You can glean a lot from book acknowledgments, like this line from historian Barbara Joyce Ross, author of J. E. Spingarn and the Rise of the NAACP, 1911-1939 (1972):
Mrs. James Weldon Johnson generously permitted me access to her husband’s papers, and Herbert Aptheker placed at my disposal the W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, transporting the manuscripts daily by subway to and from his home, at what must have been considerable inconvenience to him.
That line led me to historian Phillip Luke Sinitiere’s 2023 article on Aptheker’s editorial history with Du Bois’s papers. There I learned that in 1961, Du Bois deposited about a third of his personal manuscripts in Aptheker’s Brooklyn home and entrusted him with the work of editing and publishing the collection. According to Aptheker’s daughter Bettina, he and his wife Fay kept the papers in a series of filing cabinets in their basement, “between the laundry and the boiler rooms,” where they spent hours every night organizing the collection and poring over its contents.
In 1973, the voluminous collection moved to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (It has now been digitized.) But before then, historians like Ross turned to Aptheker for access to the papers. Sinitiere’s article also contains the text of an address Aptheker gave about this editorial work in 1974, in which Aptheker said that before the papers moved to Amherst, and “despite gossip to the contrary—I did what I could to make at least sections of the Papers available to others and this was possible in the case of some dozen people.”
Ross, apparently, was among those people. And since reading her acknowledgment page yesterday, I haven’t been able to shake the image that it conjures. Imagine: the unpublished papers of W. E. B. Du Bois, moving about New York in the late 1960s on an underground railroad.
