In the fall of 1947, the Eagle Rock Council for Civic Unity scheduled a talk by Langston Hughes to be held at Occidental College’s eight-hundred-seat Thorne Hall on March 31, 1948. But days before Hughes was scheduled to arrive on campus, the Los Angeles college’s board of trustees hastily called a meeting and canceled his talk.

Hughes was one of America’s most well-known black writers, with many volumes of poetry, short stories, magazine articles, radio scripts, a Broadway play, a Broadway musical, a Hollywood screenplay, song lyrics, and a popular newspaper column under his belt. But this was the dawn of McCarthyism, and when the trustees looked at Hughes, all they saw was a Red.

The incident illustrates how the insidious post–World War II Red Scare worked. In a period of escalating tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, conservative politicians, newspapers, and others sought to frighten people into thinking that Communists were brainwashing Americans and subverting our democracy by infiltrating key institutions — chiefly labor unions, Hollywood and television, universities, and the media. They orchestrated investigations and hearings to identify so-called left-wing agitators. If those identified refused to comply — that is, to say that they were Communists and to inform on their radical friends — they would likely lose their livelihoods. Hollywood producers, TV and radio stations, record companies, colleges, local boards of education, book publishers, and concert halls fired or refused to hire those whose names appeared on notorious lists of so-called “subversives.”