—Alice
Walker, The Color Purple
Do you find the above
passage shocking?
Are
you feeling outraged?
Indignant?
We’ll give you a moment
. . .
Alice Walker’s The Color Purple is one of the most
heart-wrenching and celebrated novels in literature. And thanks to “offensive”
passages like the one above—it also one of the most challenged.
On September 23, Oldsmar
Public Library will join libraries and schools across the nation to celebrate
“Banned Books Week,” a week-long ode to our first amendment rights to free
speech and the expression of ideas—even those sometimes considered “unpopular”
with the masses.
From the 24-29, the Circulation
Desk will host a “Banned Books” display where patrons are encouraged to “get
caught” reading a banned book and take a mug shot celebrating their own fight
against censorship.
All the titles featured
have been challenged, restricted, banned, and even burned since their initial
publication. In fact, in 1978, an instructor at Freemont High School in St.
Anthony was even terminated for advocating One
Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to his students. According to Judith Krug of
the American Library Association (ALA) in an interview with NPR: “They’re not afraid of the book; they’re afraid of the ideas.”
A great majority of the
books finding themselves on “banned books” lists every year are also hailed as classics
of literature—many having won awards or considered to be an integral part of
the American canon. One such book, To
Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, has gotten quite cozy in its banned
notoriety, finding itself a “marked” book for over fifty years now.
According to Business
Insider, Lee herself once famously responded to a proposed ban of her novel in
1966, writing a letter to the editor of the Richmond
News Leader, that, “Recently
I have received echoes down this way of the Hanover County School Board’s
activities, and what I’ve heard makes me wonder if any of its members can
read.”
Her charge, as it turns out, isn’t so far off
the money. According to Marshall University, one parent admitted during a meeting discussing the ban of Toni
Morrison’s Beloved—to not having
read the entire book!
Thankfully, due to the efforts of librarians,
schoolteachers, booksellers, and patrons like you, those voices in the fight
for intellectual freedom have far out-cried any seeking to suppress. Perhaps
summing it up best, is a statement found on ABA (American Booksellers
Association) released from the Kid’s Right to Read Project (KRRP) during a challenge
of Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a
Wallflower:
“(He) has every right to feel this way about
how he seeks to raise his own children. But the relevant law prevents school
administrators from granting one parent control over the education of other
children, or from privileging the moral values of some parents over others.”
So this upcoming week at Oldsmar Public
Library, come celebrate your Constitutional rights to read and the freedom to think
for yourself!
Come check out a banned book! Go on . . .
We
dare you.
Image by: Simon & Schuster Via BuzzFeed
*If your organization is currently undergoing a challenge or ban against a particular work of literature, you can seek confidential support from the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom by reporting online at http://www.ala.org/tools/challengesupport/report or calling 1-800-545-2433, ext. 4226.
Written by Brittany Baum
