Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights, and the New York City Teachers Union by Clarence Taylor (review)

Clarence Taylor, a professor of history at the City University of New York, has produced a well written and deeply researched history of the New York City Teachers Union, Local 5 of the American Federation of Teachers (aft). Founded in 1916, the Teachers Union (tu) initially sought professional status for its members but when communists gained control of the organization in the mid 1930s, the tu became involved in wider political campaigns. Taylor is by no means the first to write about the Teachers Union. Celia Lewis Zitron’s The New York City Teachers Union, 1916–1964: A Story of Educational and Social Commitment (1968), Robert W. Iversen’s The Communists and the Schools (1959), and Marjorie Murphy’s Blackboard Unions: The aftand the nea, 1900–1980 (1990) have all discussed the communist attachments of the Teachers Union, its civil rights record and the opposition the organization faced in the 1940s and 1950s. Taylor has unearthed new information about the activities of the Teachers Union and the severe repression it endured, but he says too little about the politics of the organization and overstates the local’s significance in the history of teacher unionism.

Much of Reds at the Blackboard details the Teachers Union’s excellent record on civil rights. Indeed, as Taylor is at pains to point out, the Union fought for racial justice more than most other teacher unions and unions in general. The tu campaigned for more African American teachers in the classroom, exposed racist principals, and opposed policies of the Board of Education that kept the school system segregated. Far ahead of its time, the Teachers Union made a special effort to eliminate racist textbooks from the New York City public schools and to promote black history in the school curriculum. To improve the lives of their black students both within the classroom and in the wider community, the tu built alliances with civil rights organizations and local parent groups.

The Teachers Union faced enormous opposition from anti-communists and those who wanted the organization to focus on bread-and-butter issues not social activism. The aft revoked its charter in 1941 because of communist influence in the local and although it subsequently affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (cio), the cio ousted them in 1950. Continually under police surveillance and encumbered with informants and spies in the schools and in the union, the Teachers Union found it difficult to prosper. Nearly four hundred members were fired or forced to leave the profession during the 1950s. The United Federation of Teachers (uft), formed in 1960 by young militant teachers who sought to gain collective bargaining rights to improve teachers’ salaries and benefits, competed with the Teachers Union for members. In November 1960 the uft organized the first New York City’s teachers’ strike, leading to the first collective bargaining election for public schoolteachers in a major US city. In the ensuing election in December 1961, the uft easily defeated the Teachers Union, which then disbanded in 1964.

Clarence Taylor does an excellent job of highlighting the heroic activities of politically engaged teachers. Hundreds if not thousands of New York City teachers, many of them Communist Party members, tried in the most difficult of circumstances and often at great cost to their careers to remedy the racial injustices they found in the schools and in the wider society. They faced persistent scrutiny in the classroom as newspapers, parents, the police, and the Board of Education tried to limit their academic freedom. Teachers found that they had few rights as many lost their jobs simply because of their political views or affiliations.

To really produce a comprehensive history of the New York City Teachers Union, Taylor needed to spend more time examining the nature of the Soviet Union and Stalinist politics that the leaders of the Teachers Union supported. It is admirable for a union to be...