check two. Harriet Beecher Stowe. judy blume. William Shakespeare. These names share more than just a legacy of classic literature and a place in school curricula: they are just a few of the many authors whose work has been banned from classrooms over the years for content deemed controversial, obscene, or otherwise objectionable. The authorities.
The book ban is back in the headlines. Earlier this year, Utah passed a state law that removes “sensitive material” from classrooms. Meanwhile, a group of Georgian moms have drawn attention for attending school board meetings and reading aloud passages from books they find objectionable, such as extremely loud & by jonathan safran foer; incredibly close, stating that they are “pornographic materials”. (Did Ovid’s erotic poetry lead him into exile from Rome?)
You are reading: Books banned in the us
Although censorship is as old as writing, its goals have changed over the centuries. Here’s how the ban on books in the United States came to be, dating back to when some of the nation’s territories were British colonies, and how censorship affects modern readers today.
religion in the early colonial era
Most of the early book bans were driven by religious leaders, and when Britain founded its colonies in the Americas, it had a long history of censoring books. in 1650, prominent massachusetts bayside settler william pynchon published the meritorious price of our redemption, a pamphlet that argued that anyone who was obedient to god and followed christian teachings on earth could enter heaven. this went against puritan calvinist beliefs that only a special few were predestined for god’s favor.
outraged, pynchon’s fellow settlers denounced him as a heretic, burned his pamphlet, and banned him, the first such event in what would later become the us. uu. only four copies of his controversial treatise survive today.
slavery and civil war
In the first half of the 19th century, materials on the nation’s most incendiary issue, the enslavement of the people, alarmed would-be censors in the South. In the 1850s, several states had prohibited expressing anti-slavery sentiments, which abolitionist author Harriet Beecher Stowe challenged in 1851 with the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel that sought to expose the evils of slavery.
As historian Claire Parfait points out, the book was publicly burned and banned by slave owners along with other anti-slavery books. In Maryland, free black minister Sam Green was sentenced to 10 years in the state penitentiary for possessing a copy of the book.
as the civil war raged in the 1860s, the pro-slavery south continued to ban abolitionist materials, while union officials banned pro-southern literature such as john esten’s biography of stonewall jackson cook.
a war against ‘immorality’
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In 1873, the war on books turned federal with the passage of the Comstock Act, an act of Congress that made it illegal to possess “obscene” or “immoral” texts or articles or to send them through the mail. Championed by moral crusader Anthony Comstock, the laws were designed to ban both content about sexuality and birth control, which at the time was widely available through mail order.
The law criminalized the activities of birth control advocates and forced popular pamphlets like Margaret Sanger’s Family Limitation underground, restricting the spread of knowledge about contraception at a time when that open discussion of sexuality was taboo and maternal mortality among boys and girls was rampant. it remained in effect until 1936. (read more about the complex early history of abortion in the united states).
meanwhile, obscenity was also a top target in boston, the capital of the state that had sanctioned the first book burning in the us. uu. boston book censors challenged everything they deemed “indecent,” from walt whitman’s leaves of grass, which the society’s president called a “dear morsel of literary filth,” to >Farewell to Arms.
the new england watch and ward society, a private organization that included many of boston’s most elite residents, filed petitions against printed materials they found objectionable, sued booksellers, pressured law enforcement and courts to bring obscenity charges against authors, and prompted the public library to store copies of the most controversial books, including books by Balzac and Zola, in a restricted room known as hell.
In the 1920s, Boston was so well known for banning books that authors intentionally printed their books there in the hope that the inevitable ban would give them a publicity boost in other parts of the country.
schools and libraries become battlefields
Even as social mores relaxed in the 20th century, school libraries remained the site of contentious battles over what information should be available to children in an era of social progress and modernization of American society. parents and administrators confronted both fiction and nonfiction during school board and library commission meetings.
The reasons for the proposed bans varied: Some books challenged longstanding narratives about American history or social norms; others were considered problematic for their language or for their sexual or political content.
the jim crow era south was a particular hotbed for book censorship. The United Daughters of the Confederacy made several successful attempts to ban school textbooks that did not offer a comprehensive view of the South’s loss in the Civil War. There were also attempts to ban The Wedding of Rabbits, a 1954 children’s book by Garth Williams that featured a white rabbit marrying a black rabbit, because opponents felt it encouraged interracial relationships. (how the jim crow laws created “slavery by another name”.)
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These attempts at prohibition tended to have a chilling effect on librarians who feared acquiring material that might be considered controversial. but some school and public librarians began to organize instead. responded to a series of challenges against mccarthy-era books censors were encouraged by communism or socialism during the 1950s and fought attempts to ban books like huckleberry finn, i>the catcher in the rye , to kill a mockingbird and even the canterbury tales.
a constitutional right to read
In 1969, the Supreme Court weighed in on students’ right to free speech. in tinker v. Des Moines, a case involving students wearing black armbands protesting the vietnam war to school, the court ruled 7-2 that “neither teachers nor students are stripped of their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or speech at the school gate.”
In 1982, the supreme court openly addressed schoolbooks in a case involving a group of students who sued a new york school board for removing books by authors such as kurt vonnegut and langston hughes that the board deemed “anti-American, anti-Christian”. , anti-Semitic and just disgusting.”
“Local school boards may not remove books from school libraries simply because they don’t like the ideas contained in those books,” the court ruled in island tree union free school district v. pico, citing students first amendment rights.
However, librarians faced so many book challenges in the early 1980s that they created Banned Book Week, an annual event focused on the freedom to read. During Banned Book Week, the literary and library community raises awareness of commonly questioned books and First Amendment freedoms.
modern censorship
Still, book challenges are more common than ever. Between July 1, 2021 and March 31, 2022 alone, there were 1,586 book bans in 86 school districts in 26 states, affecting more than two million students, according to nonprofit Pen America. that advocates freedom of expression. Stories featuring LGBTQ+ themes or protagonists were a “primary target” of the bans, the group wrote, while other targets included books with stories about race and racism, sexual content or sexual assault, and death and pain. Texas led the charge against books; its 713 bans were almost twice as many as other states.
According to the American Library Association, the most challenged book of 2021 was Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, a memoir about what it means to be non-binary. Other books on the most questioned list include The Hate You Give by Angie Thomas and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.
pat scales, first amendment advocate, veteran south carolina middle school and high school librarian, and former chairman of the wing’s intellectual freedom committee, points out that outright censorship is only one face of book bans. Shelving books in inaccessible places, defacing them, or marking them with reading levels that put them out of reach of students also keeps books out of reach of potential readers, and challenges of any kind can create a chilling effect for librarians .
“censorship is about control,” scales wrote in 2007 in the book scales on censorship. “Intellectual freedom is about respect.”
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