Herbert Aptheker Research Articles

BLACK ABOLITIONISTS IN BRITAIN AND CANADA

C. Peter Ripley, et al., eds. The Black Abolitionist Papers. Vol. I. The British Isles, 1830-1865. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. xxx + 609 pp. Illus. C. Peter Ripley, et al., eds. The Black Abolitionist Papers. Vol. II. Canada, 1830-1865. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. xxviii + 560 pp. Maps and Illus. More than a century after the freeing of the last American slave, anti-slavery retains almost as much attraction for historians as it once held for abolitionists. Among the numerous and frequently innovative antislavery studies that have appeared in the past fifteen years, black abolitionism has emerged as an important topic. Building on the foundation laid by pioneers like Carter G. Woodson in The Mind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters Written during the Crisis 1800-1860 (1926) or Herbert Aptheker's The Negro In the Abolitionist Movement (1941), later scholars — Benjamin Quarles, William and Jane Pease, William Edward Farrison, and John H. Bracey, August Meier and Elliot Rudwick to name only a few — began to reveal the broader dimensions of the black abolitionist contribu- tion to anti-slavery. Black abolition scholarship took a large step forward at John Blassingame's inception of the Frederick Douglass Papers and now approaches maturity with The Black Abolitionist Papers project. Under the judicious guid- ance of Florida State University historian C. Peter Ripley, this ambitious under- taking began in 1976 with a four-year search for sources that spanned the British Isles, Canada and the United States. The quest reaped a bountiful harvest of some 14,000 letters, speeches, essays, pamphlets and editorials, from 200 libraries and 110 newspapers, constituting the documentary record of more than 300 black men and women in their struggle to destroy slavery. The seventeen-reel microfilm edition gave historians ready access for the first time to a vast body of previously scattered materials that will doubtlessly remain the definitive primary record of black abolitionism. Happily, the editor determined to publish five volumes of representative materials and the first two are now available.

No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities

Journal Article No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universites. By Ellen W. Schrecker. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. ix + 437 pp. $20.95.) Get access Herbert Aptheker Herbert Aptheker San Jose, California Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 74, Issue 3, December 1987, Pages 1093–1095, https://doi.org/10.2307/1902232 Published: 01 December 1987

Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887-1961

Journal Article Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887–1961. By W. E. B. Du Bois. Ed. by Herbert Aptheker. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985. xxi + 325 pp. $25.00.) Get access Joshua A. Leslie Joshua A. Leslie Northwestern University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 74, Issue 1, June 1987, Pages 191–192, https://doi.org/10.2307/1908573 Published: 01 June 1987

Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963

Journal Article Black and Red: W. E. B. DuBois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963. By Gerald Home. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986. xii + 457 pp. Cloth, $44.50; paper, $16.95.) Get access Herbert Aptheker Herbert Aptheker San José, California Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 73, Issue 2, September 1986, Pages 520–521, https://doi.org/10.2307/1908328 Published: 01 September 1986

Herbert Aptheker, ed., Contributions by W. E. B. DuBois in Government Publications and Proceedings

Herbert Aptheker, ed., <i>Contributions by W. E. B. DuBois in Government Publications and Proceedings</i>

The Seventy-First Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians

T HE seventy-first annual convention of the Organization of American Historians met in New York's Statler Hilton Hotel April 12-15. opening session explored the origins and prospects of the city's intractable fiscal crisis, and numerous panels examined methods of reviving public interest in the work of a profession clearly faced with a financial crisis of its own. Despite unemployment, declining travel budgets, and the high cost of airplane tickets and hotel rooms, 2,480 persons-including 116 high school students-comprised the third largest registered attendance the association has compiled. A record ninety-three sessions, six luncheons, a breakfast, a contentious business meeting, and a presidential address competed with rare but popular job interviews, old friends, child care, glorious weather, and the culinary and cultural fleshpots of Gotham for their attention. business meeting, preoccupied with a painstaking analysis of the problems of evidence and inference involved in the investigation of Yale University's alleged abridgement of Herbert Aptheker's academic freedom, and President Kenneth Stampp's The Concept of a Perpetual Union both drew large and faithful audiences, but no one thought to count them. Apart from these occasions, the average registrant attended approximately 2.5 sessions.' Nearly a thousand remained to create crowded conditions in three of the sixteen Saturday morning sessions. On fifteen occasions, audiences ranging from 30 to more than 500 fought for space in overcrowded rooms and adjacent halls. Speakers at these and other sessions endeavored to make themselves heard against inadvertently competing speakers in thinly-walled adjoining rooms and (on at least one occasion) the subway. Presiding officers who reported

