I Do Not See How I Could Have Been Misunderstood: Sorting Out the Aptheker Debacle

Woodward’s deep admiration for W. E. B. Du Bois and protective concern with how his life and legacy would be represented virtually guaranteed that, at some point, he would find himself at cross purposes with the stalwart communist who served as the executor of Du Bois’s literary estate and zealous guardian of his papers. Unfortunately for Woodward, regardless of how he felt about Aptheker’s designs on Du Bois’s papers, Du Bois himself clearly had no such misgivings about a man whom he first invited to share his office in 1946 and asked to edit his correspondence just a few months