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

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. (July)