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Gerald Horne
Gerald Horne
Gerald Horne
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Gerald Horne (born January 3, 1949) is an American historian who holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston.[1]

Key Information

Background

[edit]

Gerald Horne was raised in St. Louis, Missouri. After his undergraduate education at Princeton University, he received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.[2]

Career

[edit]

Horne holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston.

He was a contributing editor of Political Affairs magazine.[3]

Politics

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In 1992, Horne was a candidate for United States Senate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket.[4]

Writing

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Horne has published extensively on W. E. B. Du Bois and has written books on neglected episodes of world history including Hawaii and the Pacific.[5] He writes about topics he perceives as misrepresented struggles for justice; in particular communist struggles and struggles against imperialism, colonialism, fascism, racism, and white supremacy. Horne is a Marxist.[6] Much of his work highlights and analyzes specific individuals in their historical contexts, including figures such as the blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter John Howard Lawson, Ferdinand Smith (a Jamaican-born communist, sailor, labor leader, and co-founder of the National Maritime Union), and Lawrence Dennis, a man described as "the brains behind American fascism".[7]

While many of Horne's books use an individual as a prism to inspect the historical forces of their times, Horne has also produced broad canvas chronicles of infrequently examined periods and aspects of the history of white supremacy and imperialism. For example, he has written on the post-civil war involvement of the US ruling class—newly dispossessed of human chattels—in relation to slavery in Brazil, which was not legally abolished until 1888.[8] He has also written on the historic relationships between African Americans and the Japanese in the mid-20th century, specifically examining the ways in which the Japanese state gained sympathy and solidarity from people of colour by positioning themselves as the leaders of a global war against white supremacy.[9]

Manning Marable has said: "Gerald Horne is one of the most gifted and insightful historians on racial matters of his generation."[10]

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Horne published an article, placing the blame for the conflict on the United States and NATO:[11][12]

Then, when Washington forced the dissolution of the USSR, this allowed Moscow to cease subsidizing Moldova, Turkestan, Georgia and formerly socialist regimes in the vicinity. This allowed Russia to husband its resources leading to what Stanford scholar, Kathryn Stoner terms in her latest tome: "Russia Resurrected," a self-explanatory title that speaks to the development of hypersonic missiles and an agricultural superpower and a nation that can turn geopolitical tides in Syria among other sites. Imperialism failed to acknowledge that Russia had outgrown the sellout years of Boris Yeltsin and adamantly refused to adapt accordingly. NATO should have collapsed in 1991 when the USSR did but instead extended its remit to Libya, along with destroying the former Yugoslavia and devastating Afghanistan.

That is why, as I write, it is not only regime change in Kiev that is at issue: imperialism seeks regime change in Moscow, with all the dangers attendant with regard to toppling a nuclear power.

The ostensible issue – Ukraine joining the U.S. dominated NATO – would mean a rise in the stock price of Raytheon (former home of Pentagon chief, Lloyd Austin) and Lockheed Martin, as member states are required to spend more on advanced weaponry, which inevitably comes from these corporations.

With Germany pledging to re-arm, we also witness the shortsightedness of world imperialism, which refuses to learn the lessons of the 20th century, especially the catastrophe of world war ending with the uncovering of industrial funeral pyres in 1945. Not only Washington but London, Brussels and Paris should be shuddering right now.

Historiography in and for the radical tradition

[edit]

At the Black Women and the Radical Tradition conference held at the Brooklyn College Graduate Center for Worker Education, in a session devoted to Shirley Graham Du Bois, he said:

The purpose of my brief remarks this afternoon is to use the life and times of Shirley Graham Du Bois as a vehicle for trying to understand how and why we need to think about revitalizing the radical tradition through the means of revisioning and rewriting our history, our past. I argue in these remarks that like other historians - for Shirley Graham Du Bois was among other things an historian - she tended to stress in her history writing, like most of the writers of her generation, the "Crispus Attucks" aspect of our history, I'm sure you're familiar with Crispus Attucks, he goes down in history as the first person to be slain in the uprising against British rule in then-British North America and a symbol of how black people have shed their blood to help to construct this country. Which of course is true and is accurate. But it only begins to tell part of the story, as I'll try to elaborate on in my remarks. I think today it's particularly important to talk about revitalizing our past so that we can reinvigorate the radical tradition in light of this precipitous downturn that we see in the capitalist economy. Newsweek has been amongst the many journals that have told us "We're All Socialists Now", which some might be surprised to hear. In Latin America, certainly in the most recent election in El Salvador, and in Latin American generally, one can easily espy a shift to the left. The quipsters are suggesting that the recently departed Pres. George W. Bush entered office in 2001 as a social conservative but then after being compelled to nationalize various enterprises he leaves office as a conservative socialist. When you note that in South Africa you have a Communist Party minister sitting in office in Pretoria, and perhaps the same will take place in New Delhi, after the elections that take place in the late spring, it's time to revive that aspect it seems to me reality is shouting at us, time to revitalize that aspect of black history that stresses our ancestors who as early as the 18th century were actually trying to overthrow the government of the United States of America, as opposed to shedding their blood to help to create the government of the United States of America.[13]

