"Throughout the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose name is often used as shorthand for an entire era, was ruining lives by insisting that dangerous communist zealots had infiltrated federal offices, newspapers, labor unions, and the armed forces, working to undermine America. What is almost forgotten is that several state and local school systems, and especially that of New York City, the largest school system in the country, carried out parallel hunts for alleged subversives in the virulently anti-communist years after World War II. The special investigator appointed by New York City's Board of Education operated with far less publicity than the red-hunting members of Congress, and many of the records are still not open to the public, but for the teachers involved, and for the future of public education, the impact was just as great. Between 1949 and 1954, almost a thousand New York City teachers were targeted for special inquiries by the city's Board of Education, often because of uncorroborated reports from paid informers or anonymous accusers. One of those teachers was Saul Schur, the author's father and a high school English teacher at Samuel Gompers Vocational High School in the South Bronx. Until he died, and she inherited a puzzling collectionof documents in a crammed accordion file, she knew nothing about him being blacklisted. As Smith unraveled the mystery of why and how her father became blacklisted, she also found a new understanding of the changeable, disputed, often resentful attitudestoward education in a country facing the challenges of that messy condition called democracy. The schoolhouse has always been a contested space, a battlefield for proxy wars of class, religion, race, gender, and other issues polarizing the adult world. People in power, and particular people anxious about losing that power, have always resisted efforts to expand the borders of what is taught, who can teach it, and who should be allowed to learn. The anti-communist frenzy of the 1940s and 1950s enabled mid-twentieth century American political conservatives to reshape schools in an image that better reflected their own biases, controlling who could teach and which books could or could not be read. For almost two decades, people in power were in the businessof repression and exclusion. In other words, it was a time very much like today"-- Provided by publisher.
A mysterious file of family papers triggers a journey through the dark days of political purges in the 1950s. Jane S. Smith tells the story of the anticommunist witch hunt that sent shockwaves through New York City’s public schools when more than a thousand teachers were targeted by Board of Education investigators—including her own father.
In A Blacklist Education, a mysterious file of family papers triggers a journey through the dark days of political purges in the 1950s. Jane S. Smith tells the story of the anticommunist witch hunt that sent shockwaves through New York City’s public schools as more than a thousand teachers were targeted by Board of Education investigators. Her father was one of them—a fact she learned only long after his death.
Beginning in 1949, amid widespread panic about supposed communist subversion, investigators questioned teachers in their homes, accosted them in their classrooms, and ordered them to report to individual hearings. The interrogations were not published, filmed, open to the public, or reported in the news. By 1956, hundreds of New York City teachers had been fired, often because of uncorroborated reports from paid informers or anonymous accusers.
Most of the targeted teachers resigned or retired without any public process, their names recorded only in municipal files and their futures never known. Their absence became the invisible outline of an educational void, a narrowing of thought that pervaded classrooms for decades. In this highly personal story, family lore and childhood memory lead to restricted archives, forgotten inquisitions, and an eerily contemporary campaign to control who could teach and what was acceptable for students to learn.
