And Why Not Every Man?

by Herbert Aptheker

And Why Not Every Man? is the story of the fight against slavery from the first recorded petition for freedom by slave couple in 1661 to William Cullen Bryant's poem, "The Death of Slavery" (1866). The story is told in the words of the participants themselves - the slaves, the freedmen and the white Abolitionists - as recorded in letters, speeches, broadsides, poems, songs, petitions and primary documents. These have been selected from a wealth of material produced during two centuries of the freedom struggle, to show the wide range of forces that were engaged in the various stages of the long fight and in the war that ended chattel slavery. Throughout this selection the independent and militant role of the blacks stands out clearly. The title is taken from the freedom spiritual, "Didn't my Lord Deliver Daniel?" which is the prologue to the book. The well-known American historian and authority on Afro-American history, Herbert Aptheker, selected and edited the text, and contributes the introduction.

277 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

Herbert Aptheker was an American Marxist historian and political activist. He wrote more than 50 books, mostly in the fields of African American history and general U.S. history, most notably, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943), a classic in the field, and the 7-volume Documentary History of the Negro People (1951-1994). He compiled a wide variety of primary documents supporting study of African-American history.

From the 1940s, Aptheker was a prominent figure in U.S. scholarly discourse. David Horowitz described Aptheker as "the Communist Party’s most prominent Cold War intellectual".[1] He was blacklisted in academia during the 1950s because of his Communist Party membership.

Aptheker's master's thesis, a study of the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia, laid the groundwork for his future work on the history of American slave revolts. Aptheker revealed Turner's heroism, demonstrating how his rebellion was rooted in resistance to the exploitative conditions of the Southern slave system. His NEGRO SLAVE REVOLTS IN THE UNITED STATES 1526-1860 (1939), includes a table of documented slave revolts by year and state. His doctoral dissertation, American Negro Slave Revolts, was published in 1943. Doing research in Southern libraries and archives, he uncovered 250 similar episodes. It remains a landmark and a classic work in the study of Southern history and slavery.

Aptheker challenged racist writings, most notably those of Georgia-born historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips. The latter had characterized enslaved African Americans as child-like, inferior, and uncivilized; argued that slavery was a benign institution; and defended the preservation of the Southern plantation system. Such works had been common in the field before Aptheker's scholarship revealed a much more nuanced society, in which African Americans acted from agency.

Considering himself a protégé of W. E. B. Du Bois, Aptheker long emphasized his mentor's social science scholarship and life-long struggle for African Americans to achieve equality. In his work as a historian, he compiled a documentary history of African Americans in the United States, a monumental collection which he started publishing in 1951. It eventually resulted in seven volumes of primary documents, a tremendous resource for African-American studies.