This is a poignant tale of remembering parents in trouble, careers dashed and of steady FBI harassment. The end is not happy, except that the boy survives and makes his own life as an admired cultural commentator on radio.
When Communist writer Albert Maltz was blacklisted in the McCarthyist era, no commercial publisher in the U. S. would touch his novel A Tale of One January. A new edition slated for US distribution means his 70-year blacklist will finally end.
Telling the story of a slave revolt in ancient Rome, the 1960 film Spartacus was penned by two blacklisted Communist writers. Its arrival in theaters was a middle finger to the McCarthyist witch hunt in Hollywood and publishing.
In the postwar-Cold War period U.S. corporations used anti-communist hysteria to attack the labor movement. Salt of the Earth - tells the story of heroic Mexican American mineworkers, and the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers.
Pete Seeger would have turned 100 today. Few figures in American history have lived as influential and deeply radical lives as he did. Let's celebrate him today.
He first became a target of government snoops merely because he was upset about a racist and unconstitutional idea and, as a private citizen, wrote a letter about it.
After World War II, the Red Scare built the careers of redbaiters like Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon while undermining the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and stifling prospects for progressive politics in America, a tale touched on by the movie, “Trumbo.”
Steven Salaita, an Arab-American Professor of American Indian Studies, was just fired from his job for tweeting criticisms of the Israeli massacre in Gaza.
Barzman wrote the 2003 autobiography "The Red and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate" and has been a leader in getting blacklisted writers' credits restored to films that were released with a "front" name. She'll be appearing at the Wilder theatre on her 94th birthday Sept. 15 for a screening of the 1946 drama "The Locket," for which she recently received writing credit.
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