain admission to the main campus ofColumbia College, which had already filled a quota set for Jews by college presidentNicholas Murray Butler.[4] Instead, Aptheker was relegated to enrolling atSeth Low Junior College inBrooklyn Heights,[4] a satellite school established by Butler as ade facto dumping ground for Jews[5] and ethnic Italians admitted in excess of Butler's quotas.[4]
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-backedNational Student League (NSL) and the socialist-backedStudent League for Industrial Democracy.[6] He began reading theCommunist Party's daily newspaper,The Daily Worker, at this time as well as the party's literary-artistic monthly,The New Masses,[6] 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 inMorningside Heights in Manhattan, but not with full status as a member of Columbia College. Instead, he was classified as a "university undergraduate", which placed him on track for a lesserBachelor of Science degree rather than the higher-statusBachelor of Arts, which he received in 1936.[4] At Columbia, Aptheker continued to engage in the anti-war movement, both through the NSL and theAmerican League Against War and Fascism, a broadermass organization of the Communist Party during itsPopular Front period.[6]
Aptheker earned hisMaster's degree from Columbia in 1937 and aPh.D. in 1943 from the same institution.[7] In September 1939, he joined theCommunist Party USA. He was awarded aGuggenheim Fellowship in sociology in 1945.
In 1942 Aptheker married Fay Philippa Aptheker (1905–1999), a first cousin who was also a native of Brooklyn.[8] She was a union organizer and political activist. They were married for 62 years, until her death.[1] Their daughter,Bettina, was born in 1944 at the U.S. Army Hospital inFort Bragg, North Carolina during Aptheker's service in World War II.[8]
Aptheker enlisted in theU.S. Army in 1942, participating inOperation Overlord, the invasion of northern France. By 1945 he had been promoted to the rank ofMajor,[1] commanding the all-black 350thField Artillery Battalion.[9] That year, he was one of 16 Army officers and enlisted men singled out as alleged Communists by theHouse Committee on Military Affairs. General"Wild Bill" Donovan came to their defense, citing their loyalty and effectiveness.[10] Aptheker returned home in 1946,[1][11] and in December 1950 lost his commission and washonorably discharged after failing to respond to the Army's letter of inquiry about his Communist political activity.[9]
Returning with his family to the South after the war, Aptheker became an educational worker for theFood and Tobacco Workers Union. Shortly afterward, he served as secretary of the "Abolish Peonage Committee," which had been established in 1940 by activists in New York and Chicago, with the support of theInternational Labor Defense (IDL), an arm of the Communist Party. "Peons" in the South, the vast majority of whom were African American, were typically rural sharecroppers who became tied toplantations by the debt they owed to the plantation owners, or to local merchants. This practice had effectively maintained African-Americanslavery after theCivil War in all but name.[12][13]
Given repeated publicity about peonage abuses, in 1941 Attorney GeneralFrancis Biddle had directed all federal prosecutors to "actively investigate and try more peonage cases." On the verge of entering World War II, the US would make more effort to reduce rural peonage.[13]
Similarly, southern states had runconvict leasing programs, hiring out convicts to industries and taking the fees as revenue. Several southern states had banned convict leasing to industries in the early 20th century: Tennessee, South Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Arkansas and Florida by 1923.[13][12]
Aptheker'smaster's thesis, a study ofNat Turner's Rebellion inVirginia in 1831, laid the groundwork for his future work on the history of American slave revolts. Aptheker asserted Turner's heroism, demonstrating how his rebellion was rooted in resistance to the exploitative conditions of the Southern slave system. HisNegro 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 set forthhistoriographical arguments, challenging some conservative histories, most notably the perspective in the writings ofGeorgia-born historianUlrich Bonnell Phillips, who was considered part of theDunning School at Columbia University. Historians of this group had been critical ofReconstruction and argued that slavery was no worse than urban labor conditions. 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 emphasizedW. 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.
During the 1950s and the period ofMcCarthyism, Aptheker wasblacklisted 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 theAmerican Institute For Marxist Studies. In 1966, he ran in theU.S. House of Representatives election in New York's 12th Congressional District for thePeace and Freedom Party; he received 3,562 votes. Given his work on African-American documents and history, Aptheker was chosen byW. E. B. Du Bois to be his literary executor.[14]
A strong opponent of theVietnam War, Aptheker lectured on the subject on college campuses nationwide. At the invitation ofNorth Vietnam, he,Tom Hayden andStaughton Lynd traveled through the country from December 1965 to January 1966. Aptheker wrote about the experience inMission to Hanoi (1966).[15] From 1969 to 1973, he taught a full-year course annually in Afro-American History atBryn Mawr College. He left the Communist Party in 1992 along withMichael Myerson,Angela Davis,Gil Green, andCharlene Mitchell, co-founding theCommittees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.[16] Aptheker died at age 87 on March 17, 2003, inMountain View, California. His wife had died in 1999.[1]
Bettina Aptheker is a professor offeminist studies at theUniversity of California, Santa Cruz. In her 2006 memoir,Intimate Politics, she claimed that she wassexually 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 herdissociation andrecovered memory.[17] She also wrote that she and her father reconciled before his death in 2003.[18]
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.[18]
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."[18]
The controversy about her claims about her father continued for months, with many essays and letters published on theHistory News Network hosted byGeorge Mason University. In November 2007, the historianChristopher 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.[19]
