Beacon Broadside

Banned Books Week 2.0

Christopher Finan is president of American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, which was established by the American Booksellers Association in 1990 to defend the First Amendment rights of booksellers and their customers. He is the author of From the Palmer Raids to the PATRIOT Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America, the winner of the American Library Association’s Eli M. Oboler Award for the best work on intellectual freedom published in 2006 and 2007. 

Banned Books Week turned 30 this year, but this was not your grandmother’s celebration of the freedom to read.

Since its founding, the centerpiece of Banned Books Week has been the display of banned and challenged titles on tables in bookstores and libraries around country. This year the celebration began on the Internet with a tremendously creative two-minute video produced by Bookmans, an independent bookstore with six locations in Arizona.  

The Bookmans video was a contribution to a read-out of banned books that was launched on the Internet last year. Most of the more than 1,000 videos that have been posted on YouTube feature people reading passages from their favorite books. The Bookmans video shows a series of customers and staff members reading a single line from different censored books. Each line was carefully chosen to celebrate the importance of books, reading and free speech.

The moving message of the video, combined with skillful editing by Harrison Kressler, Bookmans’ video producer, helped it become the hit of Banned Books Week. More than 17,000 people watched it on YouTube, making it our most popular video to date.

City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco also joined the read-out, producing a series of wonderful readings by writers and leading members of the literary community, including Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the store’s founder. Director John Waters read from Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Other bookstores who contributed to the read-out include Chapter One Book Store, UConn Co-op, Vintage Books, Poor Richard’s Bookshoppe, the King’s English Bookshop, the Book House and Bookmamas. The videos may be viewed here. (Some are exhibited on playlists.)

But the Internet read-out is only one of many new things about Banned Books Week. The sponsors of Banned Books Week—the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the American Library Association, the Association of American Publishers, the National Association of College Stores and the American Society of Journalists and Authors—have created a steering committee to plan for the event throughout the year. The Internet read-out was one of our first ideas.

The committee has also invited new groups to become sponsors, including the National Coalition Against Censorship, the National Council of Teachers of English, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and Project Censored.

 As a result of these organizational changes, Banned Books Week has grown. Press coverage of the event doubled last year. We don’t have statistics for this year yet, but it appears that coverage continues to increase. In the past, we have had trouble placing opinion pieces in newspapers during Banned Books Week, but this year the Louisville Courier-Journal approached us for a column. KPFA, a radio station in San Francisco, devoted a full hour to Banned Books Week.

This doesn’t mean that displays of banned books are old hat. They remain the most effective means of delivering our message that even in America censorship is a problem. The “ah-ha!” moment occurs when bookstore customers and library patrons see that some of their most beloved books have been challenged.

Banned Books Week continues to give booksellers a great opportunity to bring customers into their stores. I saw this for myself this year when I spent Banned Books Week in Durango, Colorado, at the invitation of Maria’s Bookshop.

Peter Schertz and Andrea Avantaggio, the owners of Maria’s, have been expanding their celebration of Banned Books Week for several years. It happened that this year Banned Books Week coincided with the Durango Literary Festival, and festival organizers were planning a program on censorship. Peter invited me to join the panel, which included Ellen Hopkins, whose books are frequently challenged. It seemed like a long way to go for one appearance, so I asked him to see if anyone else might want to hear about banned books.

I was surprised when Libby Cowles, Maria’s community relations manager, lined up three classroom talks at Ft. Lewis College, a radio interview and a breakfast speech to the town’s booksellers and librarians. From the first day in Durango, my visit got great coverage in the local newspaper, which published a column I wrote on the front page of the Sunday opinion section. The publisher even invited me to address his editors at their daily meeting.

While I want to believe that the warm reception in Durango was a response to my rugged good looks, it was largely the result of Libby’s efforts and Maria’s excellent relations with community leaders.

There was something else at work as well. The message of Banned Books Week is that we only possess free speech as long as we are willing to fight for it. When people are made aware of censorship, they are grateful to the booksellers, librarians, teachers, parents and kids who are fighting back.

There is no danger that Banned Books Week will grow old anytime soon. Our challenge is to continue to find new ways to carry the message.

Revising Huck Finn, Revising History

Today's post is from Thomas Norman DeWolf, a frequent speaker at colleges and conferences around the country on the legacy of slavery, undoing racism, and healing from historic trauma. Tom is the author of Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History. This post originally appeared on his blog.

Mark Twain defined a “classic” book as one “which people praise and don’t read.” He should know. How many of you have read Huckleberry Finn? This “classic” has been condemned, banned, or people attempted to ban it, in a variety of locations, and for various reasons, since it was first published in 1885. Back then it was banned because Twain had the audacity to create a character, Jim, who was not only black, but as human–and as fully developed–as the other major characters in the story. Jim is not only fully human, but the hero of the story. It ran contrary to everything white Americans had been raised to believe; that white America had been built upon since its founding.

When I was in junior high school in the 1960′s, several of my black classmates wanted the book banned from our school library for a different reason: because Twain regularly refers to Jim with the “n” word, which they found deeply offensive. Many teachers in K-12 classes struggle with how to teach this masterpiece, about which Hemingway said, “All American writing comes from that.” It is challenging to explain to kids today the context in which Huck Finn was written. I believe I understand the difficulties teachers face.

Caveat: in the interest of full disclosure, I’m a white man writing about a book that was written by a white man–albeit one who died 100 years ago in a very different era. I encourage readers to ponder these facts as you consider my words. I also encourage you to consider what others have written, like Princeton Professor Melissa Harris-Perry or author Earl Ofari Hutchinson for instance. Further disclosure: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the best book I’ve ever read. No one else can ever write the “Classic American Novel.” It has already been published. This is it.

A new version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is now being published by New South Books. Twain scholar Alan Gribben is the editor. He has replaced the “n” word with the word “slave.” I’m sure Dr. Gribben and New South Books have the noblest of intentions; to get Twain back into K-12 classrooms.

And there are many reasons why this is a really bad idea. I’ll focus on two:

1. Utilizing the word “slave” perpetuates one of the dehumanizing aspects of the system of slavery. Describing someone who was owned by another as a “slave” strips away her or his humanity–reduces that person to a commodity. They were enslaved people, not slaves.
2. I understand the challenge that educators face, but what are classrooms for if not to struggle with difficult subjects in order to wrestle with them? The one way we will finally heal from the legacy of slavery is to talk about all  aspects of it no matter how difficult, awkward, and hurtful those conversations may be. Hiding behind an alternative word–and a poorly chosen one at that–does not teach students to deal honestly with truth; it does nothing to teach people to struggle together with difficult subjects; it does nothing to help with healing from the historic trauma that continues to afflict the people of the United States. It perpetuates injustice and ignorance.

When my grandchildren are old enough to enjoy and learn from Huckleberry Finn I hope they’ll read it the way Twain wrote it. I trust their parents–and hopefully their teachers–to work with them to understand the context of the times in which Twain lived and wrote, the horrible system of slavery that drove the entire economy of our nation, and why it is important to understand and talk about these issues.

We’ve all heard that the roads in Hell are paved with good intentions. This new edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a well-intentioned mistake. Read the original. Then read it–and discuss it–with your children.