And Otis Q. Sellers was no Neo-Orthodox. Yet, as I noted in a previous article, he found 1953 The Misunderstanding of the Church by Emil Brunner (1889-1966) valuable for contextualizing his own ecclesiology. So do I.
Brunner was clear about Rome’s conceit concerning its authority: she must ever try to discredit Sola Scriptura, the Reformation principle that affirms the Bible’s final authority, an effort that has effectively meant replacing it with Sola Ecclesia, Rome’s putative “magisterium.”
The following are salient paragraphs from Chapter 4 of Brunner’s The Misunderstanding of the Church (trans. Harold Knight, The Westminster Press, 1953, 41-45). I’ve broken up paragraphs for ease of reading and copy-edited them lightly. Annotations are in square brackets.
“Oh,” today’s Catholic might protest, “we don’t believe that anymore!” Really? Then what would be left of Rome’s much vaunted theological unity, her alternative to Protestant “anarchy”?
Who believes that the Jesuits of the 16th century would not have every LGBTQ-friendly Jesuit of the 21st, along with their Vatican allies, burnt at the stake?
Who believes that Leo XIII (r. 1878 to 1903) would not have excommunicated Leo XIV?
Hoping Stephan Kinsella or Hans-Hermann Hoppe won’t sue me for copyright violation, I can think of no better way for this site to memorialize this milestone than to reproduce this cornucopia of resources from The Property and Freedom Society, whose site I could not safely open. Since maybe you can’t either, I’m grateful to internet argonaut Dave Lull for copying and pasting its table of contents into an email. (Two humble contributions of mine made the list!)
Murray was a lad of 58, I a mere babe in the libertarian woods (only 29), when I first met him. What a powerful, creatively synthesizing mind; what a generous friend! May God grant him eternal life in the Kingdom!
Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was one of the world’s greatest champions of the human liberty. In his honor, and to commemorate his 100th birthday, on March 2, 2026, the Property and Freedom Society (PFS) has assembled this collection of tributes to and commentary on him and his work by PFS members, including many who knew him personally.
This book is released in digital form today, March 2, 2026, on Murray’s 100th birthday. Print, in both paperback and deluxe hardcover, and kindle/epub/pdf versions will be made available shortly.
JoAnn Rothbard, “My View of Murray Rothbard” (March 1, 1986), delivered at the Mises Institute’s celebration in honor of Murray Rothbard’s sixtieth birthday, included in JoAnn’s obituary, “JoAnn Beatrice Schumacher Rothbard (1928-1999),” Mises Daily (Oct. 30, 1999)
Jeffrey A. Tucker, “Murray N. Rothbard at 100,” Brownstone Journal (March 2, 2026; forthcoming)
Notes
See The Free Market (June 1986), p. 2, listing papers in “Man, Economy, and Liberty: A Conference in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard.” See also: Jeffrey Tucker and Lew Rockwell, “Man, Economy, and Liberty” (17 November 2009) (Tucker interviews Rockwell about Rothbard’s festschrift, published in 1986 in honor of Rothbard’s sixtieth birthday); Rothbard, Man, Economy, and Liberty (1 March 1986) (Rothbard comments and responds to the speakers and papers presented at the “Man, Economy and Liberty” colloquium hosted by the Mises Institute; backup Youtube); Hoppe, Book Review of Walter Block and Llewellyn H.Rockwell, Jr., eds., Man, Economy, and Liberty: Essays in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard, Rev. Austrian Econ. (Vol. 4 Num. 1, 1989). See also Timothy Virkkala, “Bestschrift,” Liberty (September, 1989), p. 63.
“I prefer to remember him as the charming, brilliant, and joyous friend he had been in Liberty‘s formative years. He was the wittiest man I have ever met, the best man with whom to spend an evening in a bar that I ever knew. I miss him enormously.”
excerpted here: “Shortly before Murray [Rothbard] died, I called him to tell him of my plans to run for Congress once again in the 1996 election. He was extremely excited and very encouraging. One thing I am certain of—if Murray could have been with us during the presidential primary in 2008, he would have had a lot to say about it and fun saying it. He would have been very excited. His natural tendency to be optimistic would have been enhanced. He would have loved every minute of it. He would have pushed the “revolution,” especially since he contributed so much to preparing for it. I can just imagine how enthralled he would have been to see college kids burning Federal Reserve notes. He would have led the chant we heard at so many rallies: “End the Fed! End the Fed!”