In a speech given at an event marking the depositing of the Communist Party USA archives at the Tamiment Library at New York University,[14] Horne remarked at length on the writing of history, its importance, and what he perceives as the grievous proliferation of propagandistic historiography in the US:

Now it is often said that every generation has to rewrite history. For example, at one time there was a prevalent "moonlight and magnolias" version of slavery and Reconstruction that fundamentally portrayed "happy Negroes" during the slave era and portrayed the period following slavery as a dastardly period of Negro misrule and corruption. This began to change in the 1930s with the publication of Du Bois' magisterial 'Black Reconstruction' and changed decisively with the publication of Eric Foner's 'Reconstruction.'"

One of the reasons why I personally – and I daresay future generations – are so pleased by the depositing of these CPUSA archives is because it is painfully obvious that the history of the Communist movement in this nation is long overdue for a massive rewriting and these archives will prove indispensable in that process.

It is easy to see why future generations will be displeased with much of the present history that has been written to this point about the Communist Party because it has been incredibly biased, one-sided, deeply influenced by the conservative drift of the nation – not unlike pre-Du Bois histories of Reconstruction – and, fundamentally, anticommunist.

From 2013 to date, Horne has discussed his historical, socio-economic and political research findings in a series of conversations with Paul Jay.[15][16]

Works

[edit]
  • Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War. SUNY Press (1986)
  • Communist Front? The Civil Rights Congress, 1946–1956. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (1987)
  • Black Liberation/Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party. University of Delaware Press (1994)
  • Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising And The 1960s. Da Capo Press (1997)
  • From the Barrel of a Gun: The United States and the War against Zimbabwe, 1965–1980. University of North Carolina Press (2000)
  • Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930–1950 : Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds and Trade Unionists. University of Texas Press (2001)
  • Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois. New York University Press (2002)
  • Horne, Gerald (2004). Race War!: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire. New York University Press. ISBN 9780814736418. JSTOR j.ctt9qg215. (2004)
  • Black and Brown: African Americans and the Mexican Revolution, 1910–1920. New York University Press (2005)
  • The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten. University of California Press (2006)
  • Cold War in a Hot Zone: The United States Confronts Labor and Independence Struggles in the British West Indies. Temple University Press (2007)
  • The White Pacific: U.S. Imperialism and Black Slavery in the South Seas After the Civil War. University of Hawaii Press (2007)
  • The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade. New York University Press (2007)
  • Blows Against the Empire: U.S. Imperialism in Crisis. International Publishers (2008)
  • Red Seas: Ferdinand Smith and Radical Black Sailors in the United States and Jamaica. New York University Press (2009)
  • Mau Mau in Harlem?: The U.S. and the Liberation of Kenya. Palgrave MacMillan (2009)
  • The Color of Fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Racial Passing, and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism in the United States. New York University Press (2009)
  • W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography. Greenwood Press (2009)
  • The End of Empires: African Americans and India. Temple University Press (2009)
  • Fighting in Paradise: Labor Unions, Racism, and Communists in the Making of Modern Hawaii. University of Hawaii Press (2011)
  • Negro Comrades of the Crown: African Americans and the British Empire Fight the U.S. Before Emancipation. New York University Press (2013)
  • Black Revolutionary: William Patterson & the Globalization of the African American Freedom Struggle. University of Illinois Press (2013)
  • The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. New York University Press (2014)
  • Race to Revolution: The U.S. and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow. Monthly Review Press (2014)
  • Confronting Black Jacobins: The U.S., the Haitian Revolution and the Origins of the Dominican Republic. Monthly Review Press (2015)
  • Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary. Pluto Press (2016)
  • The Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press: Claude Albert Barnett's Pan-African News and the Jim Crow Paradox. University of Illinois Press (2017)
  • Storming the Heavens: African Americans and the Early Struggle for the Right to Fly. Black Classic Press (2017)
  • Facing the Rising Sun: African Americans, Japan, and the Rise of Afro-Asian Solidarity. New York University Press (2018)
  • The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean. Monthly Review Press (2018)
  • Jazz and Justice: Racism and the Political Economy of the Music. Monthly Review Press (2019)
  • White Supremacy Confronted: U.S. Imperialism and Anti-Communism vs. the Liberation of Southern Africa from Rhodes to Mandela. International Publishers (2019)
  • The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century. Monthly Review Press (2020)
  • The Bittersweet Science: Racism, Racketeering, and the Political Economy of Boxing. International Publishers (2020)
  • The Counter-Revolution of 1836:  Texas Slavery & Jim Crow and the Roots of U.S. Fascism. International Publishers (2022)
  • Revolting Capital: Racism & Radicalism in Washington D.C., 1900-2000 International Publishers (2023)
  • Armed Struggle? Panthers and Communists; Black Nationalists and Liberals in Southern California through the Sixties and Seventies International Publishers (2024)
  • The Capital of Slavery: Washington, D.C. 1800-1865 International Publishers (2025)

