A blacklist education American history, a family mystery, and a teacher under fire

Jane S. Smith

Book - 2025

"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 collection of 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 attitudes toward 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 business of repression and exclusion. In other words, it was a time very much like today"-- Provided by publisher. more