Overview

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.  

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9781978845053

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Reviews

""The year Jane S. Smith entered kindergarten, the Red Scare came for her father, a talented teacher whose only crime was to believe that public schools ought to be fair and just. In her moving new book, Smith sets her father's story inside a searing history of those dangerous times, which bear a terrifying resemblance to our own."" -- Kevin Boyle * author of The Shattering: America in the 1960s * ""With uncanny timing, acclaimed author Jane S. Smith recently discovered her deceased father's long-hidden wound: as a devoted teacher, he was driven from his calling by the 'fear profiteers' of the McCarthy era. A Blacklist Education is a must-read for anyone seeking to make sense of the venomous attacks on educators in our time—and for all those who appreciate a well-told detective tale."" -- Nancy MacLean * author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America * ""In this chilling and timely investigation of her father's experience as a New York City public school teacher blacklisted for his political beliefs, Smith meticulously uncovers a family mystery—personal, political, and searing in its resonance. A Blacklist Education is gorgeous and sad; as it turns out, it is also very urgent."" -- Rebecca Traister * author of Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger * ""A beautifully written account of Smith's discovery of the impact of McCarthyism on her father, forced to resign his position as a New York City school teacher because of his early political affiliations. The book reads like a mystery as Smith plumbs the archives to uncover a long-held family secret. Part memoir, part historical account, A Blacklist Education has striking resonance with the attacks on education we are witnessing today."" -- Joan W. Scott * Institute for Advanced Study *

Author Information

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.  

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