See also

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References

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[edit]
Revisions and contributorsEdit on WikipediaRead on Wikipedia

Gerald Horne

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from Grokipedia
Gerald Horne (born January 3, 1949) is an American Marxist specializing in , race relations, labor struggles, and U.S. . He holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the , where he has taught since the 1980s, offering courses on topics including the , diplomatic history, and twentieth-century . Horne's extensive bibliography exceeds thirty books and over one hundred scholarly articles, with works frequently applying class analysis to reinterpret pivotal U.S. events—such as portraying the 1776 Revolution as a pro-slavery counter-reaction against emerging British —and biographies of figures like , , and who engaged with communist movements. His research emphasizes connections between , , and global radicalism, earning awards including the 2021 American Book Award for The Counter-Revolution of 1836 and the 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award. Beyond academia, Horne has practiced law, run unsuccessfully as a Peace and Freedom Party candidate for in 1992, and hosted the internationalist Freedom Now, reflecting his longstanding advocacy for and anti-imperialist causes often aligned with Marxist perspectives. While praised by left-leaning scholars for challenging orthodox narratives, his interpretations have drawn criticism for prioritizing racial dynamics over broader in some analyses.

Early Life and Education

Childhood and Upbringing

Gerald Horne was born on January 3, 1949, in , , at , a segregated facility under that served Black patients exclusively. His parents originated from large sharecropping families in and migrated northward to the industrial city of during the Great Migration, seeking economic opportunities amid and racial oppression in the South. This family background exposed him from an early age to oral histories of Southern racism, including accounts of atrocities that his parents relayed as survivors who fled 's sharecropping system. Horne grew up in the neighborhood of , a predominantly area marked by urban density and economic challenges similar to other mid-century African American enclaves facing systemic . He attended racially segregated public , including Ashland Elementary and Beaumont High , graduating from the latter in 1966 amid the waning years of segregation in . These institutions operated under "apartheid-like" conditions, reflecting the broader enforcement of Jim Crow practices in education and public life that shaped daily experiences for youth in the city.

Academic Training

Horne earned a degree from in 1970. Following undergraduate studies, he pursued legal education at the University of California, Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law, obtaining a in 1973. After practicing law briefly, Horne shifted focus to historical scholarship, entering the graduate program in history at in 1977 to address broader political and social issues through interdisciplinary analysis. He completed a Ph.D. in history there in 1984, with a dissertation titled Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Cold War, 1944–1963, examining the intersections of racial justice advocacy and anticommunist pressures in mid-20th-century America. This work reflected his emerging emphasis on race, class, and international dimensions of U.S. history, building on legal training's emphasis on evidence and argumentation while expanding into archival and theoretical historical methods.

