A Blacklist Education
American History, a Family Mystery, and a Teacher Under Fire
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- $26.99
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- $26.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Smith (The Garden of Invention) discovers that her father was purged and blacklisted, alongside hundreds of other teachers, by the New York City Board of Education in this devastating and doggedly researched investigation. Puzzled by memories of her father being out of work when she was a child in the 1950s, Smith begins to piece together, through details gleaned from heavily redacted municipal archives, how Saul Schur became a target of the Red Scare. The son of Jewish immigrants, Schur was an exemplary high school teacher who in 1939 reported another teacher, Timothy Murphy, for beating students and discriminating against Italians, African Americans, and Jews. Schur and others who'd filed complaints were tagged as potentially subversive; these records would later be used against them, as Smith is able to trace. Schur served in the army during WWII, returned to teaching, and spearheaded efforts to combat school overcrowding. His activism and his involvement in the city's teachers union—branded communist by the antisemitic Catholic newspaper Social Justice—made him a target for investigation. Under pressure to confess and name fellow communists, Schur resigned. Smith evocatively ties her impressive archival sleuthing to memories of her father's disillusionment: "Raised to revere the power of education and... democratic equality," he "did not just lose his job. He was robbed of his ideals." Readers will be engrossed.
