In the preceding post, I inexplicably, and severely, understated things when I wrote that Carter G. Woodson, the father of Negro History in the United States, “had in 1946 replied to a letter Aptheker had written to him.”[1]
That doesn’t tell the half of it, no, not even a tenth of it, but, oddly, nearly all of it locked itself inside my memory just when I needed access to it. You see, their correspondence and relationship went back much further, about a decade earlier, and deeper. So, rather than lengthening the “birthday” post with an overlong “postscript,” as I had thought of doing last night, let me make amends with a post dedicated to correcting my inadvertent distortion.
In 1946, Aptheker was back home in the States after his World War 2 ETO service. His academic interest in history, particularly the history that Woodson pioneered and in the man himself, had begun to percolate in 1935, leaving his geological studies in the dust.
Biographer Murrell notes that Aptheker was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree from Columbia University at the age 21 in 1936, “only three years after matriculating” as a teenager and then Black history occluded all else, launching himself headlong into the work that would yield his study of Nat Turner’s Southampton revolt and a Master of Arts degree in February of 1937. At 17 going on 18 and 19, young Herbert had
. . . studied the writings of Carter G. Woodson . . . . They corresponded and met several times in Washington, D.C., where Woodson lived. Woodson evidently liked Aptheker, encouraged his study, and attempted to keep him on the right track. “You ask my opinion also about what Virginia would have done if the Civil War had not happened,” Woodson wrote in his first communication with Aptheker. “This would be invading the field of prophecy, which I do not care to do. My field is history. I have no desire to depart for this sphere.”[2]
Aptheker set down vignettes of his intellectual shift of focus:
In my late teens [1933-1935], I became deeply interested in what we then called Negro history. I was fortunate enough to discover Dr. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and its publications. I wrote to him with questions, and he responded. As a result, when I planned a trip to the Library of Congress, I told him of this; he arranged to meet me at the Penn Station.
We had lunch together; at that time, except for the ghetto, we could eat together only at a counter at the station. We did so, and Dr. Woodson inquired of my interest. I replied I was working toward understanding the Nat Turner revolt; that this was part of my studies at Columbia University. He encouraged me and said that when I planned another visit to the Library, I should let him know so that we might again meet.
We did meet. This time, Dr. Woodson took me to a restaurant in the ghetto. I remember it was below street level. When we were about to enter, he noticed some awkwardness or nervousness on my part. Dr. Woodson touched my elbow, helped me downstairs, and said, “Herbert, you may eat with us; here, there is no discrimination; we are civilized.”
By the late 1930s, I began contributing to the Journal. One essay, “Maroons Within the Present Limits of the U.S.”[3] was awarded a prize by the Association—I think at Columbus, Ohio. Dr. Woodson suggested I be there to accept it. I flew to Columbus—the fare more than consumed the prize. This was a moment of great consequence to me—of immense encouragement.
Our relationship continued with me contributing to the Journal and, at times, asking for guidance—always offered.
On my return from the War—I was then an artillery captain—an attack began against me in Congress launched by such statesmen as [Governor Theodore G.] Bilbo, [Representative John Eliot] Rankin, and [Senator James] Eastland. This became serious and evoked a spirited defense of my war record by some high officer in the Army. (Later, with the Cold War quite frozen, my commission was revoked.[4])
It was at this quite trying moment that a letter reached me from Dr. Woodson. On November 9, 1945, Dr. Woodson wrote me: “I am delighted to hear that you will be with us again. We have missed you very much. Your articles and reviews enhanced the value of our magazine, and we welcome you again to our columns.” And Dr. Woodson concluded: “You are prepared to do constructive work in history. The field needs you.”
I write this half a century after that letter came to me. Few things in a fairly long life have meant so much as that letter from Dr. Carter G. Woodson.[5]
I’m privileged to know a scholar with access to the Aptheker archives and have reason to believe he’ll track down those early missives that connect the first two generations of modern African American historiography.
Seventy-five years ago today, the Communist Party’s organ, The Daily Worker, carried Aptheker’s eulogy for his teacher and friend, who has passed away three days earlier, and with it I close this post:
Remembering Carter G. Woodson
He was a tall, slim, straight man. He conveyed the impression of great strength, of solidarity and calm. A genial person, modest, never ingratiating, always to the point, with a sharp sense of humor and a quick, warm laugh.
