The District Goes Radical in the 1960s
Savio and Bettina Aptheker (a)
Another District resident during the FSM, among many other participants who lived in the District, was Bettina Aptheker. She inherited the apartment at 2224 Roosevelt Ave. from Mike Myerson and Deanna Burke.
Her parents, Fay and Herbert Aptheker, were members of the U.S. Communist Party, her mother a union organizer, and her father, often called the party's "leading theoretician." He was also a radical historian and the literary executor of the papers of W.E.B. DuBois.
According to Aptheker, "[She] grew up in the 1950s striving to be the "perfect daughter" as [her] embattled parents bravely stood up to the McCarthy hearings, anti- Communist purges and trials and the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In childhood [she] assumed that [she] would inherit [her] father's dream and further his ambition."
She tells her story, including sexual abuse at the hands of her father, in her 2006 memoir INTIMATE POLITICS: How I Grew Up Red, Fought For Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel.