Herbert Aptheker

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Herbert Aptheker (born July 31, 1915 in Brooklyn , New York , NY , USA ; † March 17, 2003 in Mountain View , California ) was an internationally known American historian and Marxist political activist. He wrote over 50 books, mostly on African American history and US history in general. These include his dissertation, American Negro Slave Revolts , which has become a classic, and the three-volume Documentary History of the Negro People . He has been a prominent figure in the academic world since the 1930s.

Life

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Born in Brooklyn, the youngest child of a wealthy family, he graduated from Columbia University . In 1932, at the age of 16, he accompanied his father on a business trip to Alabama . There he was appalled by the reality of the Jim Crow laws in the south. Upon his return to Brooklyn, he wrote an article for his school newspaper about the Dark Side of The South .

Six years later, after graduating from Columbia University, he went back south to work as an educational worker for the Food and Tobacco Workers Union. Shortly thereafter, he served as the secretary of the Abolish Peonage Committee. Peons or “ sharecroppers, ” the vast majority of whom were African American, were tied to the plantations through debts with the plantation owners. Aside from the legal form and name, this was practically the perpetuation of slavery in the post- Civil War era .

In 1939, Aptheker's academic and political concerns and his interest in African American history and the fight against racism led him to join the Communist Party of the United States, which of all parties was then most vocal in favor of full economic, social and political equality for African Americans entered. Aptheker was in the army during World War II . He took part in Operation Overlord and had reached the rank of major in the artillery by 1945 .

Aptheker's master thesis was a study of Nat Turner's revolt in Virginia (1831) and laid the groundwork for future studies on slave revolts . Aptheker exposed Nat Turner's heroism and showed how this revolt was rooted in the conditions of exploitation of the system of slavery. His dissertation, American Negro Slave Revolts , was first published in 1943. Through his work in the archives and libraries of the South, Aptheker discovered over 250 similar events. The work remains a landmark in the history of the south and slavery.

He criticized racist writings, especially that of Georgia- born historian UB Phillips, who portrayed African-Americans as childish, inferior, and uncivilized, glorified slavery as a charitable institution, and defended the preservation of the southern plantation system. Such works represented the consensus in this area before Aptheker's work destroyed it.

Aptheker highlighted WEB Du Bois ' contributions to social science and his struggle for African Americans and saw himself as a protégé of Du Bois.

In the 1950s, Aptheker was a victim of McCarthyism and couldn't find a job at a university for a decade. During the 1960s and 1970s, he served as Executive Director of the American Institute For Marxist Studies for several years.

He was a staunch critic of the Vietnam War and gave many lectures on the campus of many colleges . Aptheker saw the US engagement in Vietnam as a war of aggression against an exploited peasantry determined to gain independence and control of their land. He saw many parallels between the slaves in the southern states, the later sharecroppers and the Vietnamese working class and peasantry, from which the guerrilla fighters of the National Liberation Front (internationally known as the " Viet Cong ") were mainly recruited.

Aptheker was a member of the National Committee of the Communist Party of the USA from 1957 to 1991 . Aptheker and the CP-USA argued that his decision to leave the party was more outward consideration than a rejection of the party line.

Aptheker died in 2003 at the age of 87. His daughter Bettina Aptheker is a professor for “Women's Studies” at the University of California, Santa Cruz .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Herbert Aptheker, 87, Dies; Prolific Marxist Historian obituary in the New York Times , accessed March 17, 2020
personal data
SURNAME Aptheker, Herbert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American Marxist historian and political activist
DATE OF BIRTH July 31, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn , New York City
DATE OF DEATH March 17, 2003
Place of death Mountain View , California