Herbert Aptheker argued black resistance to slavery was documented fact, not legend.

Evidence

Eugene Genovese, “The Legacy of Slavery and the Roots of Black Nationalism,” in Edward Greer (ed.), Black Liberation Politics: A Reader, Allyn and Bacon, Boston, 1971, p. 43. According to George Rawick, Genovese was a member of the American Communist Party in his youth. Interview with Rawick, winter 1976. The original of Genovese’s article appeared in Studies on the Left (6, no. 6 [November-December 1966]). In the same issue, Herbert Aptheker, one of the leading intellectuals in the American Communist Party and a major contributor to Black history, took Genovese to task, insisting that he recall that “the white radical historians followed and learned from Negro historians” and that: “There is no ‘legend of armed black resistance to slavery’ It is not a legend—though the use of the word ‘armed’ is disarming. There is the fact of Negro resistance to enslavement—armed and unarmed, that is the great fact and it is not legendary at all.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2110

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to accounts of slave resistance and the Black Radical tradition’s origin debates discussed throughout the book.