Duke is former counsel to the Mises Institute. “Murray N. Rothbard is the most intelligent and informed man I have met in my entire life! He like Ludwig von Mises, refused to speak and write only the truth. This hurt Mises and Rothbard financially their entire lives. They were ridiculed by the mainstream economists, government, new media, academics. But they held to the truth that they knew in their minds and hearts. I knew Murray N. Rothbard personally and he was kind to everyone. He was so brilliant that most people were nervous when they met him. Murray usually told a joke or said something weird, strange, funny or whatever to make people comfortable. He did not laugh; he cackled. He was jovial. I had lunches and dinners with him and spoke with him at the Mises institute. I was the attorney for the Mises Institute in the early years. – JRD”
Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), his one-time New York rep Gabriel Monheim (1936-2015), and long-time friend (of them and me), fellow Christian Individualist Michael Walko, Los Angeles, December 21 or 22, 1973. Photo courtesy of “Jersey Mike.”—A.G.F.
Almost fifty years ago, I met Gabriel Monheim (1936-2015) on the corner of Wall and Broad Streets and soon thereafter read The Bible versus the Churches.[1] Thus, my entrée to Otis Q. Sellers, from whose biblical theology Gabe borrowed while adding his special “street” touch.
As Gabe declared in the book’s last chapter: “What we have just described [in the preceding hundred pages] is Christian individualism.”[2] Which happens to be the title of my forthcoming book.
The takeaway from Gabe’s book was that belonging to any of the various social formations we call “churches” (because we’re stuck with that word) is not only not a condition of being saved, but also not even something one needs to do to prove one’s Christian bona fides. And more often than not, it’ll put you at odds with “what the Bible teaches,” something all the churches claim to care about.
You see, I had just left the Communist Party. I was not keen on joining anything.
It took time for me to get to the bottom of Sellers’s ecclesiology and plant my flag on the ground of his interpretation of the Word of God. Over that time, unfortunately, I drifted in and out of various churches. But God’s grace put my nose back in His Word and Sellers’s mining of it.
I must start somewhere. Of Aaron, Sellers noted, it was said, “And no man taketh this honor unto himself, but he that is called (kaleō [i.e., καλούμενος, kaloumenos]) of God, as was Aaron” (Hebrews 5:4). As for the major prophets:
Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel had their positions out of God and could be designated as ekklēsia [ἐκκλησία] men in harmony with the way the Greeks used this term. The boy David was only a shepherd, but after his anointing to be king of Israel, he had a position out of God. This position is a perpetual one. Death interrupted it but did not end it. David will again be the Shepherd-king of Israel in the day when God governs the nations of the earth. See Jeremiah 30:9; Ezekiel 34:23-24; 37:24- 25; Hosea 3:5.[3]
Sellers brings this to bear on the meaning of ἐκκλησία (ekklēsia) in the New Testament:
The disciples of Christ were simply learners. They had no position out of Him. They were not ekklēsia men individually and did not form an ekklēsia collectively. However, at one point in His ministry, after a night of prayer, He called unto Him His disciples. Out of these He chose (or elected: eklexamenos [ἐκλεξάμενος]) twelve, whom also He named (ὠνόμασεν, ōnomasen) apostles (ἀποστόλους, apostolous) (Luke 6:12-13; emphasis added.—A.G.F.)
“The full significance of this action,” Sellers continues, “has long been ignored and stultified” by those who insist on reading back into Scripture not only themselves but also the clubs (“churches”) to which they belong and which lack that status.
The very fact that it followed a night of communion with the Father should denote its importance.
In this action, Jesus Christ, who was God’s apostle (Hebrews 3:1), gave of Himself, even of His substance (essential nature) to these twelve men, resulting in each one becoming an out-positioned one, or ekklēsia man.
Individually and personally, they were an ekklēsia, and collectively they became the ekklēsia to all other disciples.[4]
These twelve disciples of His became “the foundational ekklēsia, the very rock upon which the Lord declared He would build of Himself the ekklēsia.”
In Rome, one did not join the senate as one joins a club or trade union. Membership was a function of status, office, lineage, and recognition by constituted authority. It was conferred, not self-initiated.
In ancient Athens, the ekklēsia was the assembly of citizens who were called to deliberate. One did not “join” it. If you were a male citizen of age, you were part of it. Your status preceded participation.
