~a column by Colleen O’Brien
This is national Banned Books Week, and the headline above is the banner from a consortium [*see below], including the American Library Association, to save the banned. It is a week out of every year in which people interested in never banning books are backed up by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establish of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or ABRIDGING THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH, OR OF THE PRESS; or the right of people to peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for q redress of grievances.” [CAPS mine].”
Thousands of books have been banned in this country over our 251 years, mostly by a minor bunch of people who didn’t like the book, and there was a period from the late 1800s until mid-20th century when the federal courts could ban books if they were “pornographic,” which until the law was rescinded in 1957 banned one of the most famous books in the Western world – Ulysses, by James Joyce.
But books that were and are actually banned was and is a local problem instigated by individual parents and school boards. It is public libraries and schools from K through college in which a parent, or several parents, complain, talk to their school board or college dean and get them to ban a variety of books in their school libraries, even when the books are assigned by teachers. Sometimes those institutions of knowledge and learning agree and ban them, caving in to the people frightened by words and sentences and situations they don’t want to talk about, especially with their children. Or maybe it’s just a power move. Or righteousness. Or liking to harrumph in public.
Obviously, they know plenty about these books and have read them to find the words and sentences and topics that disturb them or cause them mental anguish; they say they are moved to ban because it is their duty to protect their children. As well as other people’s children.
They often enough get their way, to the detriment of anyone who can’t afford to buy the books. And often enough, people do whatever they can to read the book to see why it’s banned. Which banned authors love – other people want to know what titillating things are in the books, so these banned books naturally become best sellers.
The irony of it is that the banner-folks don’t know that what they accomplish does not mean the book is really banned; it’s just taken off the shelves in libraries that cave to people who are, at the least, misinformed and or uninformed, maybe frightened by reality. But the books remain in bookstores, on-line, cheap at secondhand stores, free at yard sales or borrowed from friends.
The many banned books that are classic in American literature – To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee; The Call of the Wild, by Jack London; Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck; Mark Twain and Judy Blume, in general; and The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, Charlotte’s Web and Dr. Seuss – banned!
A banned book so good it won the biggest literary prize in the world is Toni Morrison’s, The Bluest Eye, published in 1970. Morrison won the Nobel Prize for her Contribution to Literature, in 1993, 20 years after that first novel of hers was published. It’s still being banned in schools by parents and school boards. It’s increasingly being sold through our nation’s progress in telling the truth about African Americans like these real-life characters from an Ohio town in 1941.
There is another surge of book banning going on right now across the country. Nothing new. Let’s hope the banning of banned books doesn’t have to hit this Supreme Court.
- * “Banned Books Week is the annual celebration of the freedom to read. The event is sponsored by a coalition of organizations dedicated to free expression, including American Booksellers for Free Expression, American Library Association, American Society of Journalists and Authors, Amnesty International USA, Association of University Presses, Authors Guild, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Freedom to Read Foundation, GLAAD, Index on Censorship, National Book Foundation, National Coalition Against Censorship, National Council of Teachers of English, PEN America, People For the American Way Foundation, PFLAG, and Project Censored. It is endorsed by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. Banned Books Week also receives generous support from HarperCollins Publishers and Penguin Random House.” from the consortium of groups who want to ban banners.
