Read a Banned Book for Freedom

October 3 - 9, 2007 by Maya Harris, The Post Newspaper

Americans have so much access to information today that we presume we’re free to read, watch or hear anything we set our hearts on.  Books, radio broadcasts, newspapers, the Internet, television shows, movies, they’re all there for the taking.  It’s easy to forget that there are constant attempts by individuals, interest groups and government bodies to decide what we should be hearing, watching or reading.

The American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom has recorded about 10,000 book challenges since 1990—formal requests to libraries and schools for books to be banned.  For every recorded challenge, four or five likely go unreported.

This constant threat of censorship prompted the ALA in 1982 to begin annually commemorating “Banned Books Week.”  This year, it runs from September 29 through October 6.

Right here in Oakland in 1984, there was an attempt to ban Alice Walker’s Pulitzer-prize-winning book, “The Color Purple,” from an Oakland High School honors class because of its “troubling ideas about race relations, man’s relationship to God, African history, and human sexuality.”  The book was cleared for reading only after nine months of debate.  However, Walker’s book has not fared as well in some other places.  It was banned in a Pennsylvania school district in 1992 and from the Jackson County, West Virginia school libraries in 1997.

Other renowned African-American authors among the repeatedly banned or challenged in the United States include Lorraine Hansberry’s play “A Raisin in the Sun,” which was restricted by the Ogden, Utah school district because of complaints from an anti-pornography group.  Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” is frequently challenged because of her description of being raped as a young girl.  Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” has been banned or challenged in schools and libraries in Georgia, Florida and Maryland.  Morrison’s “Beloved” has been attacked in Florida and Maine, and her book “The Bluest Eye” has also faced challenges.

History teaches us repeatedly that democracies are threatened not because people read books others may find objectionable, outrageous or rebellious.  Rather, the real danger to free societies comes from those efforts to suppress ideas instead of confronting them with alternative points of view.  A hallmark of dictatorships throughout history has been to ban books that failed to support the “official” view.  It is no accident that among Adolf Hitler’s earliest acts in consolidating power in pre-war Germany was to ban certain books with whose message he disagreed.

“Books and ideas,” President Lyndon Johnson once remarked, “are the most effective weapons against intolerance and ignorance.”  The First Amendment guarantees each of us the right to express ourselves and our ideas in books.  But we also have the right to ignore books with which we don’t agree or circulate books with content we prefer.  That’s the essence of a free and open society.

So celebrate our nation’s civil liberties.  Read a banned book this week.

For a list of the Ten Most Banned Books, visit http://www.ala.org/bbooks.