Herbert Aptheker – Anthony G. Flood

For Black History Month: Noting a Recurring Fantasy and Remembering Its Promulgator and Bibliophile

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?

In the early ‘70s, as a Communist Party member working for Herbert Aptheker on his Du Bois projects, this Bronx native had reason to walk along 125^th Street in Harlem from time to time, past the Apollo Theater, and, a few feet further east, an eye-catching mural. Continue reading “For Black History Month: Noting a Recurring Fantasy and Remembering Its Promulgator and Bibliophile”

Carter G. Woodson’s encouragement of Herbert Aptheker: a “postscript” that merits a post.

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.”

On the 110th anniversary of Herbert Aptheker’s birth

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 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 Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness.

Search <Herbert Aptheker> on this site for many posts on this historically interesting figure.

Ralph Ellison: another denizen of Herbert Aptheker’s memory hole

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]

Notes

[1] Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, Random House, 1952. My essay is anthologized in Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness, self-published, 2019.

[2] Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography, Knopf, 2008, 93; from Rampersad’s interview of Aptheker, June 25, 2001.

[3] Rampersad, Ellison, 152.

[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.

[5] Rampersad, Ellison, 153.

[6] Rampersad, Ellison, 423.

[7] Anthony Flood, “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.

Herbert Aptheker’s academic ghosting didn’t end with C. L. R. James: the case of Doxey Wilkerson.

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]

Continue reading “Herbert Aptheker’s academic ghosting didn’t end with C. L. R. James: the case of Doxey Wilkerson.”

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.

(Continuing the series)

I was taken aback when I first read those words.[1] I reproduced them in my review of Gary Murrell’s biography of Herbert Aptheker: “A biographer must leave out many things, of course, but one wonders why this meeting had to be one of them.”[2]

Aptheker, didn’t take kindly to apostates from Communism, the God who had failed the famous black novelist.

According to Aptheker, however, they agreed to meet in a Manhattan hotel room (almost certainly Wright’s). In fairness to Murrell, upon reflection, I believe Murrell omitted this story because no one else could corroborate it.[3] We have only Stuckey’s citation of Crowder’s interview referenced in a paper by Stuckey that Murrell otherwise drew upon several times.

Aptheker’s choice of words, however, makes it hard to question his veracity: the verb that would occur to me, were I making the whole thing up, would be “shake,” not “kiss.” But why would Aptheker confabulate such an event? Continue reading “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.”

The “point” of what, exactly? What “matters”? The groundless ethical imperative of Marxist revolutionaries.

The autograph of the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach: “Philosophen haben bisher nur die Welt anders interpretiert; es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verändern”

Marx and Engels’s oft-cited 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, penned in 1844 but not published until 1888, is perhaps the closest thing we have to words that function as holy scripture for communists: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”[1] Changing the world is allegedly what “matters,” but it’s dogmatically assumed, never argued for. It’s as de fide, as much a matter of faith, as, for example, the Immaculate Conception is for Catholics, and just as ungrounded in Scripture.

The aim of this series is to expose Marxism as an instance of the “foolishness of the wisdom of this world” (1 Corinthians 1:20) from the Bible’s standpoint. No Marxist as such has warrant for pontificating that “the point” is to change the world. The point of what? What can be “the point” in an ultimately pointless world, as distinct from the world in which God works all things according to the counsel of His will (Ephesians 1:11)?

My focal points, as you know by now, are C. L. R. James, Richard Wright, and Herbert Aptheker, men who understandably (only because they lived in God’s world and were created in His image) raged against the indignities of racial subjugation, colonialism, and imperialism that they experienced, witnessed, or studied. (That’s an inclusive “or,” by the way.) For several decades of their lives, they believed that they found in Marxism the conceptual tools they needed for addressing those evils.

Their biographies make for stimulating reading, but how does Marxist revolution answer the moral outrage of interracial subjugation, cruelty, and savagery, especially since we know that it has only added to the history of moral outrage? How can Marxist theory articulate any ethical complaint without borrowing from the Christian worldview they thought was beneath their notice? Continue reading “The “point” of what, exactly? What “matters”? The groundless ethical imperative of Marxist revolutionaries.”

“They will kill you”: Stalinists and the implicit threat of violence. Four retrospections.

This continues the study I began here and here.

This, to me, was a spectacle of glory; and yet, because it had condemned me, because it was blind and ignorant, I felt that it was a spectacle of horror. The blindness of their [Communists’] limited lives—lives truncated and impoverished by the oppression they had suffered long before they had ever heard of Communism—made them think that I was with their enemies. American life had so corrupted their consciousness that they were unable to recognize their friends when they saw them. I knew that if they had held state power, I should have been declared guilty of treason and my execution would have followed.—Richard Wright, 1944[1]

Forty-seven years later, another Stalinist uttered those three words:

Had that leadership [of the Communist Party] held state power, past history suggests that those signers [of “An Initiative to Unite and Renew the Party”] would now be dead.—Herbert Aptheker, 1991[2]

About a year after Wright arrived in New York, an anti-Stalinist revolutionary was also New York-bound from England, but a Stalinist graciously but firmly warned him:

There was a black man who had joined the CP [Communist Party of Great Britain]. He said to me that you could do that in Britain and keep breaking up their meetings, but in America, if you carry on like that, they will kill you. As far as the police were concerned, if a Stalinist killed a Trotskyist, they would have no part of that, so just take it easy. The difference between British democracy and democracy in the United States is that there you have to be aware, not of the government, but of the Stalinists.—C. L. R. James, circa 1938.[3]

In 1978, on the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in Manhattan’s financial district, where I would listen to Gabe Monheim expound the Scriptures and soon come to Christ, an older Stalinist I had known a few years earlier—his face contorted in hatred and words dripping in bile—volubly branded me a “counterrevolutionary traitor.” I have no doubt that had “tough Tony from Da Bronx” taken the bait, he would have met the fate that James’s Stalinist acquaintance predicted.

