Herbert Aptheker

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Herbert Aptheker : biography

31 July 1915 – 17 March 2003

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.

Biography

Early life and education

Herbert Aptheker was born in Brooklyn, New York, the last child of a wealthy Jewish family. In 1932, 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, and was appalled by what he saw. On his return to Brooklyn, he wrote a column for his Erasmus Hall High School newspaper on the "Dark Side of The South."

Aptheker attended Columbia University in New York City, from which he obtained a Bachelor’s degree in 1936. Aptheker also earned his Master’s degree in 1937 and a Ph.D. in 1943 from the same institution.Francis X. Gannon, Biographical Dictionary of the Left: Volume 3. Boston: Western Islands, 1972; pp. 215-218. In 1939, he joined the Communist Party USA, as he believed it took the strongest position on full economic, social, and political equality for African Americans.

Research resources

  • (122 linear ft.), Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA.

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.

Research in African American history

Aptheker’s master’s thesis, a study of the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia, 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. It remains a landmark and a classic work in the study of Southern history and slavery.

Aptheker challenged some writings, most notably those of Georgia-born historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips. The latter had characterized enslaved African Americans as childlike, inferior, and uncivilized; 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 revealed a much more nuanced society, in which African Americans acted from agency.

Considering himself a protégé of W. E. B. Du Bois, Aptheker long emphasized his mentor’s 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.