Harassment and Intimidation of BMC by Federal Government Revealed by Investigative Report

In 2015, an investigative report by Carolina Public Access revealed that US Government perceived Black Mountain College (BMC) as an "internal threat."  This led to a multi-year investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that found no wrong doing, but did create turmoil at the school.

Written by by John Ellison, the report states in part that:

In the early 1940s, for example, the bureau recruited an informant in a class taught by the college’s anthropology professor, Paul Radin, to spy on him, according to Radin’s FBI file. The bureau suspected that Radin, a self-professed radical leftist, was a Communist operative. 

The informant, reporting on classroom discussions, told the FBI that Radin was a staunch advocate for racial integration and indeed a Communist Party member, according to historian David Rice’s 2004 book, Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists. 

No less than Buckminster Fuller, the famous futurist and inventor who was a visiting professor at BMC in 1948 and ’49, also garnered an FBI file, which was recently released.

The report is entitled "FBI investigation of Black Mountain College revealed in newly released file" and can be read in full here.