#herbert aptheker

[comradeowl]

Herbert Aptheker is one of the under the radar writers. Marxists historically speaking, are either smeared or ignored. The ones you hear in mainstream are ‘safe’ and are no threat to the power structures that dominate American political and economic life. Hoover once called Aptheker the “most dangerous Communist in America.” Which is the highest compliment.

At one point, he was denied a job and it was due to a movement that he obtained one. Fearless, Aptheker was a top notch writer, focusing on slave revolts and the history of African Americans. He wrote a staggering 7 book documentary of the African American from the first days of slavery up to his times. He was also the literary executor of Web du Bois and both were members of CPUSA.

He even gave multiple talks. YouTube has a few of them up. If you want a smaller introduction to him, try his “The Nature of Democracy, Freedom and Revolution.” It’s a short book that analyzes bourgeois democracies and liberalism, a passionate arguement for why revolution is NEEDED. His works are a good intro to Marxist thought and socialism in American history.

Try bookfinder.com, bookshop.org, ThriftBooks and AbeBooks are great sites.

[dr-archeville]

On March 9, 1966, Herbert Aptheker attempted to speak to students near the Confederate monument at UNC-Chapel Hill.   The campus police chief escorted him a short distance away to a spot technically off-campus.  There, Aptheker, a historian and member of the Communist Party, spoke to 2,000 students from the sidewalk outside the rock wall that separates the campus from Franklin Street.

[pictured: Aptheker on campus before his speech.  Image from the North Carolina Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill.]

The speech came almost three years after the state legislature passed on June 26, 1963, “An Act to Regulate Visiting Speakers at State Supported Colleges and Universities,” otherwise known as the Speaker Ban law.  The action came just weeks after students joined others in Raleigh to advocate civil rights.  The Speaker Ban forbade from speaking at a state school any known Communist, anyone who advocated overthrow of the government, or anyone who exercised Fifth Amendment rights when questioned on related topics.  Passage of the law came with very little debate on the last day of the legislative term.

Administrators, faculty and students loudly protested the infringement of First Amendment rights but it was not until 1968 that the law was declared unconstitutional.

In October 2011 a marker commemorating the actions of students to challenge the Speaker Ban law was dedicated on the spot where Aptheker’s speech took place.

For more, check out “William Friday and the North Carolina Speaker Ban Crisis, 1963-1968,” in the North Carolina Historical Review from N.C. Historical Publications.

This Day in NC History: Free Speech Challenged at UNC Campus

[recreationaldivorce]

Eras have their appropriate symbols: Nat Turner hung by terrified Virginia slaveowners; John Brown and his Black and white comrades executed by Bourbons deep in their counterrevolutionary plotting; Dr. Du Bois vilified, hounded, mugged and fingerprinted by a McCarthyite ruling class; Henry Winston jailed and blinded by craven sadists. But Turner and the Martyrs of Harpers Ferry and the incomparable Du Bois are immortal; and as Winston truly said in his unforgettable phrase, though his sight was taken from him, his vision endures. As for the executioners and jailers who, even now, remembers their names?

Herbert Aptheker, America's Most Wanted Criminal, printed in If They Come in the Morning

[bring-it-all-down]

Great things are not come by lightly and are not achieved without cost. But revolutionary movements represent profound human and social needs and form; indeed, needs and forces that are irresistible. Fundamental to these needs and forces are the intolerable conditions emanating from the status quo, producing that mass awakening and activity without which revolution could not even begin, let alone succeed. Viewed historically and analytically, viewed realistically, and viewed in terms of the supreme end of existence-the ennoblement of human life-the record shows, I think, that the revolutionary process does not come at too high a cost, but rather as a breath of fresh air and as a force moving forward decisively the whole human race.

Herbert Aptheker, “On the nature of revolution: The Marxist theory of Social Change,” pg. 24.

[veryslowreader]

Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion by Herbert Aptheker

Mad Men: "Commissions and Fees"

[jellobiafrasays]

mission to hanoi (1966)

[thebookwrightsbooks]

Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion: Including the 1831 "Confessions" by Herbert Aptheker "In the summer of 1831, a band of some forty slaves led by Nat Turner attacked slave-owning residents of Southampton County, Virginia. One of the largest and most violent revolts in the history of the young nation, the rebellion took the lives of some sixty white men, women, and children. An outcry against the South's exploitative slave system, the revolt was suppressed within forty-eight hours, and Turner, who eluded authorities for months, was eventually captured, sentenced to death, and executed. The impact of Turner's uprising was monumental. Abolitionists looked for ways to encourage and support future insurrections while white Southerners took revenge on both slave and free African-Americans. Nearly 200 blacks, many of whom had nothing to do with the rebellion, were beaten, tortured, and murdered by white mobs. Herbert Aptheker's account of the bloodiest slave uprising in U.S. history was the first full-length study of its kind. Meticulously researched, it explores the nature of Southern society in the early nineteenth century and the conditions that led to the rebellion. Described by the Journal of American History as "a thorough and scholarly treatment," the text includes Turner's "Confessions," recorded before his execution in 1831."

[radicalarchive]

‘To Be Free - Pioneering Studies in Afro-American History: Slave Guerrilla Warfare, Militant Abolitionism, Black Soldiers & Sailors in the Civil War, Freedom Organizations, Reconstruction in Mississippi’, Herbert Aptheker, New World Paperbacks, Communist Party, United States, 1969.