He was a prodigious worker, a remarkable organizer and an extraordinary scholar; and he was a Negro with a consuming love for his people and pride in them and contempt for the “barbarians”—as he used to refer to the chauvinists—who oppressed the Negro.
We write of Dr. Carter Godwin Woodson, who died April 8, 1950; and so full was he of life that one’s pen rebels at applying the past tense to him.
In the deepest sense, the past tense does not apply to Dr. Woodson, for his work has the most profound import for the present, and his work will live so long as truth and courage are admired in the world.
He was born in Virginia in 1875, of parents who had been slaves. Through the efforts of these one-time slaves, and through his own very hard work—including coal-mining in West Virginia—enough was saved so that young Woodson might study. He attended Berea College in Kentucky, obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Chicago (always working evenings and summers), studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and received his doctor’s degree from Harvard in 1912.
Following several years of experience as a teacher of French, Spanish and history in the public schools of West Virginia and the District of Columbia, Dr. Woodson was appointed Dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Howard University in 1919.
He remained there only one year, however, and important in his leaving was the snooping of a Red-baiting Congressman who expressed great displeasure over the fact that Dr. Woodson’s school insisted on discussing and reading about the Bolshevik Revolution.
There followed a two-year period as Dean of the West Virginia Collegiate Institute, after which Dr. Woodson gave up his academic career to devote himself entirely to the enterprise that he had already begun and to which he devoted the remainder of his life.
Late in 1915, Dr. Woodson and five friends founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, with Dr. Woodson as the Director. In January 1916, the first number of the Journal of Negro History appeared, a quarterly that flourishes today and which Dr. Woodson edited from its first appearance until his death.
The Association and the Journal have been the backbone of the renaissance in Negro history which in turn has been so vital a part of the modern Negro liberation movement. Attempts by wealthy individuals and so-called benevolent foundations to gain control of the Association or to swerve it from its course of dedication to scientific inquiry were steadfastly resisted by Dr. Woodson.
While editing the Journal, directing the Association, conducting the efforts of the Association Publishers, founding (in 1925) and developing the nationwide celebration of Negro History Week, Dr. Woodson found time to launch, in 1937, the excellent monthly Negro History Bulletin, and to compile in four volumes, The Works of Francis J. Grimke (1942). Meanwhile, beginning in 1917 with The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861, he produced a total of seventeen major works in the field of Negro history, including The African Background, The Negro in Our History, The Rural Negro, and A Century of Negro Migration.
Toward the close of his life, Dr. Woodson became more and more sharply critical of American imperialism and, in November 1949, he denounced the Truman administration for supporting world colonialism. Referring to the struggling masses and to the efforts of the imperialists to defeat them, he declared:
While there may be more guns to kill off the patriots, they will hardly become frightened for they have learned from Thomas Jefferson that the soil of liberty must be moistened with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
When, in 1926, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People awarded the Spingarn Medal to Dr. Woodson as the outstanding Negro of the year, it stated the action was taken in recognition of Dr. Woodson’s “labors for the truth.” Let that be his epitaph; in the death of Dr. Carter G. Woodson the world has lost one of its most ardent and most fruitful “laborers for the truth.” As such, he is assured immortality. [6]
Notes
[1] “On the 110th anniversary of Herbert Aptheker’s birth,” July 31, 2025.
[2] Gary Murrell, “The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States”: A Biography of Herbert Aptheker, UMass Press, 2015, 11.
[3] Herbert Aptheker, “Maroons Within the Present Limits of the U.S.,” The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 24, No. 2, April 1939. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.2307/2714447
[4] For the part of the context of this revocation, see my letter to The Journal of American History, 87:4, March 2001, 1598-99, the text of which is available on my old site and forms Appendix B appendix of my book.
[5] Herbert Aptheker, “Personal Recollections: Woodson, Wesley, Robeson, and Du Bois,” The Black Scholar, Summer 1997, Vol. 27, No. 2, 42 https://www.jstor.org/stable/41068730
[6] Text taken from Libero Della Piana, “Remembering Carter G. Woodson,” People’s World [“Continuing The Daily Worker founded 1924″], February 1, 2002. https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/remembering-carter-g-woodson/