Stephen King on Censorship

Photo Credit: Tabitha King

The Official Stephen King Web Site includes a column about censorship that was first published as a Guest Column in the March 20, 1992 issue of The Bangor Daily News.

While this is an older column, it is well worth reading the full text. What I found especially valuable is its advice to all parties involved in a censorship issue. This is what Stephen King would say if he felt he needed to take time out from his work to defend it.

First, to the kids: There are people in your home town who have taken certain books off the shelves of your school library. Do not argue with them; do not protest; do not organize or attend rallies to have the books put back on their shelves. Don't waste your time or your energy. Instead, hustle down to your public library, where these frightened people's reach must fall short in a democracy, or to your local bookstore, and get a copy of what has been banned. Read it carefully and discover what it is your elders don't want you to know. In many cases you'll finish the banned book in question wondering what all the fuss was about. In others, however, you will find vital information about the human condition. It doesn't hurt to remember that John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger, and even Mark Twain have been banned in this country's public schools over the last 20 years.

Second, to the parents in these towns: There are people out there who are deciding what your kids can read, and they don't care what you think because they are positive their ideas of what's proper and what's not are better, clearer than your own. Do you believe they are? Think carefully before you decide to accord the book-banners this right of cancellation, and remember that they don't believe in democracy but rather in a kind of intellectual autocracy. If they are left to their own devices, a great deal of good literature may soon disappear from the shelves of school libraries simply because good books -- books that make us think and feel -- always generate controversy.

If you are not careful and diligent about defending the right of your children to read, there won't be much left, especially at the junior-high level where kids really begin to develop a lively life of the mind, but books about heroic boys who come off the bench to hit home runs in the bottom of the ninth and shy girls with good personalities who finally get that big prom date with the boy of their dreams. Is this what you want for your kids, keeping in mind that controversy and surprise -- sometimes even shock -- are often the whetstone on which young minds are sharpened?

Third, to the other interested citizens of these towns: Please remember that book-banning is censorship, and that censorship in a free society is always a serious matter -- even when it happens in a junior high, it is serious. A proposal to ban a book should always be given the gravest consideration. Book-banners, after all, insist that the entire community should see things their way, and only their way. When a book is banned, a whole set of thoughts is locked behind the assertion that there is only one valid set of values, one valid set of beliefs, one valid perception of the world. It's a scary idea, especially in a society which has been built on the ideas of free choice and free thought.

Well said!

Final Word on Vamos a Cuba

According to School Library Journal, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear arguments to overturn a decision by the Miami-Dade School District that took Vamos a Cuba off of public school library shelves. This means that the decision of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals stands.

Opponents of the book described it as factually inaccurate because it "paints too rosy a picture of life in the communist nation."

The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this week declined to take up the case of the controversial book by Alta Schreier, letting stand a 2–1 decision earlier this year by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that the school board's decision to remove the book was not censorship in violation of the First Amendment. Instead, the Atlanta-based appeals court said the school board was seeking to remove the book because it contained substantial factual inaccuracies. Vamos a Cuba is one of a series of books on various countries in the world written for children aged four to eight.

The Lovely Bones

The Lovely Bones movie is scheduled to be released in January 2010. According to Books Challenged or Banned in 2007-2008 by Robert P. Doyle, The Lovely Bones was "moved to the faculty section of the John W. McDevitt Middle School library in Waltham, Mass. (2008) because its content was too frightening for middle school students."

American Banned Books Week

Just a quick reminder that the American Library Association Banned Books Weeks runs from September 26 − October 3, 2009. Check out the little drama created by Puppet Book Banners.

US Book Challenges Mapped by Location

Check out the 2007 - 2009 challenges to books, mapped by location. These have been recorded on the Banned Books Week website.

This map is drawn from cases documented by ALA and the Kids' Right to Read Project, a collaboration of the National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression. Details are available in ALA's "Books Banned and Challenged 2007-2008," and "Books Banned and Challenged 2008-2009," and the "Kids' Right to Read Project Report."

To Pull, Ban or Kill A Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is being pulled from the Grade 10 English curriculum at Brampton's St. Edmund Campion Secondary School following the complaint of a parent over the use of the n-word. The classic book depicts a southern US lawyer's struggle against racial injustice.

Bruce Campbell of the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board made this statement concerning the issue: "The school administration was aware of the parent’s concern and made the decision to use another board-approved resource that teaches the same concept for the coming year." Campbell added, "The principal elected to select an alternative text for the fall, it would have been in response to the concern but at the same time it's not a banning. We're definitely not in the business of censure or book banning."

Just the same, the literary community has been critical.

The Toronto Star has published author Lawrence Hill's opinion. He points out that the real problem with To Kill a Mockingbird is "it's just one story, from another country, long ago." While he sees great value in the book, he points out that this book which explores the issues of racism, segregation and the experiences of black people, does not even focus on black people. It explores racism from small town Alabama over half a century ago. Hill suggests that Canadian students do not know the "Canadian stories of slavery and abolition, and of segregation and civil rights." He suggests that To Kill a Mockingbird should be kept on the shelves but be joined by Canadian books that explore the issues.

I wonder why school officials have to wait for a challenge to a book to review the literature students are studying. Why can't there be a more deliberate effort to have the black Canadian voice heard without making the removing/banning of a book the central issue?

A Milestone for Us

Today our counter hit over 100,000 hits and 150,000 page views since we installed Sitemeter. Thank you to our faithful readers and to Meg Cabot, who, with one mention had us shut down as a spam site for a day as our stats spiked.