Professional Career

After earning a J.D. from the , Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law following his admission in 1970, Gerald Horne entered legal practice influenced by the activist potential of the judiciary during the Court era (1953–1969), which he viewed as a period of significant judicial intervention in social issues. His pursuit of law stemmed from broader political activism, including proximity to radical movements that drew him to Berkeley. Horne worked as a practicing attorney in the 1970s, focusing on areas aligned with his interests in civil rights and labor, though specific cases or firms remain undocumented in beyond his general professional involvement. His legal endeavors paralleled early academic forays, as he continued private practice while beginning to teach history, African American studies, and legal studies at institutions such as from 1975 to 1979, , and . This dual role bridged law and scholarship; Horne's legal experience informed his teaching of legal studies and contributed to transitional writings, such as essays on in 1980 that critiqued opposition to racial progress policies. Eventually, he shifted fully to academia by pursuing a Ph.D. in history at , marking the end of his primary legal practice around the late 1970s or early 1980s.

Academic Roles and University of Houston

Gerald Horne holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the , where he serves as a in the Department of History. In this endowed position, Horne has focused on classroom instruction and graduate supervision within the institution's liberal arts framework. His teaching portfolio includes undergraduate courses such as the and U.S. History through , alongside graduate seminars in , , and 20th Century . Horne incorporates diverse pedagogical methods to enhance engagement, including approaches and interactive elements designed to stimulate student involvement in historical analysis. In August 2025, Horne assumed a joint appointment in both the African American Studies and departments, expanding his institutional presence amid ongoing faculty developments in interdisciplinary programs. This role aligns with his continued participation in academic events, such as departmental podcasts and lectures into late 2025, supporting student and faculty discourse on historical topics. No formal administrative leadership positions, such as department chair, are documented in his University of Houston tenure.

Political Views and Activism

Influences from Marxism and Radical Traditions

Gerald Horne has explicitly identified as a , framing his analyses of historical events through the lens of class dynamics and systemic exploitation rather than isolated . His scholarly engagement with Marxist theory is evident in works that evoke Marx's concepts of political reaction and bourgeois revolutions, applying them to reinterpret events like the as rooted in maintaining and class hierarchies. This orientation draws from radical traditions emphasizing and the interplay of race and class, influencing his biographical studies of figures entangled in leftist movements. Horne's connections to communist traditions are demonstrated through his extensive research on African American leaders within the , such as Benjamin J. Davis Jr., a Harlem politician and party member from 1933 until his death in 1964. In his 1994 book Black Liberation/Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party, Horne chronicles Davis's role in linking Black liberation struggles to international communist networks, highlighting how anticommunist repression targeted such intersections during the mid-20th century. This focus reflects Horne's affinity for recovering narratives of Black radicals who prioritized over narrower nationalist agendas, as seen in his archival explorations of party activities in urban centers like New York. Horne advocates a "radical internationalist perspective" as essential for understanding , arguing that it counters domestic by situating U.S. racial dynamics within global anti-imperialist struggles. In a 2025 , he critiqued as a diversion from class struggle, asserting that prioritizing racial over economic weakens leftist coalitions and echoes historical divides exploited by elites. His personal papers, held at the and spanning 1953 to 2016, document early involvement in activist circles aligned with these traditions, including materials on labor organizing and anti-imperialist campaigns that underscore his formative ties to radical networks.

Stances on Race, Class, Imperialism, and Anti-Communism

Horne maintains that U.S. functions as a core mechanism perpetuating racial oppression, both abroad and at home, by exporting and reinforcing white supremacist structures. In analyzing U.S. policy toward Southern Africa's struggles, he argues that opposition to liberation movements in and stemmed from imperial imperatives to preserve white minority rule, which aligned with domestic racial hierarchies. This stance frames not merely as but as a racialized project sustaining global white dominance. He extends this view to the foundational role of in U.S. institutions, positing in his 2025 examination of , that the capital's establishment as a slaveholding hub from 1800 to 1865 exemplified how intertwined with racial enslavement to consolidate power. Horne asserts that such dynamics reveal imperialism's causal role in entrenching racial as a pillar of American . On , Horne critiques it as a deliberate strategy to undermine black liberation by conflating racial justice demands with subversive ideologies, thereby enabling repression under the guise of . He contends that post-World War II U.S. politics were dominated by the tandem forces of and , which stifled interracial class alliances essential for . In this framework, anti-communist campaigns disrupted black-led movements, prioritizing ideological purity over material gains for the oppressed. Horne integrates race and class as inseparable, rejecting dichotomies that pit identity-based struggles against ; he argues racial enforces class divisions by granting precarious privileges to white workers while exploiting black labor. In a 2025 discussion, he rebuffed left-wing dismissals of as a diversion, insisting that race constitutes a class-inflected fault line under , where ignoring it blinds analysis to imperialism's racial logic. This position defends race-conscious organizing as complementary to, rather than competitive with, class . Concerning armed struggle, Horne portrays the Black Panthers' and communists' embrace of militancy in the and as a pragmatic response to state violence and reform's failures, linking it to broader anti-imperialist traditions. He highlights Southern California's radical ecosystem, where Panthers navigated alliances with communists and nationalists amid escalating repression, viewing armed self-defense as an extension of class-war tactics against racialized policing. Against intra-left criticisms of or , Horne underscores these efforts' role in challenging the U.S. empire's domestic bulwarks.