The verb καλέω (kaleō) in this context was not a polite invitation. Not a “You’re cordially invited to attend,” but rather a “You are summoned to exercise your political responsibility as a citizen.” It meant to be summoned under authority, convened for deliberation, or having one’s presence required.
It carried legal and civic force. Social ontology asserted itself: it was the enactment of the Athenian polis itself. When it met, Athens was acting.
Thus, ekklēsiai (the plural of ekklēsia) may mean “those called out,” but “out” does not necessarily mean out from; it could mean out of.
Christ’s “commissioned ones,” his apostles, had positions out of Him, the just as, if you will, your arm is “out” of your body, not out of the world. And so He said “I will build of me (μου, mou; genitive) My ekklēsia” (Matthew 16:18).
The first Christians, who understood themselves to be positioned out of Christ, didn’t “join a church.” The language of voluntary association reflects post-Enlightenment social forms, not apostolic ecclesiology. An ekklēsia was not a collegium or voluntary association.
In ancient Rome, there were thousands of collegia[5] (the Latin plural of collegium), groups of worshippers, religious processions, or cults (often associated with Dionysus). Besides θίασοι, there were ἔρανοι (eranoi, the plural of ἔρανος, eranos), voluntary clubs or “picnic groups” that might provide mutual aid, banquets, or financial assistance to their members.
Does this sound familiar? Thiasoi and eranoi resembled the “clubs” we call churches.
Among collegia were trade guilds (bakers, carpenters, shipbuilders, and so forth), burial societies, ethnic associations, cults devoted to deities like Isis or Mithras. With membership came initiation rites and dues, and vestments that indicated rank. You joined it by applying (or being sponsored), paying dues, and participating in rituals. Membership was voluntary and contractual. And, according to the logic of clubs, you could leave, or be expelled.
To Roman authorities, Christian meetings smelled like illicit associations of dangerous folk who met regularly, shared meals, and imposed discipline on their members. Ironically, those authorities sometimes persecuted Christians just because they didn’t behave like members of a normal collegium.
A trade guild could be regulated; a mystery cult, licensed. But a community claiming exclusive allegiance to a crucified and risen Lord and refusing to regard its gathering as just another voluntary association? Well, that risked destabilizing the imperial order from which all secular blessings flow!
The Roman Senate in session.
Again, one did not “join” the ἐκκλησία any more than one joined the Roman Senate. One was “constituted” into it, whether by civic status (in Rome’s case) or, in the case of Christ’s first disciples (learners), by divine calling (positioning).
Christian identity is ontological, not contractual. It’s about what you are, not how you “identify.” Regardless of century or dispensation, it’s grounded in your being a new person in Christ.
Individuals can decide to form or join a collegium, and that’s what individuals, even Christian individuals, have done since Acts 28:28. These social formations neither effect nor affect (neither bring about nor impact) their salvation.
Christ commissioned ones, His Apostles, identified individuals with Christ, making them ἐκκλησίαι, and they evangelized others. Apostles and evangelists were mediated between God and men, something only Christ does in this dispensation (1 Timothy 2:5). Now we can only “do the work of evangelists” (2 Timothy 4:5). This ontological status had nothing to do with meeting regularly and paying dues.
If New Testament ἐκκλησίαι were not analogous to Roman collegia, then today’s “church” practices are built on extra-biblical assumptions.
Like Roman collegia, churches have membership classes, covenants, voting rights, transfer letters, and ways to opt out.
Churches compete for their members who transfer freely in or out of this one or that. Preference governs the belonging and the transfers.
If the church is primarily a voluntary association, then belonging to this one, that one, or none at all, is a matter of consumer choice.
The forum at Corinth. remains of shops, the western side.
In the first century, however, there was no religious “marketplace”: the ἐκκλησίαι in Corinth constituted what we refer to (at least in English) as “the church” in Corinth.
If, however, the church is ἐκκλησία, then belonging was (and one day will again) be grounded in God’s action.
Today, He’s dealing with us strictly as individuals, regardless into what clubs we sort ourselves.
In support of the (in his view) non-identity of ἐκκλησία and “church,” Sellers favorably cited Emil Brunner’s The Misunderstanding of the Church (The Westminster Press, 1953), whose author tantalizingly posed these questions:
Is it a question of a misunderstanding of which the Church is guilty or of a misunderstanding of which it is the victim? Or is that the Church itself, as such, is perhaps the product of a misunderstanding? The author is not responsible for this ambiguity; it is intrinsic, rather, to the theme itself. (Brunner, Misunderstanding, 1951 Preface)
Or perhaps, partly perpetrator, partly victim, partly product? My Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, to be published mid-year (God willing) by Atmosphere Press, is in the interior design phase.