Communications

Previous articleNext article No AccessCommunicationsPaul M. Wright, Earl Smith, Herbert Aptheker, and Elliott RudwickPaul M. Wright Search for more articles by this author , Earl Smith Search for more articles by this author , Herbert Aptheker Search for more articles by this author , and Elliott Rudwick Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 62, Number 2April 1977 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/JNHv62n2p195 Journal History This article was published in The Journal of Negro History (1916-2001), which is continued by The Journal of African American History (2002-present). Copyright 1977 The Association for the Study of African American Life and HistoryPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Herbert Aptheker, ed., The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois. Volume I, Selections, 1877-1934Herbert Aptheker, ed., The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois. Volume II, Selections, 1934-1944

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsHerbert Aptheker, ed., The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois. Volume I, Selections, 1877-1934 Herbert Aptheker, ed., The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois. Volume II, Selections, 1934-1944Elliot RudwickElliot Rudwick Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 61, Number 4October 1976 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2717006 Views: 1Total views on this site Journal History This article was published in The Journal of Negro History (1916-2001), which is continued by The Journal of African American History (2002-present). Copyright 1976 The Association for the Study of African American Life and HistoryPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion (review)

book reviews359 letters to Democratic party figures whose own papers are scattered . Included here also are convenient pieces of the Congressional Globe with Davis's speeches on Oregon settlers, Texas debts, and war measures, and citizens' complaints about land claims in numbers that suggest something of the socio-legal confusion of early Mississippi. There are unexpected items of interest in the volume— a few newspaper accounts of Democratic meetings are clever enough to qualify as southwestern humor; the several biting exchanges in the House between Davis and Andrew Johnson, which no doubt Davis later regretted, are witty and revealing of class differences in the Old South. Researchers in Mississippi political history will find the well indexed volume, of special value for the hundreds of secondary personalities identified in it, and for the several editorial notes that help clarify state issues. Mcintosh and his staff have produced what is for the most part a model of exceedingly thorough work. Yet such exceeding thoroughness makes us a bit impatient. The first document in this volume—a brief business message that Davis sent his brother from a steamboat—receives, for example, four pages of somewhat tedious annotation. Elsewhere there are disgressions on lacunae, unnecessarily exhaustive histories of crossroads communities , a blow-by-blow description of a streetlight (p. 252), and abundant information of most value to steamboat buffs. Abbreviated notes in these and similar cases would have satisfied most historians and helped to keep the cost of the volume within bounds. Over three years in preparation, uncovering nothing that will call for a reconsideration of Davis and containing much material that is already published, this volume simply takes too long to do what it does. While these years of first political successes and remarriage are certainly important ones, the best is yet to come. Should it take proportionate scholarly effort to bring us the papers of Davis's later, far more eventful years in public life, historians are in for a long wait. Davis would find the second volume of his collected papers altogether pleasing. But then he was a vain man, who stayed up until two and three at night fussing over details. Robert J. Brugger University of Virginia The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion. By Stephen B. Oates. (New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Pp. xiii, 189. $7.95.) In 1900 William S. Drewry published the first scholarly account of Nat Turner's rebellion and declared that the abolitionist movement was the chief cause of that tragedy. Drewry relatively ne- 360CIVIL WAR HISTORY glected the other factor stressed by Virginians in 1831: wild, emotional, religious enthusiasm. Today it is a commonplace, as it was not in Drewry's time, that slave rebellions are a characteristic of slavery itself. Negro uprisings punctuated colonial history, before the anti-slavery movement existed. What is unusual about the antebellum period in the United States is that slave rebellions were so scarce; what is especially unusual about Nat Turner is not that he acted on his conviction that slavery was wrong, but that he reduced his already slender chances of success by systematically butchering the families in his immediate neighborhood. Today this might be interpreted as an extreme example of "expressive violence " or "black rage." But Nat Turner's killings were too purposeful and thorough to be an outburst of pathological feelings: he clearly saw himself as an agent of God's wrath, an instrument of Divine Vengeance. Either he was right, or he was one of the most powerful and original religious fanatics in American history. Oates' new book, like those of Drewry and Herbert Aptheker before him, fails adequately to represent the religious, or spiritual dimensions of Nat Turner and his times. Otherwise Oates deserves all praise. His book is accurate, lucid, restrained, sympathetic, and imaginative. Especially useful is his attention to the aftermath of the rebellion: the slaughter of innocent blacks by roving white mobs, the Jeffersonian (but not Jefferson-like) insistence of Governor John Floyd on acting within the strict letter of the laws and constitution of Virginia , the simultaneous passions of white Virginians to find a way out of slavery and to make slavery perfectly secure, their contradictory desires to...