Scholarly Contributions

Methodological Approach

Gerald Horne employs a biographical method to reconstruct radical histories, particularly within , by focusing on individual lives to expose systemic repression and forge connections to broader anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggles. This approach recovers overlooked figures whose trajectories illuminate how state and societal forces suppressed dissent, linking personal narratives to international networks of resistance against racial and economic domination. Central to Horne's technique is rigorous archival recovery, drawing from diverse sources including national repositories and smaller international collections to establish causal mechanisms tying to capitalist imperatives and communist alternatives. His process, evolved from legal training to historical inquiry, emphasizes primary documents and oral histories to trace material origins of ideological conflicts, avoiding speculative interpretations in favor of verifiable linkages between domestic repression and global imperial dynamics. Horne frames historical developments chronologically as alternating revolutions and counter-revolutions, portraying backlashes—such as those preserving or quelling labor unrest—as deliberate reactions to egalitarian threats, with class antagonisms serving as the foundational causal layer beneath racial manifestations. This materialist orientation subordinates isolated identity factors to structural class analysis, positing economic interests as the primary engine of historical motion rather than epiphenomenal cultural or psychological elements.

Central Themes in Historical Analysis

Horne's scholarship recurrently posits the as a safeguard for racialized amid British imperial shifts toward abolition, framing U.S. as a fusion of class exploitation and to preempt multiracial alliances that threatened planter elites. This interplay extends to his analysis of domestic economies, where 's proceeds fueled infrastructural and financial growth in early , from 1800 to 1865, embedding racial capital in the republic's core institutions. He similarly interprets post-colonial states like , where communist frameworks post-1959 dismantled Jim Crow-like segregation by prioritizing class leveling over racial , contrasting with U.S. models that perpetuated divisions for imperial gain. A core motif links African American resistance to transnational anti-imperial circuits, viewing cultural expressions such as not merely as artistic output but as commodified labor under and racial capitalism from the onward, simultaneously fostering subversive networks for equity and reparative . Horne traces this to broader black mobilizations against U.S.-backed , where domestic struggles mirrored global insurgencies, as in Haitian influences on antebellum fears or alignments with decolonizing forces. Horne delineates liberalism's structural constraints in addressing , arguing its reformist domesticity cedes ground to imperial retrenchments, whereas radical internationalism—rooted in anti-capitalist —enables effective counterforces, evidenced by U.S. anti-communist interventions in that sustained Rhodesian and apartheid regimes until 1980s defeats via allied liberation fronts. This perspective underscores his causal emphasis on geopolitical reprisals, where failures to internationalize anti-racist praxis prolong domestic oppressions tied to expansionist logics.

Major Publications and Output

Horne has authored more than 30 monographs, along with over 100 scholarly articles and reviews, demonstrating a prolific output spanning domestic U.S. , labor struggles, and global anti-colonial movements. His early publications focused on intersections of race and radical politics in the United States, including Black Liberation/Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party (1994, University of Delaware Press), which chronicles the career of Benjamin Davis Jr. within the Communist Party USA. This was followed by Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (1995, University of Virginia Press), documenting the 1965 Watts riots and their immediate aftermath in Los Angeles. Subsequent works expanded to Hollywood and labor conflicts, such as Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, and Trade Unionists (2001, University of Texas Press), covering union organizing and ideological battles in the film industry. Internationally oriented books emerged prominently from the mid-2000s, including From the Barrel of a Gun: The United States and the War Against , 1965-1980 (2001, ), which examines U.S. policy toward Rhodesia's white minority regime. Race War!: and the Japanese Attack on the (2003, New York University Press) addresses racial ideologies during in . Later publications increasingly addressed slavery's transatlantic dimensions and U.S. imperialism, such as The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the of America (2014, New York University Press), focusing on enslaved people's actions during the . The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of , , and in Seventeenth-Century and the (2018, Press) traces early colonial economic structures in the . More recent titles include Jazz and Justice: Racism and the Political Economy of the Music (2020, Press), which surveys the music industry's development amid racial dynamics, and The Capital of Slavery: Washington, D.C., 1800-1865 (2025, International Publishers), detailing enslaved labor's centrality to the federal district's growth.

