Afterword

Robin D. G. Kelley

I think I was about twenty-one years old when I discovered that Herbert Aptheker was not black. By then I had known his name for well over half my life. Like many Harlem families rooted in the local intellectual traditions, we owned a tattered paperback copy of Aptheker's American Negro Slave Revolts and quite possibly one of his collections of essays on black history.1 I did not read American Negro Slave Revolts until high school and had left Harlem for an entirely different black community in southern California, but I had seen that book and his name so many times it found a permanent place in my memory. No one could have convinced me that he was not a black man—who else would write such a book? My assumption was confirmed in the tenth grade when I actually read American Negro Slave Revolts for a term paper I wrote about slavery. The book was certainly careful and scholarly (something tenth graders do not particularly care for), but it was also passionate and forceful. Aptheker took it for granted that enslaved Africans never wanted to be slaves, that they fought back at all costs, that the idea of innate docility was an invention of the master class, and that their battles for freedom actually made a difference. They shaped the limits and contours of the slave system and ultimately were decisive in the complete destruction of slavery in the United States.	1
That Aptheker turned out to be a bespectacled, intense, militantly antiracist white guy was not entirely surprising once I learned more about him. Having spent my formative years in Harlem, I had enough sense to know that a Jewish Communist was not your typical white person. What did surprise me, however, was discovering how the history profession had marginalized his work. Back in the early to mid-1980s when I first started graduate school, Aptheker was not being taught at the graduate level, and most of the faculty I encountered—at the University of California, Los Angeles, and elsewhere—were indifferent if not downright hostile to his work. I was discouraged from adding Aptheker's work to my exam lists for United States history, particularly his efforts at synthesizing United States history in volumes such as The Colonial Era and The American Revolution.2 The mainstream profession's attitude toward Aptheker's work really hit home during the written portion of my Ph.D. qualifying examination. The last question on the exam asked us to write a substantive critical essay on a major historian. I planned to write about Aptheker since I had read so much of his work, but before I started typing I asked one of the faculty proctors if Aptheker falls under the category of "major." "Absolutely not," was the answer, delivered so abruptly I felt embarrassed for even asking the question. I then asked about W. E. B. Du Bois and received a slightly less hostile, though equally negative, response. "He is more of a sociologist than an historian," I was told. So for the final ten pages or so I turned my attention to the late Ulrich B. Phillips. Needless to say, I passed.	2
Things have changed a lot since then. In 1986 the historian Gary Okihiro edited the first collection of essays in honor of Aptheker titled In Resistance: Studies in African, Caribbean, and Afro-American History, and only a few months after I had conducted the preceding interview, Herbert Shapiro edited a beautiful tribute to Aptheker titled African American History and Radical Historiography. With contributions from scholars and activists such as Lloyd Brown, Catherine Clinton, Eric Foner, Gerald Horne, Jesse Lemisch, Staughton Lynd, Manning Marable, Gary Okihiro, Mark Solomon, Sterling Stuckey, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, and others, the book gives Aptheker the kind of recognition long overdue. They assess Aptheker's contributions in the broadest possible terms, examining his work as a historian of the United States, with special emphasis on African Americans, his political activism and efforts to shape public policy, his critical role as a teacher and lecturer, and his enduring struggle against forms of repression and marginalization in the academy.3	. . .