The Correspondence of W. E. B. DuBois

Scholar, author, editor, teacher, reformer, and civil rights leader, W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was a major figure in American life and one of the earliest proponents of equality for black Americans. He was a founder and leader of the Niagara Movement, the NAACP, and the Pan-African Movement; a progenitor of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance; an advocate of anticolonialism, anti-imperialism, unionism, and equality for women; and a champion of the rights of oppressed people around the world. The three-volume Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois offers a unique perspective on Du Bois's experiences and views. In recognition of the significance of the Correspondence, the final volume was named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review. Herbert Aptheker has provided an introduction and notes to each volume, illuminating the circumstances and identifying the personalities involved in the correspondence. A long time friend and colleague of Du Bois, Aptheker is a well-known historian of the African American experience. In 1939 and again in 1969, he won the history award given by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Among his most prominent works are American Negro Slave Revolts and the three-volume Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States.

The Urgency of Marxist-Christian Dialogue. By Herbert Aptheker. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. 196 pp. $6.95

Journal Article The Urgency of Marxist-Christian Dialogue. By Herbert Aptheker. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. 196 pp. $6.95 Get access Bob E. Patterson Bob E. Patterson Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Church and State, Volume 14, Issue 1, Winter 1972, Page 159, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcs/14.1.159 Published: 01 January 1972

The Frontier Against Slavery: Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and the Slavery Extension Controversy (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Frontier Against Slavery: Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and the Shvery Extension Controversy. By Eugene H. Berwanger. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967. Pp. x, 176. $5.95.) White Americans of the nineteenth century were a racist lot—and not just in the South. Even if such now widely read commentators as Tocqueville had never told us this, the documentary evidence abounded for historians to bring forward. Instead they did not. While the laity clung to the legend of the abolitionist North and a Civil War fought to free the slaves, the academics did little better, allowing themselves to be diverted into such unresolvable debates as whether the Northeast or the Midwest had been the most important seat of the antislavery movement. In 1961, prompted by an emerging realization that the twentieth century northern ghetto was no haven for black Americans, historians began at last to explore what had been almost forgotten. Leon Litwack emphasized the widespread negrophobia that characterized northern antebellum society; Larry Gara challenged the cherished legend of the Underground Railway; and the following year C. Vann Woodward spoke out on what he convincingly termed The Antislavery Myth." The curtain of forgetfulness began to be swept aside on one of the most depressing landscapes in American social history. Now comes Eugene Berwanger's slim survey of the Middle West and Far West in the antebellum years. His discussion roves from the Upper Mississippi Valley to California, to Oregon, to the High Plains, closing with a brief analysis of "Western Politicians and the Negro Question." His message is clear: The West was overwhelmingly antislavery, true enough, but for the wrong reason. Instead of a genuine humanitarian opposition to the southern chattel system, instead of sympathy with Americans held in bondage, westerners were motivated by an absolute horror of a potential black population influx into the West—a region viewed as a Promised Land to be reserved for whites exclusively. In resisting the geographical spread of slavery they were really resisting the geographical spread of black people. And Mr. Berwanger concludes that racism was by far the most important ingredient in the western antislavery impulse. The author's argument proceeds in a straightforward, even astringent, style, utterly without flair, not even with anger. He lets actions and rhetoric speak for themselves. When his material achieves poignancy it is with such items as this, the testimony of an Arkansas slave who had once been liberated in California but who had voluntarily returned to bondage: "In California I was free," explained the black informant, "but there 183 184CIVIL WAR HISTORY was a wider difference between the white and the black man than in Arkansas. I labored hard, but I was a nigger and that was enough with the Yankees, and I preferred to be a slave with my old master, where I could be respected as such, than to be a free man among white men in a free state." As the new historiography on "free state" negrophobia approaches the end of its first decade, the point seems to have been made. Perhaps it is time historians, armed with studies like Mr. Berwanger's, returned to establishing with a great deal more precision than formerly just where—in terms of white northern social groupings—the strength resided that favored full civil equality for black Americans. Berwanger, for instance, places great emphasis on the results of popular referendums that excluded blacks from four western states; all together, negrophobia triumphed by 174,000 to 45,000 votes—or by a resounding 79.5 per cent. I for one would like to know more about that important 20.5 per cent minority than I think all the historians of western abolitionism have yet chosen to tell us. Robert R. Dykstra University of Nebraska Nat Turner's Skve Rebellion: The Environment, The Event, The Effects . By Herbert Aptheker. (New York: Humanities Press, 1966. Pp. iv, 152. $4.00.) Herbert Aptheker, Marxist historian and theoretician, has turned back to his master's essay, written thirty years ago, to produce what purports to be an intensive look at Nat Turner's rebellion. The essay itself examines the context of the uprising and its impact as well...

Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion: The Environment, The Event, The Effects (review)

184CIVIL WAR HISTORY was a wider difference between the white and the black man than in Arkansas. I labored hard, but I was a nigger and that was enough with the Yankees, and I preferred to be a slave with my old master, where I could be respected as such, than to be a free man among white men in a free state." As the new historiography on "free state" negrophobia approaches the end of its first decade, the point seems to have been made. Perhaps it is time historians, armed with studies like Mr. Berwanger's, returned to establishing with a great deal more precision than formerly just where—in terms of white northern social groupings—the strength resided that favored full civil equality for black Americans. Berwanger, for instance, places great emphasis on the results of popular referendums that excluded blacks from four western states; all together, negrophobia triumphed by 174,000 to 45,000 votes—or by a resounding 79.5 per cent. I for one would like to know more about that important 20.5 per cent minority than I think all the historians of western abolitionism have yet chosen to tell us. Robert R. Dykstra University of Nebraska Nat Turner's Skve Rebellion: The Environment, The Event, The Effects . By Herbert Aptheker. (New York: Humanities Press, 1966. Pp. iv, 152. $4.00.) Herbert Aptheker, Marxist historian and theoretician, has turned back to his master's essay, written thirty years ago, to produce what purports to be an intensive look at Nat Turner's rebellion. The essay itself examines the context of the uprising and its impact as well as the actual event. An appendix reprints Turner's "Confessions" which, as Aptheker points out, is practically the only, and unquestionably the most authoritative, source for the Turner rebellion. Unhappily the long essay-introduction adds little to existing knowledge. Scholars of southern and Negro history like Staudenraus and Elkins canvassed the material after Aptheker but published first, with the result that Aptheker's essay is stale and stilted. In fact, his own American Negro SZaue Revolts, published in 1943, covered essentially the same ground as this essay. The so-called myth of the Virginia legislative debate of 1832, apparently signifying the last gasp of the antislavery movement in the upper South, received monographic treatment from Joseph Clarke Robert in 1941 and a lucid restatement in Stanley Elkins' Skvery in 1959 (pp. 209-211). The slave unrest and the pinched southern economy have also been familiar ground for historians for many years. Aptheker firmly believes that Turner, symbolic of the rising black masses, almost single-handedly produced the southern turn toward a tighter control over slavery. This is a distortion in degree which ignores the process which had been transforming the South during the previous dec- BOOK REVIEWS185 ade, a process shaped by a multitude of economic, political, intellectual, emotional and technological factors. Of these, fear of rebellion, and the climactic Nat Turner uprising in particular, was important, but it was an importance leavened by other forces. It is unfair to compare the work of a historian and a novelist, but the almost simultaneous appearance of William Styron's novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, merits a word about the two treatments. Using tools not available to the scholar, Styron captures the essence of southern plantation life and black-white relationships in a way that throws additional light on the period and the people. In the novel, Turner becomes a man. In the historical essay, the South and its slaves are overweighted with statistics and interpretation which fall short of explaining the event and its impact, and the man who caused it. Leslie H. Fishel, Jr. State Historical Society of Wisconsin The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Shvety in the North. By Arthur Zilversmit. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. Pp. viii, 262. $6.95.) Professor Zilversmit has put into convenient form a summary of the growth of abolitionist opinion and legislation to end slavery in the northeastern colonies and states. The first half of the book sketches the nature of slavery in this area and the well-known procession of men in the colonial period who argued...

Book Reviews : Marxism and Democracy. Edited by HERBERT APTHEKER. (New York: Humanities Press, 1965. Pp. xii, 113. $3.50.)

Book Reviews : Marxism and Democracy. Edited by HERBERT APTHEKER. (New York: Humanities Press, 1965. Pp. xii, 113. $3.50.)

