November 10, 2006

Herbert Aptheker in Public Life and at Home

To the Editor:

I read with personal interest Christopher Phelps's "Herbert Aptheker: the Contradictions of History" (The Chronicle Review, October 6). I was a freshman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1963 when Herb Aptheker was invited to speak at the student union. Alerted that Aptheker was a Communist, and spurred to action by a Raleigh TV journalist named Jesse Helms, the state legislature passed a hasty and ill-conceived law against any known Communist