A Blacklist Education: American History, a Family Mystery, and a Teacher Under Fire - Hardcover

by Jane S. Smith (Author)

Finalist for the Society of Midland Authors Richard Frisbie Award for Adult Nonfiction

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.

Author Biography

JANE S. SMITH's books include The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants, winner of the Caroline Bancroft Prize in Western American History, and Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vaccine, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.