Gary Murrell. “The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States”

Gary Murrell’s “The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States”: A Biography of Herbert Aptheker is an exhaustively researched and fair-minded biography of an unusually controversial American historian. Herbert Aptheker had a wonderfully original historical mind, and his mid-century contributions to the field of African American history spurred a reconceptualization of all American history. In 1943 he published American Negro Slave Revolts, the product of his genius for finding overlooked sources and for foregrounding African American agency in U.S. history. This he had to do against the grain of every academic fashion in the 1940s. A friend of W. E. B. Du Bois and eventually the literary executor of Du Bois’s estate, Aptheker was instrumental in promoting the study of this monumental intellectual and political figure. His multivolume Documentary History of the Negro People, compiled from 1951 to 1994, was a gift to later generations of students and historians—and it would remain so even after Aptheker’s death in 2003, at age eighty-seven.

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