Notes

[1] Richard Wright, “I Tried to Be a Communist,” The Atlantic Monthly, September 1944, 54; italics mine. This was the second part of a two-part series that became a chapter of The God That Failed, Richard Crossman, ed., Columbia University Press, 2001; originally, The God That Failed: A Confession, Harper & Brothers, 1949.

[2] Herbert Aptheker, December 14, 1991, cited in Gary Murrell, “The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States”: A Biography of Herbert Aptheker, UMass Press, 2015, 335; italics mine. For an account of that “initiative” and its denouement, see Jaiveer Kohli, “The Last American Communists: The Story of the Fall of the Communist Party USA,” The Journalist as Historian, May 22, 2019.

[3] Interview of C. L. R. James by Al Richardson, Clarence Chrysostom, and Anna Grimshaw in South London, June 8 and November 16, 1986; italics mine.

Three years before that interview, that is, in 1983, James received an honorary degree from Hull University. At the podium is Baron Wilberforce, a great-great-grandson of abolitionist William Wilberforce. For the background, go to https://www.africansinyorkshireproject.com/clr-james.html

Whence “revolutionary” moral outrage? An attempt at a biblical answer.

That’s the question underlying my current project. Answering it might explain why I was drawn to revolutionary Marxism (of interest at least to me, if not to you). Youngsters can be at once hypercritical and credulous. Revolutionary rejecters of the existing order, they fall for one or another “explanation” hook, line, and sinker.

Rummaging through the lives of Marxist intellectuals is no mere romantic, antiquarian interest of mine (although it is partly that). I will draw upon but not add to the biographies already written. I’m trying to understand, to the extent it is intelligible, the demonic madness we see on college campuses, draped in the language of moral outrage. (“F— finals! Free Palestine!,” announced one savage disrupting Columbia University students who were trying to use the main library to prepare for final exams, to cite only one example. I find the categories of intelligibility in Christian theology, specifically anthropology.

Created in God’s image and living in His world as (we all are), the miscreants have a sense of moral outrage (however misinformed), but they have nothing in which to ground it. On Monday, they’ll affirm that it’s wrong to starve children; on Tuesday, that an unborn child’s natural protector has the right to procure the services of an abortionist to destroy that child chemically, or cut him or her to pieces, or leave him or her to expire on a metal table. Most of them, if pressed, will say that, strictly speaking, we don’t know that we have more moral dignity than that of “evolved,” i.e., rearranged, pond scum. They merely dogmatize that we do.

I’m stepping back from the news and noise of the day to reflect on more civilized specimens of humanity, however much their careers betrayed the civilizing impulse. I want to explore why they thought Marxist revolution adequately addressed the moral outrage of interracial subjugation, cruelty, and savagery, evils that energized them? That it was such an answer is the conclusion at which my three very different intellectuals arrived. It all starts with outrage at one or another fact in one man’s experience: colonialism, imperialism, slavery, peonage, Jim Crow.

I will also ask whether these men, if they were alive today, would embrace today’s savages. I fear they would have, as counterintuitive as such a conclusion might strike some. Continue reading “Whence “revolutionary” moral outrage? An attempt at a biblical answer.”

Richard Wright: Herbert Aptheker’s Other (Almost) Invisible Man

Richard Wright (1908-1960), Lido, Venice, 1950. (Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche/Getty Images)

The subject line is the working title of a projected study of three fascinating writers and their interactions. I will undertake this as an exercise not only in historical exposition but also in Christian apologetics.

That is, as an epistemologically self-conscious Christian individualist living in the dispensation of the grace of God in anticipation of His inauguration of the Manifest Kingdom of God, I will explore the intellectual and personal trajectories of three radical intellectuals—Herbert Aptheker (1915–2003), C. L. R. James (1901–1989), and Richard Wright (1908–1960)—whose materialist epistemologies rendered their political projects not only impossible of realization, but also absurd. Christians can nevertheless learn from them, if only indirectly.

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.” The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

United by secularism and engagement with black history, they were collectivists philosophically, but individualists in how they lived their lives. But their individualism was not enough to save them. They all failed to discern the true dividing line of their times and ours: not the “color line” that W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) predicted would define the 20^th century, but rather the line in the sand drawn by the God-breathed Scriptures (Matthew 4:4).

Their rejection of the latter marks a common, tragic undercurrent. I will examine their shared but divergent paths, focusing on their anti-Christian secularism, Marxist commitments (Stalinism, Trotskyism, non-Communist revolutionary thought), and struggles with racism, ironically and tragically, they could not interpret soundly, let alone condemn, apart from the worldview they rejected. Their second-rate epigones among our contemporaries are no less intellectually bankrupt, but their frank embrace of the horrors to which their plans lead enhances the relevance of this study, which is of more than antiquarian interest.

Continue reading “Richard Wright: Herbert Aptheker’s Other (Almost) Invisible Man”