Central York School District in York, Pennsylvania, recently voted to overturn its ban on more than 250 books, documentaries, and articles about race, racism, anti-racism, diversity, and equality. The ban, which had been implemented last year by an all-white school board, was reversed after students and community members spent weeks protesting the board’s list of banned educational resources, including a children’s book about Rosa Parks, Malala Yousafzai’s autobiography, and CNN’s Sesame Street town hall on racism.
Although the ban on these materials was overturned, this controversy is just one example in the long history of censorship of written materials. In fact, censorship has been so commonplace that, in 1982, a coalition of diverse organizations from across the globe launched an international celebration called Banned Books Week to promote the freedom to read and counter the dangers of censorship. This year, the week of recognition for censored materials is September 26 through October 2.
Banned Books Week was launched around the time of the ruling in a 1982 Supreme Court case, Island Trees School District v. Pico. After a New York school board received complaints about nine books available in the library — such as Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and books by Black authors, including Langston Hughes’s Best Short Stories by Negro Writers, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, and Eldrige Cleaver’s Soul on Ice — those books were removed from circulation. The complaint referred to them as “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy.” But high school senior Steven Pico and four other students pushed back, saying that “passages in the books offended [the group’s] social, political, and moral tastes and not because the books, taken as a whole, were lacking in educational value.” Pico and his fellow students took their case to the Supreme Court and won. The court ruled that "local school boards may not remove books from school libraries simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to ‘prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.’”
The censorship of books has an extensive, complex history. In 35 AD, there was an attempt to ban The Odyssey because the emperor of Ancient Rome, Caligula, believed it expressed Greek ideals of freedom. Around 213 BC, Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang burned books in an attempt to erase Confucian scholarship, criticisms, and the documented record of the past. In 1931, Alice in Wonderland was banned in China’s Hunan Province because animals used human language in the story, and “it was disastrous to put animals and human beings on the same level.” Prior to that, Alice in Wonderland was banned in New Hampshire for allegedly promoting sexual fantasies and masturbation; later, in the 1960s, it was banned in the U.S. for allegedly promoting drug use.
A particularly grim example of censorship took place in 1933, the year the Nazis came into power in Germany. University students in 34 German towns burned over 25,000 books written by Jewish authors, including Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, and some American authors too. The students burned these books while giving the Nazi salute; and, in a speech to thousands of people in Berlin, the German minister of public enlightenment and propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, said the moment heralded the end of “the era of extreme Jewish intellectualism.” At the time, New York Tribune journalist Walter Lippmann called it a symbol of “the moral and intellectual character of the Nazi regime,” and said it was symbolic of “a government in Germany which means to teach its people that their salvation lies in violence." Less than 10 years after this massive book burning, referred to as “the Action Against the Un-German Spirit,” the Holocaust began.
In the past decade, Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Beloved, R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series, Maya Angelou’s autobiographical I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Cheryl Kilodavis’s My Princess Boy have all made the American Library Association’s list of the 100 most challenged books. One recently released work of writing to be challenged is the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project, by New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. A number of Republican lawmakers have tried to ban the teaching of her work, which explores the profound impact slavery has had on the U.S. At the Times’s launch event, which I attended, Hannah-Jones told the audience, “This project is, above all, an attempt to set the record straight.”
So much of the content in banned books is an attempt to set the record straight, and so often those who ban or burn books are seeking to destroy history, ideas, and narratives that challenge the authority of those in power. Fear of those with curious minds has taken center stage with the discourse about teaching critical race theory in classrooms. But this fear was also on full display back in the 1990s, during the investigation into Monica Lewinsky’s relationship with President Bill Clinton. Lists of Lewinsky’s book purchases from various Washington bookstores were subpoenaed, as investigators tried to confirm whether or not she had purchased Nicholson Baker’s erotic novel, Vox. As long as we’re living in a world that’s plagued by white supremacy and patriarchy, books that educate about racism, question institutions, or merely celebrate those who aren’t cisgender, heterosexual, white men are at risk of being challenged.
I was an eight-year-old watching Disney Channel’s The Famous Jett Jackson when I first learned about the censorship of books. In the episode “Saving Mr. Dupree,” the star character’s teacher is relieved of his teaching duties and arrested for teaching a banned book called Fahrenheit 451. Afterwards, his students protested and were arrested. I remember being so confused by this storyline that had been, to my surprise, inspired by the very real book bans taking place nationwide. It felt like a stark contrast to the American exceptionalism with which I was being indoctrinated. In my young mind I asked, What about all the “freedoms” we have here?
These restrictions on literature are restrictions on truth. They’re reminders of the stipulations set in place when it comes to “whose truth” we amplify, teach, and give life to. The attempt to ban books is an attempt to erase the stories in them. But what can’t be erased are the people who hold these stories. With all the First Amendment talk by Republicans who throw around complaints of “cancel culture,” you’d think they’d get it by now: The books are just the vessel, and the people won’t be silent.
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