As Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union began during the 1940s and 1950s, the US government launched its hunt to uncover domestic communism.  Using congressional hearings, archival research and published sources, this paper examines the disparate effects of the Second Red Scare among white male intellectuals, women, and African Americans. While historians have analyzed the effects of the Second Red Scare on specific professional or demographic groups, no research examines the differences in anti-communist investigations and their enduring personal and career implications across the lines of gender and race. The paper begins by examining the testimonies and public statements of white male professors accused during the academic red scare. The paper then examines Mary Dublin Keyserling's experience with anti-Communist accusations during her time as an economist in the Commerce Department of the federal government. The entirety of Keyserling’s public response comes from statements made by her husband, Leon Keyserling – President Truman’s Chief Economic Advisor from 1946-1953 – who was also a target of Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist attacks. Finally, using autobiographical sources and the secondary source analysis of historian Gerald Horne, the ideological evolutions, investigations, and post-red scare lives of W.E.B Du Bois and his wife Shirley Graham Du Bois are explored. From their experiences, the detrimental impact of the Second Red Scare on the growing civil rights movement is also evident. Throughout each section, the paper compares each individual’s experiences and subsequent career endeavors. Overall, the analysis shows how the status of prominent, white male intellectuals afforded an opportunity to retreat into an already beneficial system – an opportunity not presented to the women and African Americans accused.  Additionally, by comparing the impacts of a period of hysteria and political repression, I show how the differential treatment and constraining dichotomies created discriminatory legacies for women and African Americans.