Social Structure and the Negro Revolt: An Examination of Some Hypotheses

An attempt is made to examinie objective structural conditions in order to provide a sociological interpretation of the current Negro revolt. sociological literature is examined and five structural hypotheses are derived. Data on the changing positionl of the nonwhite in the United States are examined. Nonwhites are found to be improving their position in terms of level of education, type of occupation, and amount of income. They are found to be improving their pOsition relative to whites in level of education and in holding middle status occupations but not upper status occupations. They are falling further behind whites in incomiie. It seems likely that the proportion of status inconsistents among Negroes is increasing. data are inconsistent with two of the derived hypotheses and are consistent with the other three. These latter hypotheses are reconciled in terms of a single common denominator: Changes in objective conditions cause feelings of relative deprivation, which, in turn, produce a tendency toward protest and rebellion. sumimer of 1963 has been referred to as The Summer of the Negro Revolt. Negroes lhave rebelled against their status in the United States from the earliest days of slavery to the present time,1 but this rebellion reached its peak to date the summer of 1963, wlhen it became a nationwide movement with protests and demonstrations in three-fourtlhs of our states in all mainland regions of the country.2 It is true that this revolt did not simply emerge spontaneously and full-blown in one summer. Yet, we cannot validly view this present protest as a simple continuation of the protest begun during slavery. Intense and widespread support makes today's protest basically different. Lomax chooses to date today's revolt from Decemnber 1, 1955, when Mrs. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus.3 Others miglht prefer other dates, but this seems as good as any. major question is not the precise date of its inception but rather the reasons for its existence. *I am indebted to Elwood Guernsey for coImlpiling much of the data upon which Tables 1 and 3 are based and to the Institute for Social Research, Florida State University, for the use of g aduate assistants and machines. I have benefited f om the critical comments on earlier drafts generously given by William A. Rushing and Henry J. Watts. 1 For informationi on the slave revolts see Herbert Aptheker, Aiwerica'n Negro Slave Revolts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), and for a brief history of other Negro protest activity see Gunnar Myrdal, An Amiericani Dileutina (New York: Harper & Bros., 1944), pp. 736-937. 2 See files of Newc, York Ti'uues througlhotit the period from May to August, 1963. 3 Louis E. Lomax, Negro Revolt (New York: New Americau Library, 1963), p. 92. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.11 on Wed, 10 Aug 2016 06:36:10 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND THE NEGRO REVOLT 249 Journalists lhave speculated as to these reasons.4 It is time for a sociologist to attempt a structural explanation. present writer will attempt to do tlis by searchiing the literature for sociological lhypotheses wliclh purport to be able to explaini suclh revolts, examliniiing empirical evidence pertainiing to the living condlitions of the Negro in order to test and evaluate these lhypotheses, anid drawing somiie gelneral conlclu-

Book Reviews : The Colonial Era: A History of the American People. By HERBERT APTHEKER. (New York: International Publishers. 1959. Pp. 158. $2.00.)

Book Reviews : The Colonial Era: A History of the American People. By HERBERT APTHEKER. (New York: International Publishers. 1959. Pp. 158. $2.00.)

Yankee "Schoolmarms" In Post-War Florida

Previous articleNext article No AccessDocumentsYankee "Schoolmarms" In Post-War FloridaHarriet A. Barnes, Catharine R. Bent, Samuel Proctor, Frdk. Douglas, and Herbert ApthekerHarriet A. Barnes Search for more articles by this author , Catharine R. Bent Search for more articles by this author , Samuel Proctor Search for more articles by this author , Frdk. Douglas Search for more articles by this author , and Herbert Aptheker Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 44, Number 3July 1959 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2716441 Journal History This article was published in The Journal of Negro History (1916-2001), which is continued by The Journal of African American History (2002-present). Copyright 1959, 1969 The Association for the Study of African American Life and HistoryPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Herbert Aptheker, A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States

Herbert Aptheker, <i>A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States</i>

