The Journal of American History
June 2000 (Vol. 87, No. 1)
Interview of Herbert Aptheker (Interview)
By Robin D. G. Kelley <kelley at is2.nyu.edu>
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 Jose, 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 improve- ments to the revised transcript and approved this final version:
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/87.1/interview.html
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The Journal of American History
June 2000 (Vol. 87, No. 1)
Interview of Herbert Aptheker (Afterword)
By Robin D. G. Kelley <kelley at is2.nyu.edu>
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. 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.
That Aptheker turned out to be a bespectacled, intense, militantly anti-racist 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:
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/87.1/afterword.html
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