Notes
[1] Gabriel Monheim, The Bible versus the Churches, self-published, 1977. I tell the story of this meeting in my forthcoming Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, but you can read an ancestor of its preface on my site: “Discovering Otis Q. Sellers: an autobiographical vignette,” July 9, 2019.
[2] Chapter 22, “The Conclusion of the Whole Matter,” 103.
[3] Otis Q. Sellers, “Ekklēsia Men,” Seed & Bread, No. 115, n.d., ca. late 1970s. Emphasis added. Further quotations from Sellers in this article are from this study.
[4] Sellers held “they could not be an ekklēsia collectively unless each one was ekklēsia personally.” That is, the individual didn’t become out-positioned by joining a collective that jointly bore the characteristic of being out-positioned. “The United States Senate (a legislative ekklēsia) is an example of this. It must be made up of a hundred men who individually are senators, men whose positions are out of their states. You cannot become a senator by joining the Senate, and you cannot form the Senate by organizing a hundred ordinary men.”
[5] The Greek equivalent: θίασοι (thiasoi), the plural of θίασος (thiasos).
I always tell people the day the Latino, African American, Asian, and other communities realize that they share the same oppressor is the day we start winning. We have the ability to take over this country and to do what is needed for everyone and to make things fair. But the problem is our communities are divided.
So opined Gene Wu. In a 2024 podcast interview that has recently resurfaced, this Democratic state representative from Houston, but born in Communist China in 1978, broadcast this anti-white racialist appeal (while predicting the end of life as we know it were all illegal immigrants in the U.S. repatriated).
Candidate for Texas Attorney General Aaron Reitz thinks that’s enough not only to disqualify Wu for the office he holds, but also to put the truthfulness of his naturalization process in doubt and thereby schedule him for denaturalization and deportation:
He likely concealed his anti-American sentiment throughout his citizenship application process—the details of which are conspicuously absent from the public record. Wu is a subversive whose citizenship should be revoked.
But where and when did I first catch wind of this rhetoric?
That is the title of James Parkes’s patient historical narrative. The subtitle is A History of the Peoples of Palestine. “Palestine,” we have collectively forgotten, names a remnant of the Roman Empire, a remnant that has been occupied by many peoples. He wrote it in the late ’40s, long before “the Palestinian people” was popularized by Yassir Arafat in the ’60s to refer exclusively to its Arab inhabitants, a ruse the world fell for and seems stuck with.
Whose Land? came from the pen of a theological liberal. By “liberal” I mean (in part) that he did not believe that the creation of the modern secular state of Israel in 1948 (hereafter simply “Israel” unless the context indicates the biblical House of Israel) fulfilled Old Testament prophecy of the ingathering to The Land of the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—simply because he did not think that any event can do such a thing.
Unlike today’s “liberals,” however, he conditionally supported the Zionist response to European antisemitism, the ghoulish rise of which he witnessed in the ’20s and ’30s and which he made the focus of his professional life. In Whose Land?, Parkes affirms the historical and moral right of Jews to national restoration in their ancestral land, but insists that—I’m paraphrasing Parkes—justice and respect for the Arabs with whom the Jews had to deal must (ethically must) inform the Jew in his exercise of his right to, say, purchase a plot of land from a Palestinian Arab. He defends Israel’s legitimacy while warning that Jewish nationalism must never mirror the exclusivism or oppression that Jews themselves had suffered. He bases his non-Scriptural case on commonly shared assumptions—which, in my view, make no sense unless grounded in Scripture. I encourage you to find a copy of Whose Land? and take Parkes’s eloquent, empathetic, and learned historical tour.
I agree with Parkes that Israel fulfills no prophecy, but that’s because I follow the Scriptural exegesis of Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992). Sellers rarely commented on current events, so what his view on Israel was is a matter of speculation. (I invite his descendants to settle the matter, if they can.) He was neither pro-Zionist or anti-Zionist as we use those terms. Where Sellers and I differ from Parkes is that we accept the Bible’s self-attestation that its words are God-breathed, a proposition no self-respecting theological liberal takes seriously. (My Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers will, God-willing, be published in 2026.)
