UC Irvine

Progressive teachers working in Los Angeles public schools became the targets of a multi-pronged attack by anti-communist crusaders in the 1950s. This study examines the Los Angeles teacher purge as a case of formal extrajudicial punishment in which elected and appointed officials devised and implemented a complex scheme to exact economic sanctions on public school teachers for their beliefs. In this historical analysis, archival records from the Los Angeles Unified School District and the California Un-American Activities Committee, among other primary and secondary sources, reveal the machinations of an assault on the civil liberties of a select group of progressive teachers – labor union leaders advocating for racial equality in schools, housing, and the workplace.

This study explores the collaborative efforts of local and state officials who exploited the legislative powers of investigation and capitalized on a nationwide anti-communist moral panic to fire progressive teachers. These efforts were aided by a U.S. Supreme Court willing to carve out constitutional exceptions for teachers based on anti-communists’ arguments about the national security threat they posed. Because the Los Angeles teacher purge did not involve the private sector like most anti-communist firings did, the case offers a unique opportunity to scrutinize the logics of anti-communism as presented by elected and appointed officials both to the public and the judiciary and to hypothesize about the case’s contemporary implications.