Conversation

We Know It Well: Red Scare at CUNY and the Archival Politics of Dissent

Mon, May 4, 2026

6:00 PM–8:00 PM

Proshansky Auditorium, CUNY Graduate Center. Free and open to the public. Please register to attend.

Join archivists, activists, and scholars for an evening of study and strategizing for resisting the new McCarthyism on college campuses. This panel discussion features Mariame Kaba, Jeanne Theoharis, Marianne LaBatto, and Ted Schmiedeler, moderated by Shana L. Redmond, and is on the history of the Red Scare at CUNY, the importance of collecting and preserving our stories in times of political upheaval, and archival strategies for navigating the present conjuncture.

Throughout the 1930s, students and faculty from City College, Hunter College, Brooklyn College, and Queens College – the four senior colleges in New York City before their consolidation as the City University of New York (CUNY) – were part of a broad base of leftist intellectuals and dissidents responding to the economic conditions of the Depression, the growing threat of fascism, and political repression by their schools’ administrations. They demonstrated and organized against heightening militarism abroad, social and economic injustice at home, and fascism everywhere.

During World War II, fears of Communist subversion coalesced into a series of investigations into the personal beliefs and associations of New York City’s public school and municipal college teachers. The techniques used against New York State teachers and CUNY faculty were to find new life in the next wave of anti-communist investigations known as McCarthyism.

This event is organized to coincide with the publication of Red Scare at CUNY: A Research Guide, a comprehensive guide to archival collections documenting anti-communist repression of faculty, staff, and students at CUNY, and is co-sponsored by the CUNY Digital History Archive, the Mina Rees Library, the American Social History Project, the Center for the Humanities, PS2, and PSC/CUNY. Support for this program is provided by the Cultivating Archives & Institutional Memory project, a 3-year project to explore and strengthen archives across CUNY’s 26 campuses funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and The Radio in the Orchard (TRiO)— a radical rehearsal in scholarly and creative futures.

About the Panelists

Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator, librarian/archivist, curator, zinemaker and prison industrial complex (PIC) abolitionist who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. Kaba co-leads Interrupting Criminalization, an organization she co-founded with Andrea Ritchie in 2018. She is the author of the New York Times Bestseller We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Books, 2021) & the National Bestseller Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care with Kelly Hayes (Haymarket, 2023) among several other books that offer support and tools for repair, transformation, and moving toward a future without incarceration and policing. Mariame has founded and co-founded a number of projects and organizations including Sojourners for Justice Press, For The People Leftist Library Project (FTP) and the NYC Public Library Action Network (PLAN).

Dr. Jeanne Theoharis is the author or co-author of thirteen books on the civil rights and Black Power movements and the contemporary politics of race in the US. Her newest book is King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr’s Life of Struggle Outside the South. Her biography The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks won a 2014 NAACP Image Award & the Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. The book was turned into a documentary directed by Johanna Hamilton and Yoruba Richen and executive produced by Soledad O’Brien for Peacock where she served as a consulting producer. The documentary was awarded a Peabody Award and a Television Academy Honor Award. Her book A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History won the 2018 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize for Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Nation, The Atlantic, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Marianne LaBatto is the Associate Archivist at the Brooklyn College Archives and Special Collections. A Brooklyn College (BA, MA) and Queens College (MLS) alumna, Marianne has worked in the Archives since 1995. Her work includes organizing collections, and ensuring the preservation of historical documents, photographs, and records related to the College and Brooklyn’s history. She supervises archival projects and interns and helps researchers and students access historical collections. Marianne has also written blog posts and educational materials about Brooklyn College history.

Ted Schmiedeler is a senior at Columbia University and the former Station Manager and former Head Archivist of WKCR 89.9 FM, Columbia’s student-run radio station. During his tenure as Station Manager, Ted contributed to WKCR’s coverage of the 2024 Columbia Gaza Solidarity Encampment.

About the Moderator

Shana L. Redmond thinks and creates at the intersection of music, identity, and power. She is the author of Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (NYU Press, 2014) and Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson (Duke University Press, 2020), which received a 2021 American Book Award as well as other honors. She has written album liner notes, essays, and reviews for labels like Verve and Sony, and for popular media, including NPR, BBC, and Mother Jones. She is currently writing Dark Prelude: Black Life Before Mourning, a speculative account of Black listening before state violence.

Redmond is professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity & Race at Columbia University in New York City and Past President of the American Studies Association (2023-2024). She is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow.

This event is sponsored by the Cultivating Archives and Institutional Memory Project, with support from TRiO: The Radio in the Orchard; the American Social History Project: Center for Media and Learning; and PSC CUNY, PS2, the Mina Rees Library, and the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center.