The Historian and Southern Negro Slavery

A SURVEY of the literature dealing with southern Negro slavery reveals one fundamental problem that still remains unresolved. This is the problem of the biased historian. It is, of course, a universal historical problem-one that is not likely to be resolved as long as historians themselves are divided into scientific and so-called subjectivist-presentist-relativist schools.' These schools seem to agree that historians ought to strive for a maximum of intellectual detachment and ought not to engage in special pleading and pamphleteering. But whether they are entitled to pass moral judgments, whether they can overcome the subjective influences of their own backgrounds and environments, are still debatable questions-at least they are questions which are still being debated. Yet it must be said that so far as Negro slavery is concerned we are still waiting for the first scientific and completely objective study of the institution which is based upon no assumptions whose validity cannot be thoroughly proved. And as long as historians must select their evidence from a great mass of sources, as long as they attempt to organize and interpret their findings, the prospects are not very encouraging. This does not mean that everyone who has written about slavery has had the same bias, or that some have not been more flagrantly biased than others, or more skillful than others in the use of the subtle innuendo. It most certainly does not imply that further efforts toward a clearer understanding of slavery are futile, or that we are not enormously indebted to the many scholars who have already engaged in research in this field. No student could begin to understand the complexities of the slave system without being thoroughly familiar with the findings and varying points of view of such historians as Ulrich B. Phillips, Herbert Aptheker, Lewis C. Gray, John Hope Franklin, Avery Craven, Carter G. Woodson, Frederic Bancroft, Charles S. Sydnor, John Spencer Bassett, and many others. Among these scholars, the late Professor Phillips has unquestionably made the largest single contribution to our present understanding of southern slavery. It may be that his most durable monument will be the vast amount of new source material which he uncovered. But Phillips was also an unusually able and prolific writer. Measured only crudely in terms of sheer

Changing Patterns in Negro Leadership

LEADERSHIP involves a group of individuals in which one assumes dominance over the other; the attitudes and values of the group may be changed by the dominant person. It functions in a pressure and counter-pressure fashion, with the group and the leader reacting upon each other.' A clear example of leadership is found in a social situation of unrest and dissatisfaction and involves the aggregation of individuals in masses. From the atmosphere of excitement, crisis, and disorganization it moves to a condition of organization which strives for adjustment. customarily works toward some specific goal which, when achieved, may call for another form of leadership.2 The Negro group in the United States affords an excellent demonstration of the leadership process. Changing patterns of leadership inside this process are consonant with changes in the social climate of given socio-historical periods. The Negro has always formed a large minority of the general population, and his position, directly and indirectly, has been the cause of numerous temporary crises and a more or less permanent state of anxiety. The United States, like all other countries, has experienced at intervals periods of relative upheaval, such as wars, economic depressions, great shifts in population, and so on. Inasmuch as the Negro creates a special problem in relation to all of these, his demands for leadership have been constant and, at the same time, have operated within the sociological pattern which provides the background for leadership in general. The purpose of this paper is to examine the leadership of the Negro and to analyze historical changes in terms of a dynamic social atmosphere. This analysis will try to shed some light on such questions as: What changes have occurred in Negro leadership in the past century? What are the sociological implications inherent in these changes? What factors have operated to promote flexibility in the leadership pattern? How is Negro leadership related to the total social structure and to the overall pattern of leadership? During slavery the Negro was largely an unorganized mass, and although constituting a considerably greater proportion of the population than is now the case, he was socially so situated as to be inconsequential in the general social structure. His condition of servitude on large plantations, small farms, or households, provided no opportunity for mass leadership. The character of slavery itself and the pattern in which it operated were not conducive to the development of leaders. There were local occasions, of course, such as slave revolts, which on a reduced scale provided a type of momentary leadership for very small groups,3 but not until about 1830, when the Abolitionist movement became a significant social force, was there any generally recognized leader of American Negroes. Before this date there were Negroes who held some status among small local groups in the North; but communication was not highly developed in the nation at this time, and the almost complete illiteracy of Negroes made it impossible for these persons to reach them and foster group consciousness. However, the coming of a Negro newspaper4 1 A Negro leader is defined here as a person who exerts special influence over a number of people for a period of a decade or more and who has helped to change significantly the position of the Negro in American society. Further, he stands as a distinctive symbol in the struggle, growth, and development of the Negro. 2 For a discussion of the leadership process see Emory S. Bogardus, Leaders and Leadershiip (New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., Inc., 1934), and Fundamentals of Social Psyclhology (New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., Inc., 1942), sections II and IV; F. Stuart Chapin, Leadership and Group Activity, Journal of Applied Sociology, VIII (1923-1924), 141-145; Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1921), chap. XII; John L. Gillin and John P. Gillin, An Introduction to Sociology (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1945), chap. XXI. 3 For examples of slave revolts consult Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), and To Be Free (New York: International Publishers Co., 1948), especially the section on guerilla warfare by runaway slaves, pp. 11-30; John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1947). 4 The first Negro newspaper, Freedom's Journal, was published in 1827, and prior to the outbreak of the Civil War there were more than 20 Negro newspapers