Sellers held that Israel must be judged by the same standards to which one would hold any other nation. In the present Dispensation of Grace, resurrected descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob have not yet been ingathered to The Land, nor have Christ’s Apostles been resurrected to sit on twelve thrones judging the Israel’s twelve tribes (Matthew 19:28); Israel is not yet mediating between God’s throne and the nations in the eon of the manifest Kingdom of God. Israel is but one of the nations, on equal footing with them. The status of “most favored nation” is reserved for the time when God will govern all nations.
That is, because the Gospel is freely authorized to all nations (Acts 28:28), they are “joint bodies” (σύνσωμα, sussōma: plural; Ephesians 3:6). As we are living in the pre-Kingdom Dispensation of Grace (and the “Silence of God”), however, we who follow the course of history’s “secular surface” still need to know what trend to promote or impede. We’re left to our theoretical devices guided by biblical precepts, one of which, I’d argue, is the just acquisition of property. Continue reading “Whose Land?”
The history of the Industrial Revolution—how feudalism’s serfs became capitalism’s propertyless proletarians—does not make for pleasant reading. It was not, however, the unrelieved tragedy of Marxist propaganda. On the contrary. This Labor Day, I reproduce the 21st chapter of my Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic(2022), which, with the help of Nobel Laureate Friedrich von Hayek, highlights that story’s pro-life dimension. (“Mr. Ferrara” refers to Christopher Ferrara, the Catholic Distributist author of my book’s foil, The Church and the Libertarian.)
That chapter’s title came to me out of the blue when I wrote its ancestor post for my now-defunct blog, anarcho-capitalist.com, perhaps in 2011. Remembering as a kid enjoying Trini Lopez’s hit in 1963, I thought it an ironically fitting title: serfs did lose the economic utility of their hammers and other tools, and were left with only their labor to sell using machines they no more owned than they owned the commodities that issued from them. But, I argue, they gained so much more.
“I still call myself a communist,” Pete Seeger (1919-2014) proclaimed as late as 1995.
The opportunities now open to them, not the least of which was seeing more of their children grow up to give them grandkids, mean nothing to Communists, excuse me, Progressives who sang “If I Had a Hammer” around the campfire, at rallies, and on the concert stage. Like “Imagine,” John Lennon’s ode to godless communism, “If I Had a Hammer” was an innocent-sounding, mesmerizing, aspirational hymn to their collectivist designs, starting with its Red composer, Pete Seeger in 1949, and continuing with Peter, Paul and Mary in 1962. With Lopez, the ballad reached No. 3—and my ears. For the rest of the tune’s discography, see the Wikipedia entry.
If I Had a Hammer: Hayek on Tool Ownership
Now, about the “propertyless paupers” of Mr. Ferrara’s solicitude, Hayek wrote in his own contribution to the previously cited volume:
Discussions of the effects of the rise of modern industry on the working classes refer almost always to the conditions in England in the first half of the nineteenth century; yet the great change to which they refer had commenced much earlier and by then had quite a long history and had spread far beyond England. The freedom of economic activity which in England had provide so favorable to the rapid growth of wealth was probably in the first instance an almost accidental by-product of the limitations which the revolution of the seventeenth century had placed on the powers of government; and only after its beneficial effects had come to be widely noticed did the economists later undertake to explain the connection and to argue for the removal of the remaining barriers to commercial freedom.[1]
Self-interested lords may have intended only to assert their own interests against the monarch, but they unleashed a wave of “beneficial effects” that many beyond them enjoyed. The prescient among them, including some economists, thought it would be good to “roll out” the idea of limited government even further. But Mr. Ferrara’s emphasis on tool-ownership—“the few . . . in possession of the means of production”—is a Distributist “tell” that merits a comment.
Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950) reviewing ASNLH Bulletins.
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.
US Army Captain Herbert Aptheker, Brooklyn, 1946
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.” Continue reading “Carter G. Woodson’s encouragement of Herbert Aptheker: a “postscript” that merits a post.”
Herbert Aptheker, 57, W. E. B. Du Bois’s literary executor, signing over Du Bois papers to the University of Massachusetts, May 27, 1973. To Aptheker’s right is Du Bois’s widow, Shirley Graham Du Bois.
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 Mainstreamfrom 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.
