One hundred ten years ago today, the temperature in Brooklyn was as high as it was yesterday, that is, 93°F, an especially stressful, even dangerous, circumstance for a woman great with child. Yet that day, July 31, 1915, Rebecca Aptheker successfully birthed Herbert, her and husband Benjamin’s fifth and last child, the future scholar of African American history and apologist for communism of the Stalinist kind—and, for a few years in the early 1970s, my friend, comrade, and employer.
The year of Herbert’s nativity also saw the screening of the pro-Ku Klux Klan film, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, in Woodrow Wilson’s White House; the founding of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and Culture by Carter G. Woodson (the only Harvard Ph.D. whose parents had been slaves; in 1946 he replied to a letter Aptheker had written to him); and the passing of Booker T. Washington.
Aptheker’s papers (1842-2005, bulk 1934-1994) are stored and catalogued in the Manuscripts Division of Stanford University. The linked page’s biographical paragraphs, here reproduced and copyedited, provide a compact introduction to aspects of his life. Its bibliographical section is unfortunately incomplete, and the items that are listed are not chronologically ordered. By welcome contrast, that section in his Wikipedia article is both nearly complete and arranged chronologically; there is no need to reproduce it here. Those interested should visit that page and scroll down to “Works.”
Dr. Herbert Aptheker, historian and lecturer, was born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 31, 1915, to Benjamin and Rebecca (Komar) Aptheker. He married Fay Aptheker on Sept. 4, 1942; they had one daughter, Bettina Aptheker, an author and historian in her own right. Aptheker received his B.S. in 1936, an A.M. in 1937, and his Ph.D. in 1943, all from Columbia University. He also holds a Ph.D. (honorary) from Martin Luther University, Halle, Germany, 1966, and a DHL (honorary) from the University of Massachusetts, 1996.
He edited Masses and Mainstream from 1948 through 1952 and Political Affairs from 1952 through 1963. He was the director of the American Institute for Marxist Studies in New York City from 1964 to 1985 and a professor at Hostos Community College, CUNY, from 1971 to 1977. He lectured extensively throughout the United States and Europe since 1941.
He was a visiting lecturer in the Department of History at Bryn Mawr College, 1969-1971; visiting lecturer, University of Massachusetts from 1971-1972; Yale University, 1976; University of California at Berkeley Law School, 1978-1991; University of Santa Clara, 1982-1983; visiting professor, Afro-American Studies, University of California at Berkeley, 1984.
Aptheker ran for the U.S. Congress in 1966 as the Independent Peace
candidate and for the U.S. Senate in 1976 as the Communist Party candidate. He served as Major in the Field Artillery of the Army of the United States, European Theater of Operations, 1942-1946.
He served as a Guggenheim Fellow from 1946 to 1947 and received grants from the Social Science Research Council, 1961, the Rabinowitz Foundation, 1965, and the American Council of Learned Studies, 1974. He holds memberships in the American Historical Association and the Association for the Study of Negro Life, which awarded him its History Award in 1939 and 1969. [End]
The Wikipedia entry on Herbert Aptheker is worth consulting, but only as a preliminary to reading Gary Murrell’s “The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States”: A Biography of Herbert Aptheker (UMass Press, August 2015), published exactly a century after Aptheker’s birth. I reviewed it in 2016 for American Communist History; a PDF of the review is freely available here, but also republished with other essays in my 2019
Search <Herbert Aptheker> on this site for many posts on this historically interesting figure.