Aptheker, Herbert

APTHEKER, HERBERT (1915 - 2003). A preeminent controversial historian, polemicist, agitator, anti-war activist, and for fifty years a leading intellectual in the Communist Party, USA, Aptheker was born to wealthy Jewish parents in Brooklyn, New York. He earned a BS at Columbia University in 1936 and a PhD at the same institution in 1943. Simultaneously he served in the US Army from 1942 to 1946 during World War II, rising to the rank of major. In 1942 Aptheker married his second cousin Fay P. Aptheker (1905-1990), and their daughter, Bettina, was born in 1944.

Aptheker was one of the first white historians to immerse himself in the study of Black history. His master's thesis at Columbia was the first full-length scholarly study of the Nat Turner revolt (published by Humanities Press in 1966 as Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion) and led Aptheker to further research on slave revolts that resulted in publication of his first and most influential book, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943). "For fifty years," historian Eugene Genovese declared, “the literature [on slave resistance] falls easily into categories of 'before' and 'after' [Aptheker's book]. . . . No one has even tried to replace Aptheker's book with a fresh synthesis and reinterpretation. . . . All subsequent work on the subject . . . has had to build on it."

Aptheker's openly-acknowledged membership in the Communist Party, USA kept him from an appointment to a university position, but he did not accept his exclusion quietly. He challenged the blacklist, excoriating the history profession as "a closed intensely conservative, lily-white, anti-Semitic bulwark and reflection of the . . . ruling class,” sentiments that did not sit well with establishment historians who simply wrote him out of the canon of American history and created a wall of silence around him. Aptheker was, according to the activist and historian Staughton Lynd, "beyond question the American historian most discriminated against because of political belief."

Aptheker's radicalism also led him into direct conflict with the preeminent American witch-hunters, FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy. The FBI amassed a file on Aptheker consisting of tens of thousands of pages and initiated dozens of covert operations against him through its COINTELPRO program. Hoover's frustration at the FBI's inability to unearth actionable evidence for prosecution boiled over in an internal memo when he called Aptheker "the most dangerous Communist in the United States." Senator McCarthy called Aptheker to testify before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, but Aptheker's open defiance left McCarthy and his deputy Roy Cohen openly sputtering.

The FBI stepped up its covert activities when Aptheker took Yale University historian Staughton Lynd and Student's for A Democratic Society founder Tom Hayden on a fact-finding visit to North Vietnam, one of the first trips by Americans traveling at the invitation of the North Vietnamese government. On their return to the United States the three anti-war activists split up and spoke at dozens of anti-war rallies around the country. Aptheker, at the invitation of student leaders, used his appearances at colleges and universities such as Ohio State University and University of North Carolina and many others to help break the bans then in effect against radical speakers on campuses.

Aptheker first corresponded with W. E. B. Du Bois in 1939 but not until 1946 did they become close when they shared an office at the NAACP headquarters. That year Aptheker began searching for a publisher for Du Bois's letters and other unpublished work. By 1961, still without a publisher, Du Bois hastily left the country to live in Ghana. He moved all his papers into Aptheker's basement and named Aptheker his literary executor, a move that occasioned some rumbling from several black intellectuals. Du Bois died in 1963. Aptheker and Fay set about the monumental task of organizing the thousands of letters and edited for publication an autobiography Du Bois had left in their care. On 26 November 1969, twenty-three years after he began searching for a publisher for Du Bois's papers, the University of Massachusetts Press notified him that it would publish, with Aptheker as editor. Eventually, Aptheker edited three volumes of Du Bois's correspondence and four volumes of unpublished writings by Du Bois for UMass Press and thirty-seven volumes of the collected, published writing of Du Bois published by Kraus International Publications and a seven-hundred-page annotated bibliography of Du Bois's writings. Shirley Graham Du Bois, Du Bois's widow, eventually sold all the papers in Aptheker's care to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Graham Du Bois demanded and secured, as a condition of selling the Du Bois papers, a professorship for Aptheker in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies. Aptheker traded away that position in return for a guarantee that the department would build a core faculty for the study of Black history, which the university did.

Aptheker significantly marred his reputation when he published two ill-conceived books, more than a decade apart, justifying the Soviet Union's invasions of Hungary in 1954 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. The Truth About Hungary and Czechoslovakia and Counter-Revolution: Why the Socialist Countries Intervened supplied ammunition to his detractors long after anyone bothered to read them.
Aside from American Negro Slave Revolts and the under-appreciated Anti-Racism in U. S. History (1993), probably his most lasting contribution to the history of Black people in the United States is his seven-volume Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States.
Aptheker resigned from the CPUSA in 1991. He helped to launch and remained affiliated with the Committees of Correspondence until his death.

Murrell, Gary. The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States: A Biography of Herbert Aptheker. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015.

Herbert Aptheker Papers, M1032. Department of Special Collections. Stanford University Libraries. Collection Overview. Online Archives of California. https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf467nb0bh/