The tale of censorship is as old as writing, but what is being censored and by whom is ever evolving. The topics under fire throughout history have been related to religion, race and sex.
Most of the earliest recorded book bans were brought by religious leaders. Before Great Britain founded its American colonies, it had a lengthy history of religious censorship.
In 1650, a Massachusetts colonist by the name of William Pynchon published a pamphlet called “The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption,” which argued that all obedient followers of God would be accepted into heaven, upsetting Puritans who believed only a special group is predestined for God’s favor.
This led to other colonists burning the pamphlet and banning it, bookmarking the first time this would happen in what would later become the U.S. But it was far from the last time.
In the early 19th century, publications about the most hot-button issue of the time—slavery—would become censored at an alarming rate and lead to imprisonment for some.
“By the 1850s, multiple states had outlawed expressing anti-slavery sentiments—which abolitionist author Harriet Beecher Stowe defied in 1851 with the publication of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ a novel that aimed to expose the evils of slavery,” according to National Geographic. “As historian Claire Parfait notes, the book was publicly burned and banned by slaveholders along with other anti-slavery books. In Maryland, free Black minister Sam Green was sentenced to 10 years in the state penitentiary for owning a copy of the book.”
Throughout the 1860s, as the Civil War raged, abolitionist materials continued to be banned by the Southern Confederacy. Meanwhile, Union authorities banned some pro-Southern literature, like a biography of Stonewall Jackson by John Esten Cook.
By the 1870s, the war on books was no longer just a states’ rights issue when Congress passed the Comstock Act, making it illegal to possess “obscene” or “immoral” texts or articles or to send them through the mail. The laws were designed to ban content about sexuality and birth control, which had become much more readily accessible by mail order.
This made informational brochures go underground, affecting how and how many women were able to access information when infant and maternal mortality rates were high.
Books labeled obscene by Comstock’s broad definition continued to be banned and even burned, until the Comstock Act was struck down in 1936, more than 60 years after its inception.
Moving into the 20th century, parents and administrators debated at school board and library commission meetings about what information should be available to children. The Jim Crow era in the South made it easier for attempts to censor books to go through.
Groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy were able to successfully ban school textbooks that didn’t offer a sympathetic view of the Civil War South. “The Rabbits’ Wedding,” a 1954 children’s book, depicting a white rabbit marrying a black rabbit, was nearly banned because of its depictions encouraging interracial relationships.
During the 1950s, some librarians reacted and fought against attempted bans on books like “Huckleberry Finn,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Canterbury Tales.”
By the time the late ‘60s rolled around, the Supreme Court would make a decision weighing in on students’ right to free expression. With Tinker v. Des Moines, a case where students were admonished for wearing black armbands to school in protest of the Vietnam War, the court ruled in their favor, saying, “Neither teachers nor students shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
Indianapolis’ Kurt Vonnegut, whose “Slaughterhouse-Five” novel has been challenged, banned and even burned in a North Dakota high school furnace in 1973, said, “The freedom to choose or reject ideas, to read books of our choice … is the very bedrock of our free society.” This book, likely his most famous, is still receiving challenges today.
Again in 1982, the Supreme Court ruled in Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico that “local school boards may not remove books from school libraries simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books.” The school board had removed books from the school library shelves, including “The Fixer” by Bernard Malamud, “Slaughterhouse Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, and “Best Short Stories of Negro Writers” edited by Langston Hughes.
Despite this, librarians received so many book challenges during the 1980s that they felt inclined to create Banned Book Week. Now the annual event is typically held the last week of September and “highlights the value of free and open access to information and brings together the entire book community—librarians, educators, authors, publishers, booksellers, and readers of all types—in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas.”
Pat Scales, a former South Carolina middle- and high-school librarian and former chair of the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee, wrote in her book “Scales on Censorship” that outright censorship is only one facet of book bans.
She said censorship includes moving books, defacing them or intentionally marking them as outside students’ reading levels, and challenges of any kind can have a chilling effect on educators and librarians.
“Censorship is about control,” Scales wrote. “Intellectual freedom is about respect.”
While many related topics like sexuality and race are still the subject of current bans, this new wave of censorship and book challenges worming its way into school and public libraries around the country is an entirely different genre.