Reception and Critiques

Scholarly Praise and Influence

Gerald Horne was awarded the American Book Award in 2021 by the Before Columbus Foundation for The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Age of Liberty, recognizing its synthesis of global events tied to capitalism and racial oppression. This accolade underscores his role in documenting interconnected histories of marginalization, as noted in university announcements highlighting his elevation of overlooked narratives. In June 2017, the African American Intellectual History Society organized an online roundtable, "Gerald Horne's Black Radical History," featuring scholars who analyzed his emphasis on black radicals' global agency and insurgent traditions. Contributors praised his approach for centering African-descended intellectuals in revolutionary contexts, such as and anticolonial movements, thereby challenging Eurocentric framings of black history. Horne's works have garnered favorable assessments in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of American History, where End of Empires: African Americans and India (2008) was lauded for its elegant exploration of U.S.-India linkages through African American lenses, urging further transnational research. Likewise, Race to Revolution: The United States and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow (2014) earned commendation for its detailed archival tracing of U.S.-Cuban ties from the 1700s to 1959, illuminating shared racial dynamics. His scholarship has shaped discourse in African American, labor, and , with books like White Supremacy Confronted (2019) cited for integrating U.S. with southern African liberation struggles from to Mandela. Ongoing academic outreach, via podcasts such as those on The Podcast (2025) and discussions of U.S. trends (2025), reflects sustained engagement with his analyses of race, class, and empire into the mid-2020s.

Criticisms of Interpretations and Bias

Critics of Gerald Horne's historical interpretations, particularly his thesis in The Counter-Revolution of 1776 (2014) that the preserved against British abolitionist trends, have accused him of overstating reactionary motives while underemphasizing antislavery impulses and multifaceted colonial interests. Waldstreicher, in a 2022 review, contends that Horne's framework dismisses genuine antislavery advances in northern states and the enlistment of thousands of Black individuals who fought for the patriots, thereby contributing to the erosion of racial ; Waldstreicher further notes that opposition to was not distinctly stronger in Britain pre-1775 and that the placed the on an antislavery trajectory culminating in the Civil War. The World Socialist Web Site's analysis labels Horne's source interpretations as fictional, citing specific distortions such as truncating an August 1772 Virginia Gazette letter to invert its antislavery argument into a pro-slavery one, misattributing a Loyalist to revolutionary William Drayton to claim opposition to the 1772 decision, and falsely portraying as anti-abolitionist despite his later antislavery petitions and collaboration with reformers like . These critiques highlight alleged chronological errors, such as positing British abolitionism as the Revolution's driver when key events like occurred amid escalating colonial tensions, unsupported by revolutionary-era texts or archives. Horne's methodological emphasis on class struggle and has drawn charges of selective evidence, neglecting empirical markers of U.S. institutional progress such as northern states' post-Revolution emancipations (e.g., Pennsylvania's 1780 gradual abolition act, followed by full freedom in most Northern states by 1804), which confined slavery southward and enabled constitutional mechanisms for its eradication via the 13th Amendment in 1865. Critics from Marxist perspectives, including analyses in Midwestern Marx, argue this approach retreats from materialist dialectics by inadequately engaging prior scholarship on the Revolution's bourgeois-progressive elements and misreading colonial debates—such as interpreting anti-slavery critiques of as endorsements of the system—thus prioritizing racial-imperial backlashes over contradictory advances like the ideological commitments to that fueled domestic . In broader works on Black history, Horne's attribution of key advances to communist organizing—such as in labor and anti-lynching campaigns—has been implicitly questioned for underplaying liberal reforms and individual agency, as mainstream narratives credit organizations like the with pivotal legal victories (e.g., , 1954, via Thurgood Marshall's strategy) and post-World War II legislative gains under the 1948 Truman desegregation orders, which leveraged electoral pressures rather than solely radical agitation. This interpretive bias, rooted in Horne's Marxist framework, is seen by detractors as portraying foundational U.S. events as inherently reactionary without balancing data on free-market incentives for industrialization that reduced Southern slavery's viability by the or the constitutional order's adaptability in addressing grievances through amendments and court rulings.

