By: Robin D. G. Kelley
| Inspired by Herbert Aptheker’s “An Autobiographical Note,” the editors of the Journal of American History asked Robin D. G. Kelley to interview Aptheker. The interview took place in two sessions at Aptheker’s home in San José in July 1998. Transcripts of the wide-ranging conversation were reworked and reorganized to provide greater chronological and thematic coherence. Both Aptheker and Kelley suggested further improvements to the revised transcript and approved this final version. | 1 |
| Robin D. G. Kelley: What events in your life sparked your interest in African American history? | 2 |
| Herbert Aptheker: I grew up in Brooklyn. I was born in 1915, the last child, and my family was wealthy. I was dangerously ill when I was very young. Mamma employed a black woman from Trinidad, Angelina Corbin. She slept next to my room. She raised me, dressed me, bathed me, fed me, and I loved Annie like I loved Mamma. I often tried to kiss her, but she didn’t want me to kiss her. She was fundamental to my upbringing until and including early school. Mamma had a very high regard for her also, and they were friends rather than Annie being just a domestic. | 3 |
| After Papa lost most of his money, we no longer had her. She was a friend, she came to visit, and when I came back from the war she organized a lecture for me at the Primrose Club, of which she was secretary. She died soon after. Annie Corbin was decisive in my life. | 4 |
| There were no black people in our neighborhood. Papa went on a business trip to Alexander City, Alabama, in the heart of the depression, around 1932, when I was in high school, and he let me come with him. We went by car, and in those days there were no throughways. When we got to Washington I saw Jim Crow for the first time in my life, and I was appalled. I remember it vividly. Papa had to stop in Georgia because of car trouble. There was a black child about my age, and we walked toward each other. He was in tatters, very thin. A black woman who looked like Annie, maybe his mother, stood with her arms akimbo at the entrance to the hut, watching. They didn’t have a door, they had a cloth. I held out a cookie that Mother had given us, but he didn’t take it. He bent forward and took a bite out of it. | 5 |
| This whole trip had a profound impact upon me. When I returned I wrote a column for the Erasmus Hall high school newspaper, on the “Dark Side of the South.” This was the beginning of my research. I discovered that this horror was known, and I couldn’t understand that. | 6 |
| A dramatic thing happened. One day there was a crowd in our neighborhood; very unusual. A man with a megaphone and a white flag was speaking and distributing leaflets. Attached to the wagon was a cage, like in a zoo. And in the cage was a man, and he was talking about Angelo Herndon, who was organizing unemployed workers in Atlanta and was facing death.1 I brought a leaflet home to Mamma. She gave it back to me and said, in Yiddish, that she was not able to read, which astonished me. She’d raised five of us. With her agreement, I began to teach her, and she became literate. | 7 |
| Later I became a friend of Angelo’s, and we created the Negro Publication Society. Angelo Herndon, Richard B. Moore, and me. We published among other things The Kidnapped and the Ransomed by E. R. Pickard. We were pioneers.2 | . . . |
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