Apart from Shirley Graham Du Bois (1896-1977), no one knew more about her husband W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) than his literary executor, Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003). Not far behind, if this were a competition, would be Black labor activist, scholar, and fellow Communist theoretician Doxey A. Wilkerson (1905-1993).[1]
From 1948 to 1957, Wilkerson was the Director of Curriculum of the Communist Party-run Jefferson School of Social Science (northwest corner of Sixth Avenue and 16th Street in Manhattan) where Aptheker and Du Bois taught classes. This period saw Du Bois’s marked shift to Marxism-Leninism, culminating in his formally applying for Party membership in 1961.[2]
Since Wilkerson wrote the introduction to Aptheker’s The Negro People in
America: A Critique of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1946) and reviewed it six years later in a party periodical that Aptheker edited, it was odd that Aptheker omitted mention of Comrade Wilkerson’s review when preparing for publication the first critical scholarly edition of Du Bois’s 1952 In Battle for Peace.[3] Philip Luke Sinitiere, an empathetic Du Bois and Aptheker scholar,[4] writes:
. . . the absence of an expansive review of In Battle for Peace published in the October 1952 issue of Masses & Mainstream is a more curious omission [in the 1976 edition], both in Aptheker’s archives and in the Kraus Thomson edition. CPUSA [Communist Party United States of America] member and Black radical Doxey Wilkerson praised In Battle for Peace as a “moving story” of “practical freedom struggles” and a “profoundly perceptive critique of our decadent imperialist society” that Du Bois penned with “masterful prose, wit and scathing satire.”
. . . Unlike other reviewers, however, Wilkerson’s incisive Marxist analysis registered important critiques of the book. First, he held that Du Bois’s use of the term socialism captured all forms of “public ownership” instead of focusing on “collective ownership” with “working class control of the state.” In other words, for Wilkerson’s tastes, Du Bois’s radical discourse lacked theoretical precision and the finer points of communist doctrine over which Party members sparred.[5]
So, one cannot attribute Aptheker’s omission to “liberalism” or “Trotskyism” on the part of Wilkerson, who was as much a Browderite-Stalinist-Communist as Aptheker ever was (until he wasn’t):
Second, Wilkerson read Du Bois’s literary descriptions of Black history and collective society in ancient Africa as a form of philosophical mysticism that belied the need for more precise language reflecting “the scientific, materialist conception of reality.” Third, Wilkerson felt that Du Bois’s mistrust of “the Negro petty bourgeoisie as incurable self-seeking and reactionary”—except for those who did not desert him in 1951—left out potential solidarity with Black middleclass progressives in the larger struggles for freedom and equality.[6]
But the baby should not be thrown out with the soiled diapers:
[T]he importance of this book [Wilkerson writes] can never be measured by the extent to which its analyses are in technical accord with all the principles of dialectical materialism. It must be appraised, rather, in terms of its meaning for the life-and-death struggles which now confront the Negro people and the working class of our country.
The absence of any notation about Wilkerson’s review in Aptheker’s editorial introduction to the first critical reprint of In Battle for Peace in 1976 is as curious as it is concerning. The two radicals knew each other and the political and intellectual circles in which they moved overlapped in the mid-20th century. . . .
But then all becomes clear:
. . . Wilkerson, a committed Marxist and Black radical, left the CPUSA in 1957. [My emphasis.—A.G.F.] At that critical moment of anticommunist Cold War repression and in the wake of Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin, Party stalwarts like Aptheker decried such exoduses and sometimes ghosted former CPUSA comrades. In a private conversation with his daughter Bettina, Aptheker labeled former [Daily] Worker newspaper editor Johnny Gates a “cowardly bastard” upon leaving the Party.[7]
Sinitiere quotes Aptheker biographer Gary Murrell: “Resignation from the party had always been the ultimate betrayal in Aptheker’s judgment.”[8] Sinitiere charitably considers other factors:
Without evidence of Aptheker denouncing Wilkerson specifically, perhaps Aptheker’s bibliographic oversight happened in the over flush of research, writing, and editorial work he carried out on Du Bois in the mid-1970s. Between 1975 and 1977 he published eighteen Du Bois volumes in the Kraus Thomson Collected Works of W.E.B. Du Bois series in addition to completing research on the first two Du Bois correspondence volumes that the University of Massachusetts Press published in 1973 and 1976 respectively.[9]
In addition to “Aptheker’s over stacked editorial work in the early 1970s,” however, there remains the question of the weight one should assign to this “solitary bibliographic omission” of one review. Sinitiere’s judgment in favor of “fixat[ing] on one review” is instructive: “[C]itational practices,” he writes, “are political decisions.”
And as his own career of producing primary source anthologies attests, Aptheker knew intimately the importance of leaving a documentary trail for researchers and historians. It is indeed ironic, is it not, that at a moment of heightened editorial labor and prolific publication on a subject that he probably knew better than any living person at the time besides Shirley Graham Du Bois . . . Aptheker would miss the bibliographic reference of a fellow radical who published a review of his hero and comrade in the very periodical he edited? It seems that even in 1976, Aptheker had perhaps not forgotten Wilkerson’s exit from the CPUSA and decided to erase him from In Battle for Peace’s history. Sadly, Aptheker performed an editorial version of political and intellectual exclusion, the kinds of chauvinistic and antidemocratic practices he spent his career denouncing and fighting against.
