Working Class Heroes: Herbert Aptheker

Herbert Aptheker, a member of the Communist Party USA from 1939 until 1991, died March 17, 2003. He is probably best remembered for his groundbreaking American Negro Slave Revolts and the seven-volume work A Documentary History of the Negro People...

Herbert Aptheker, a member of the Communist Party USA from 1939 until 1991, died March 17, 2003. He is probably best remembered for his groundbreaking American Negro Slave Revolts and the seven-volume work A Documentary History of the Negro People.

APTHEKER’S LIFE

Born July 31, 1915, in Brooklyn, NY, Aptheker was the youngest of five children. At age sixteen Aptheker accompanied his father to Alabama. The experience left a permanent impact on him. “I saw Jim Crow for the first time in my life and I was appalled,� he said.

By the time Aptheker was twenty-two he was back in the south doing educational work for the Food and Tobacco Workers Union. He served as Secretary of the Abolish Peonage Committee; peonage was the system by which sharecroppers, mostly African American, were tied to land debt by predatory creditors.

Aptheker graduated from Columbia University in 1936 and completed his master’s degree there in 1937.

In 1942 Aptheker married Fay Philippa Aptheker; Fay died in 1999. They had one child, Bettina, a leader in the W. E. B. DuBois Clubs of America (a precursor to the Young Communist League USA) and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.

In the early 1940’s, as war was raging in Europe, Party members, including Aptheker, saw the defeat of fascism and the security of Soviet Russia as the number one priority of the peoples of the world. So in 1942 Aptheker joined the U.S. Army. He served until 1946.

After returning from his service in WWII, Aptheker applied for a teaching position at Columbia University and was told he would never be hired because of his Party membership. In fact, Aptheker was excluded from academic life until 1969, when student demands for Black history courses at Bryn Mawr college led to his invitation to teach there. He remained at Bryn Mawr until 1973.

Aptheker also taught at the University of Massachusetts, City University of New York, Yale, Berkeley, and at Humbolt University in Berlin.

APTHEKER’S LEGACY

Aptheker came to adulthood at a time when most historians depicted African Americans as passive and inferior. According to U. B. Phillips, a well known historian of the time, African Americans suffered from “inherent ineptitude� and were “by racial quality submissive.�

Phillips saw slavery as a paternalistic plantation system and argued that “slave revolts and plots very seldom occurred in the United States.�

Aptheker methodically and vigorously challenged these racist views. As documented in American Negro Slave Revolts, Aptheker found that there were at least 250 known slave revolts in U.S. history and that “the African American people, in slavery, forged a record of discontent and of resistance...�

In the preface to Aptheker’s first volume of A Documentary History, W. E. B. DuBois, also a member of the CPUSA, wrote, “It is a dream come true to have the history of the Negro in America pursued in scientific documentary form.�

In 1946 W. E. B. DuBois appointed Aptheker his literary executor. While many criticized Aptheker and believed that he could not objectively edit DuBois’s Correspondence, among other writings, others called Aptheker’s editing “a landmark in African American history.� Aptheker proceeded to edit and publish many volumes of the writings of W. E. B. DuBois.

While Aptheker wrote and edited primarily on African American history, he also published a number of books on American history and U.S. foreign policy; including Mission to Hanoi, a first hand account of his visit to North Vietnam in 1966 during the height of U.S. bombardment. Aptheker was also an associate editor of Masses and Mainstream, editor of Political Affairs and founder and executive director of the American Institute for Marxist Studies.

Aptheker critiqued some leftist thinking of the 1960’s and 70’s, while at the same time winning wide respect from activists and intellectuals of the era. In an article titled Racism and Women’s Liberation, Aptheker drew a sharp distinction between working class feminism and “petty-bourgeois feminism�. Aptheker explained that the latter “poses the battle of the Afro-American people against...the women’s struggle� as if “all women are white.� In his view, many leftist intellectuals failed to see that in women’s liberation and in Black liberation “one has in both these struggles natural allies.�

Despite the hardships caused by the Cold War and McCarthyism, Aptheker wrote prolifically, lectured at numerous academic institutions, participated in many conferences in and out of the university and expanded the audience of Marxism-Leninism. In many ways, Aptheker encouraged a new generation of students, scholars and activists to look at African American history as a history of struggle and empowerment. Undoubtedly, Aptheker contributed much to the intellectual and practical spirit of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements.

Herbert Aptheker’s contributions to the struggles to end racism, sexism, oppression, exploitation and war have left a lasting imprint on the struggles of today.

Tony Pecinovsky is an independent media/labor activist. He has organized with the Teamsters union and SEIU and is a frequent contributor to the People's Weekly World, among other publications. He is currently a member of the Newspaper Guild, and a member of the YCL National Council. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri.