Herbert Aptheker

Herbert Aptheker (July 31, 1915 – March 17, 2003) was an American Marxist historian and political activist. He wrote more than 50 books, mostly in the fields of African-American history and general U.S. history, most notably, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943), a classic in the field, and the 7-volume Documentary History of the Negro People (1951–1994). He compiled a wide variety of primary documents supporting study of African-American history.

From the 1940s, Aptheker was a prominent figure in U.S. scholarly discourse. David Horowitz described Aptheker as "the Communist Party’s most prominent Cold War intellectual". Aptheker was blacklisted in academia during the 1950s because of his Communist Party membership.

Biography

Early life and education

Herbert Aptheker was born in Brooklyn, New York, the last child of a wealthy Jewish family. In 1932, when he was 16, he accompanied his father on a business trip to Alabama. There he learned first-hand about the oppression of African Americans under Jim Crow Laws in the South. On his return to Brooklyn, he wrote a column for his Erasmus Hall High School newspaper on the "Dark Side of The South."