Aptheker’s erasure of Wilkerson, while vindictive and the bitter fruit of an unyielding, dogmatic fidelity to the CPUSA, is part of In Battle for Peace’s editorial history.[10]
When Aptheker included Richard Wright’s essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born”
in the fourth volume of A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, which covered 1933 to 1945,[11] Wright (1908-1960), who had left the CPUSA in disgust in 1942, had been dead for decades.
(It’s worth noting that Wright’s departure strained his relations with Du Bois, who had met him in 1940 and admired his Native Son. He regarded Wright’s 1944 Atlantic Monthly essay “I Tried to Be a Communist” as a sign of the novelist’s abandonment of political responsibilities and increasing existentialist reflections. Du Bois’s and Wright’s stance toward the Soviet Union would continue to diverge over the next twenty years, with the former’s growing, year by year, closer to Aptheker’s.)
When, however, Aptheker erased Wilkerson from the history of In Battle for Peace, the erased one was not only alive, but productive:
From 1963-1973, Wilkerson was a professor of education and chairman of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Yeshiva University in New York. Also in the 1970s, he served on the board of the Little Red School House and the Elisabeth Irwin High School, a progressive private school in Manhattan. From 1973 until his retirement in 1984, he was a technical coordinator and vice president for Mediax Associates, an educational consulting firm in Westport, Connecticut.[12]
The evaporation of the names of C. L. R. James[13] and Doxey A. Wilkerson in Aptheker’s work does not comport with the encomia that left-leaning academics have uncritically showered on his writings.[14] We can be grateful to Philip Luke Sinitiere for being a noble exception to that rule.
Notes
[1] The remarkable itinerary of this overlooked figure in American radical, labor, and African American history is summarized here: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/doxey-wilkerson-1905-1993/
[2] James E. Jackson, “W. E. B. Du Bois to Gus Hall: ‘Communism Will Triumph: I Want to Help Bring That Day,’” The Worker, November 26, 1961. https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/from-the-peoples-world-archives-w-e-b-dubois-joins-the-communist-party/ For Du Bois’s involvement with “the Jeff School,” see Denise Lynn’s illuminating essay, “Enlightening the Working Class: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Jefferson School of Social Science,” Socialism and Democracy, No. 78, November 2018. https://sdonline.org/issue/78/enlightening-working-class-web-du-bois-and-jefferson-school-social-science
[3] Doxey A. Wilkerson, “W.E.B. Du Bois In Battle for Peace,” Masses & Mainstream, October 1952, 34–35.
[4] Sinitiere is a Professor of History at the College of Biblical Studies, a predominantly African American school in Houston, and a scholar-in-residence at UMass Amherst’s W. E. B. Du Bois Center. His books include Citizen of the World: The Late Career and Legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois, Northwestern University Press, 2019), and Race, Religion, and Black Lives Matter: Essays on a Moment and a Movement, Vanderbilt University Press, 2021.
[5] Phillip Luke Sinitiere, “W.E.B. Du Bois’s In Battle for Peace: A Black Radical Intellectual Book History, American Communist History, 2022, 21:3-4, 169.
[6] Sinitiere, 169.
[7] My emphasis. Sinitiere quotes from the memoir of Aptheker’s daughter Bettina: Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel, Seal Press, 2006, 55. Sinitiere, 170. Her father’s response to Khrushchev’s “revelations” was to defend the revelator’s 1956 invasion of Hungary in The Truth about Hungary, Mainstream Publishers, 1957. Wilkerson left because “the Communist party no longer affords a framework within which I can make a constructive contribution” [toward building what he deemed a better United States]. “Wilkerson Quits Reds: Top U.S. Negro Intellectual in Communist Party Resigns,” New York Times, December 14, 1957, 8. The Times-consuming Aptheker could not have missed that description.
[8] Always? Then, in his biography of Aptheker, Murrell should have noticed the exception that Aptheker made for Richard Wright. I took note of this in “Willful Blindness,” American Communist History, 15:1, 2016, 167. A version of this review of Murrell’s book appears in Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness, self-published, 2019. I plan on publishing a second, expanded edition. In the meantime, see my “Did Richard Wright want to “kiss the hand of the man who wrote American Negro Slave Revolts”? Yes, according to that hand’s owner. Notes on a mutual suspension of hostilities,” June 1, 2025.
[9] Sinitiere, 169.
[10] Sinitiere, 170.
[11] The content covering the period 1933-1945 in A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States was first published as Volume 3 in 1974. A later edition, published by the Carol Publishing Group in 1990, designated this period as Volume 4.
[12] Doxey A. Wilkerson papers, 1926-1994, New York Public Library. https://archives.nypl.org/scm/20928
[13] Anthony Flood, “C. L. R. James: Herbert Aptheker’s Invisible Man,” The C. L. R. James Journal, 19:1 & 2, Fall 2013, 276-297; a version of this paper was published in my Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness, referenced in note 8. Or search <C. L. R. James> on this site.
[14] See, for example, African American History and Radical Historiography: Essays in Honor of Herbert Aptheker, ed. Herbert Shapiro, Minneapolis: MEP Press, 1998, 74-75, and In Resistance: Studies in African, Caribbean, and Afro-American History, ed. Gary Okihiro, Amherst: UMass Press, 1986,