The longest chapter of my book on Herbert Aptheker—Communist theoretician, African American history researcher, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s literary executor (see my previous post)—elaborates upon my claim that Aptheker’s Stalinism is the only credible explanation of his failure to cite The Black Jacobins (TBJ) of C. L. R. James, a Trotskyist.
After all, I argued, Aptheker’s scholarly specialization lay in slave revolts; the subject of TBJ is the 1791 slave revolt in San Domingo (SDR) led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, the only successful such revolt in modern times; TBJ was published in New York in 1938, a year after Columbia University awarded Aptheker his master’s degree (for which he had written the first book on Nat Turner’s 1831 decidedly unsuccessful slave revolt) and as he was immersed in doctoral studies that culminated in his 1943 American Negro Slave Revolts (ANSR).
Further, TBJ had been reviewed in periodicals familiar to Aptheker (e.g., The New York Times, The Journal of Negro History, Time Magazine); Aptheker devoted several pages of ANSR to the impact of the SDR on the American slave revolts he studied.
In my book I noted that ANSR’s bibliography listed, not TBJ, but James’s “The History of Negro Revolt,” which essay exhaustively comprised the September 1938 issue of Fact, a London periodical. Aptheker’s citation of the obscure periodical, but not the full-length, widely reviewed book published the same year by a major New York house (Dial) seemed to me to be a deliberate effort not to give James the credit he was due. (Aptheker never quoted James’s words.)
And, as it happens, this move was also ironic, although the irony only hit me the other day. I wish I had noted a few years ago what was right under my nose.
The issue of Fact that Aptheker presumably had in his hands before he listed it was not the reprint (with Tony Martin’s introduction) or the version re-titled The History of Pan-African Revolt (with Robin D. G. Kelley’s). It’s a document that virtually removes from its handler any excuse for not being aware of TBJ from the time it was published.
Pages 2 provides the periodical’s masthead; page 3, its table of contents:
Chapter 1 begins on page 5:
Ah, but what’s on the facing page, held open by the reader’s left hand? (That’s a stapler holding open my copy as I snapped the picture.)
A full-page advertisement announcing the publication of TBJ!
If Aptheker handled this number of Fact—and if he didn’t, he shouldn’t have listed it in the ANSR bibliography—he knew about James’s ground-breaking study of the SDR.
In possible mitigation of my missing it: when in 2012 I procured a copy of this issue of Fact from an Irish bookseller, I was anxious to return this aging, delicate periodical to its protective packaging. I was accumulating evidence from other sources that invited the strong inference that Aptheker deliberately ignored James for political reasons (and that many scholars provided cover for this neglect), and I was determined to treat each bit of it carefully.
So carefully, it turns out, that I had missed perhaps the clearest evidence of the thing I was looking for, namely, Aptheker’s awareness of TBJ.
A few days ago, I just felt like looking at my valuable acquisition again.
Reviews of Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness:
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- David Gordon, “A Study in Willful Blindness,” Mises.org, May 13, 2019
- Lloyd Billingsly, “Studies in Herbert Aptheker, Esteemed Expert on Slave Revolts: How a ‘post-Stalin Stalinist’ suppressed revolt history,” Frontpage Magazine, May 23, 2019.