"In 1950, a group of former FBI agents, with help from the FBI and Congress’s House Committee on Un-American Activities, issued a report titled “Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television.”
It listed 151 actors, writers, musicians, broadcast journalists, and others whom it claimed, often with dubious evidence at best, were part of the Communist influence in the entertainment industry — including actors Edward G. Robinson, Lee J. Cobb, Avon Long, and Orson Welles, writers Arthur Miller and Dashiell Hammett, and musical artists Leonard Bernstein, Pete Seeger, Josh White, Lena Horne, Aaron Copland, and Hughes. Many of of those listed in “Red Channels” were issued subpoenas to testify before Congress and blacklisted for refusing to cooperative with Congress’s witch-hunt.
In its section on (Langston) Hughes, the “Red Channels” report identified more than forty so-called subversive left-wing organizations and publications that Hughes had allegedly been affiliated with. These included the American Peace Mobilization, Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, American Labor Party, International Labor Defense, Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, League of American Writers, American Youth for Democracy, National Negro Congress, New Theatre League, National Council of Soviet-American Friendship, People’s Songs, the New Masses, and the Daily Worker."
SOURCE: HERE.
An excellent article from the Jacobin website.
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