Book Review

Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights, and the NY City Teachers Union 

Book Review

by Jim Vail

Reds at the Blackboard is a book about the communists who ran the New York City Teachers Union until the US government purged its leaders and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) took control in the 1960's.

The book was written by Professor Clarence Taylor and published in 2011 the year after CORE became the new leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union.

A lot of what the NY Teachers Union fought for in the 20's and 30's for civil rights and against racism has shaped the ideology of the CTU leadership today.

The NY Teachers Union (TU) had an unofficial partnership with the American Communist Party and the Soviet Union which led to the huge purge by the United States government despite the union's historic fight against racism in the schools that had popular support. 

The TU led the fight to form community schools aligned with the black and Latinx parents and civil rights organizations to get more resources, fought to improve the working conditions for the teachers and campaigned for broader social concerns.

Core has organized several strikes to fight for these same issues today.

The author describes how the NY Board of Education fought against the TU and used the Red Squad and other undercover agents who worked with the board to bring down the union. 

The Teachers Union said its opposition to censorship and racism was opposed by "dangerous right-wing fanatics that wanted to take away the people's constitutionals rights."

Core is using the same playbook today denouncing right-wing Republican attacks on unions and public schools.

The strong public support for the TU v. the US government crack down (calling the TU an agency of a foreign power) revealed a power struggle between the two groups. The Soviet Union was the first government in history to declare its mission to oppose racism - a significant challenge to the US and other colonial powers who had enslaved and exploited their black and brown colonial subjects.

The communist teachers union in NY fought against racist textbooks that stressed the superiority of whites and the inferiority of blacks calling on the Board of Education to remove biased textbooks from its approved list. In 1951 the board removed eight offensive books from its curriculum thanks to the union's fight! 

The TU called out a vicious anti-labor publication called T-Model Tommy which was on the board's approved list for high schools. Tommy the hero in the book is a strike breaker portrayed in a positive light, while the strikers are depicted as "disreputable characters." The union said the book failed to discussed what caused the strike and only reinforced anti-union and anti-labor sentiment. They appealed to the parents who were workers and the labor unions, and the publisher agreed to remove the book.

They called for the ban of textbooks that contained racist, anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant passages and campaigned for the study of black history which would provide psychological protection against white racism.

This is a fight that Core continues to this day with its emphasis on Black Lives Matter.

When Mayor Rahm Emanuel was elected in 2011 he took direct aim at the CTU. He immediately rescinded the teacher's 4% raise in the last year of its contract claiming the city did not have the money. This infuriated the teachers enough to go on strike.

Emanuel called the CTU a bunch of Trotskyites. The question many could ask is did he know the difference between the different socialist groups who helped form the original Core party.

The Communist Party was split after Soviet Union party leader Joseph Stalin purged many including the Revolutionary Leader Leon Trotsky who was exiled and developed his own following.

The International Socialist Organization or ISO (today disbanded) had many followers in the CTU. They followed the Trotsky line that called for an international revolution, denouncing the Stalin led Soviet State. Other CORE founders were members of various Trotsky-aligned socialist groups such as Socialist Alternative and Solidarity and Stalinist-Maoist groups such as Freedom Road and the Progressive Labor Party. There were others who were members of smaller offshoots of the American Communist Party.

Disagreements between the groups continue to this day, including whether socialist groups should support the Democrats or work outside the political system dominated by the two ruling parties.