Bettina Aptheker

Bettina Fay Aptheker (born September 2, 1944)[1] is an American political activist, radical feminist, professor and author.

Her father was a Marxist historian, whose first book about slave revolts overturned previous conceptions of enslaved African Americans.

Du Bois Club, a national youth organization sponsored by the Communist Party USA, and was involved in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement during the fall of 1964.

All but three of the National Committee, headed by party leader Gus Hall, backed the intervention of Soviet tanks.

[6] During the 1970s, Aptheker worked for the defense in the high-profile trial of Angela Davis, a long-time friend and fellow Communist Party member accused of involvement in George Jackson's attempt to escape from jail.

After completing her master's degree, Aptheker taught African-American and Women's Studies at San José State University.

[citation needed] In her memoir, Intimate Politics, (2006), she wrote about growing up in a leftist household, as what was called a "Red Diaper Baby."

Numerous letters were published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, which had reviewed her book, and on the History News Network of George Mason University.

Fellow Red Diaper Babies and many former Communists seem to want to sweep this under the rug — or, may I say, airbrush it — as if there had never been a Women's Liberation Movement, and it had never occurred to anybody that there might be a connection between the personal and the political ..."[13]The controversy continued for months.

He included the results of an interview with Kate Miller, who had been present during Aptheker's 1999 conversation with her father about the abuse, and confirmed her account.

[15] In 2012, she was co-appointment with Karen Yamashita to the UC Presidential Chair in Feminist Critical Race and Ethnic Studies; a position offered to distinguished members of the university's faculty intended to encourage new or interdisciplinary program development.

[16] She received the 2017 John Dizikes Teaching Award in Humanities[17] and the inaugural appointee of the endowed Peggy and Jack Baskin Foundation Presidential Chair for Feminist Studies.