References

  1. https://www.uh.edu/class/history/faculty-and-staff/horne_g/index.php
  2. https://archives.nypl.org/scm/23310
  3. https://www.intpubnyc.com/book-author/gerald-horne/
  4. https://www.uh.edu/class/history/news/history-newsletter-october-2024.pdf
  5. https://www.midwesternmarx.com/articles/a-critique-of-gerald-hornes-the-counterrevolution-of-1776-a-case-study-of-the-us-lefts-retreat-from-materialist-history-by-marius-trotter
  6. https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.18574/nyu/9781479811458.003.0004/html
  7. https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%257CA261319707&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=15481867&p=AONE&sw=w
  8. https://peoplesworld.org/article/gerald-horne-endows-international-publishers-research-prize-on-indigenous-dispossession-and-black-oppression/
  9. https://monthlyreview.org/gerald-horne-from-a-jim-crow-hospital-to-the-american-book-award/
  10. https://www.stlamerican.com/news/local-news/gerald-horne-of-plenty/
  11. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23518612
  12. https://blackagendareport.com/imperialism-and-apocalypse-interview-gerald-horne
  13. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5323/jafriamerhist.96.2.0215
  14. https://archives.nypl.org/scl/186710
  15. https://www.blackagendareport.com/essay-who-are-enemies-affirmative-action-gerald-horne-1980
  16. https://uh.edu/class/aas/faculty/affiliate/horne/
  17. https://www.uh.edu/class/aas/news/archive/2025/aas-new-faculty/
  18. https://www.kintespace.com/rasx36.html
  19. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-long-american-counter-revolution/
  20. https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/100/5/1712/94896
  21. https://www.amazon.com/Black-Liberation-Red-Scare-Communist/dp/0717808629
  22. https://mronline.org/2022/10/08/for-african-americans-employing-a-radical-internationalist-perspective-is-not-a-luxury-but-a-necessity/
  23. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2WzesF2vzY
  24. https://www.intpubnyc.com/browse/white-supremacy-confronted-u-s-imperialism-vs-the-liberation-of-southern-africa-from-rhodes-to-mandela/
  25. https://convergencemag.com/articles/the-white-republic-response-by-gerald-horne/
  26. https://www.blackagendareport.com/gerald-horne-discusses-his-book-capital-slavery-washington-dc-1800-1865
  27. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCNiXn_0nho
  28. https://www.aaihs.org/black-radicalism-repression-and-the-horne-biographical-method/
  29. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5323/jafriamerhist.96.2.0236
  30. https://poorprolesalmanac.substack.com/p/challenging-historical-narratives
  31. https://www.intpubnyc.com/browse/armed-struggle/
  32. https://www.democracynow.org/2024/8/30/black_august_armed_struggle_prof_gerald
  33. https://www.aaihs.org/revolution-and-counter-revolution-toward-a-new-interpretive-framework/
  34. https://utpress.utexas.edu/9780292731387/
  35. https://www.aaihs.org/gerald-hornes-insurgent-african-diaspora/
  36. https://online.ucpress.edu/jpms/article/32/4/160/114304/Review-Jazz-and-Justice-Racism-and-the-Political
  37. https://thisishell.com/interviews/1625-gerald-horne
  38. https://blackagendareport.com/african-americans-employing-radical-internationalist-perspective-not-luxury-necessity
  39. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18640850-the-counter-revolution-of-1776
  40. https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/69929.Gerald_Horne
  41. https://www.intpubnyc.com/browse/capital-of-slavery/
  42. https://monthlyreview.org/watch-gerald-hornes-american-book-award-acceptance-speech/
  43. https://www.aaihs.org/tag/horne/
  44. https://monthlyreview.org/black-perspectives-online-roundtable-gerald-hornes-black-radical-history-june-5-10/
  45. https://www.aaihs.org/comrades-in-the-struggle-for-black-freedom-gerald-horne-and-web-du-bois/
  46. https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/96/2/609/728196
  47. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.5323/jafriamerhist.95.1.0112
  48. https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/102/3/826/1792417
  49. https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/126/2/768/6365107
  50. https://blackstudiespodcast.com/2025/01/17/gerald-horne/
  51. https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/professor-gerald-horne-on-global-politics-u-s-trends/id1533859805?i=1000714824482
  52. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/18/horn-m18.html
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