My 2013 essay on Herbert Aptheker’s ghosting of C. L. R. James which casts him as the former’s “invisible man” alludes, of course, to the title of Ralph Ellison’s great novel.[1] Today, as I was flipping through Arnold Rampersad’s life of Ellison, Aptheker’s name cropped up, although Ellison’s, like James’s or Richard Wright’s, never did in any of our many chats in his office. Culturally prominent African Americans whom Aptheker knew, once they were “on the outs” with his party, were to him personae non gratae, regardless of their achievements.
U.S. Army Major Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003) in 1946, his last year of active duty, seventh as member of the Communist Party USA. Earl Conrad, “A Historian Comes Home,” Chicago Defender, March 16, 1946, page 14.
Such were the choices [Rampersad writes] facing Ralph as he found himself fallen among radicals in New York [in the mid-1930s]. He probably became, at least for a while, a dues-paying [Communist] party member. Herbert Aptheker, a scholar and Communist who knew Ralph from these years and believed that he was a fellow member, recalled that “it was really easy to join the Party. You simply signed up. Ralph would not have had to submit to tests or special study or anything like that. He would have been welcomed right away.”[2]
[Ellison] received a note . . . asking him to contribute an essay to a new journal of African-American affairs, to be sponsored by the recently formed Negro Publication Society. The society, tightly linked to the radical left, included the young Communist historian Herbert Aptheker, the black intellectuals Arthur Huff Fauset and Alain Locke, the dramatist Marc Blitzstein, the novelist Theodore Dreiser, the artists Rockwell Kent, and Henrietta Buckmaster . . . . The most celebrated person involved was the proposed editor of the journal, Angelo Herndon . . . .
Now, in 1941, as secretary of the Negro Publication Society, he [Ellison] was the editor of The Negro Quarterly: A Review of Negro Life and History. . . . Ralph would insist later that Herndon published the magazine in defiance of the Party, which presumably saw it as a diversion from its goal of uniting blacks and whites in the war effort. [3]
In March 1942, then Herndon launched the journal . . . he invited Ralph. . . . He liked the look of the first number. Dominated by a long, heavily footnoted article on slavery[4] by Aptheker, it projected an image of seriousness, if not severity. Either at this party or shortly afterward, Ralph agreed to join the staff as managing editor at a salary of $35 a week.[5]
[Ellison] declined to attend a conference called by the leftist Harlem Writers Guild at the New School for Social Research. Partly as a result, he became its prize scapegoat, attacked by writers such as [John Oliver] Killens, John Henrik Clarke, and Herbert Aptheker.[6] 423
In other words, Aptheker gave Ellison the same treatment he gave ex-comrade Wright and for the same reason: there’s no lower form of life than a renegade from the cause of revolution.[7]
[4] To the inaugural issue of The Negro Quarterly: A Review of Negro Life and History, Spring 1942, Aptheker contributed “The Negro in the Abolitionist Movement.” That is, it was about African American resistance to slavery. That year, International Publishers published that essay as a booklet; Aptheker anthologized it in his Essays in the History of the American Negro, International Publishers, 1945, 1964. Note that Doxey Wilkerson‘s “Negro Education and the War” is the first article in the first issue.
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]
In support of the (in his view) non-identity of ἐκκλησία and “church,” Sellers favorably cited Emil Brunner’s The Misunderstanding of the Church (The Westminster Press, 1953), whose author tantalizingly posed these questions:
[1]
So opined Gene Wu. In a 
That is the title of James Parkes’s patient historical narrative. The subtitle is A History of the Peoples of Palestine. “Palestine,” we have collectively forgotten, names a remnant of the Roman Empire, a remnant that has been occupied by many peoples. He wrote it in the late ’40s, long before “the Palestinian people” was popularized by Yassir Arafat in the ’60s to refer exclusively to its Arab inhabitants, a ruse the world fell for and seems stuck with.
The history of the Industrial Revolution—how feudalism’s serfs became capitalism’s propertyless proletarians—does not make for pleasant reading. It was not, however, the unrelieved tragedy of Marxist propaganda. On the contrary. This Labor Day, I reproduce the 21st chapter of my 
The Wikipedia entry on Herbert Aptheker is worth consulting, but only as a preliminary to reading Gary Murrell’s 
My 2013 
contributed “The Negro in the Abolitionist Movement.” That is, it was about African American resistance to slavery. That year, International Publishers published that essay as a booklet; Aptheker anthologized it in his Essays in the History of the American Negro, International Publishers, 1945, 1964. Note that 
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.
. . . 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.