Univ. North Carolina Bans Communist Scholar Herbert Aptheker From Speaking
The University of North Carolina on this day officially banned Herbert Aptheker, a noted Marxist scholar and member of the Communist Party, from speaking on campus.
Aptheker’s most significant work was American Negro Slave Revolts, published in 1943. It was a path-breaking work on slave revolts, a subject that had been ignored by mainstream historians, and African-American history.
Ohio State University had banned Aptheker from speaking on campus a year earlier, on April 21, 1965.
Read Aptheker’s groundbreaking work: Herbert Aptheker: American Negro Slave Revolts (1943)
Read his daughter’s memoirs: Bettina Aptheker, Intimate Politics (2006)
Learn more about the North Carolina speaker ban: William J. Billingsley, Communists on Campus: Race, Politics, and the Public University in Sixties North Carolina (1999)
See Herbert Aptheker speaking at UCLA in 1970: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeHjmapYBsM
The “Sixties” really began in the mid-1950s and ended in the early 1970s. Read: Christopher B. Strain, The Long Sixties: America, 1955-1973 (2016)