The Red scares and Communist hysteria of the late 1940s and early 1950s destroyed reputations, lives, and livelihoods, as Matilda West’s situation proved. The fear of Communism was a bonanza for segregationists like Virginia senator Harry Byrd. Byrd painted the epithet “Communist” on everyone and everything that threatened to upend his view of “traditional” American customs and values, which included white supremacy. (One sequence in the film He May Be a Communist not so subtly showed a dramatized protest march in which participants held signs reading END KKK TERROR and NO WAR BASES IN
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