ACLU Background Briefing:
Censorship in America's Schools
For IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 3, 1995
How far can school boards or administrators go in imposing their own
moral, political, or even religious beliefs on curriculum and library
choices? How far can they acquiesce in ideologically driven demands for
censorship by parents or community groups? Countless censorship incidents
throughout the country raise these questions; cases being handled by the
ACLU are seeking some answers.
Caught in the tug of war are hard-pressed teachers and librarians, most of
them conscientiously trying to maintain professional standards of secular
public education and open intellectual inquiry. Also caught in the
crossfire are students, who are learning some dramatic lessons about
democracy and tolerance as they witness political battles over what ideas,
words, and subjects they will be permitted to learn about in school.
In 1982, the Supreme Court decided Island Trees School District v. Pico, a
New York censorship case involving ten books that the Island Trees Village
school board had removed from the school library because it considered them
"anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and just plain filthy." Among
the books were Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, Richard Wright's Black
Boy, Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, and Alice Childress' A Hero Ain't
Nothing But a Sandwich.
While conceding broad discretion to school boards and
administrators to frame curriculum, and to inculcate civic and moral
values, the Supreme Court in Pico announced important limits to this
discretion. The First Amendment, it said, includes the "right to receive
ideas," especially in the special context of a school library, where "a
student can literally explore the unknown." School officials, said the
Court, may not engage in the "narrowly partisan suppression of ideas" by
removing books simply because they disagree with the ideas they contain.
Six years later, in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, the
Supreme Court reiterated that local school officials have broad discretion
to control curriculum (including, in that case, a student newspaper
produced as part of a journalism class). But administrators' decisions must
be based on "legitimate pedagogical concerns." The Court left open the
question whether a broader standard for students' free expression and
inquiry might apply to school libraries.
The dividing line between the "narrowly partisan suppression of ideas"
condemned by the Supreme Court in Pico, and the "legitimate
pedagogical concerns" that it approved in Hazelwood, is constantly being
tested. In one ACLU library censorship suit in Olathe, Kansas, students,
parents and a teacher are challenging a district superintendent's
unilateral decision to remove all copies of a gay-themed book, Nancy
Gardner's Annie on My Mind, from all school libraries in the district. The
superintendent, Ron Wimmer, had been hoping to avoid the ugly controversy
that had engulfed neighboring communities when Annie and another gay-themed
novel for young readers were donated to high school libraries. That
controversy had included, in the preceding months, a public book burning by
a homophobic community group on the steps of the neighboring Kansas City
School District offices. Superintendent Wimmer not only refused to accept
the donated books but ordered the removal of all copies of Annie on My Mind
that were already in the collections of several school libraries in the
district.
In this case, the literary and educational value of Annie On My Mind was
undisputed, as an official book review committee affirmed.
Superintendent Wimmer's repeatedly stated reasons for rejecting the
committee's recommendation, and ignoring established procedures for
addressing challenges to library books, was that he wanted to make a
unilateral decision that would quickly get rid of the book and thus "avoid
controversy." The Olathe school board affirmed Superintendent's Wimmer's
decision.
The plaintiff parents, students, and teacher in this case,
represented by the ACLU, are arguing that Annie was removed from school
library shelves on ideological grounds, and in violation of established
procedures, because the ideas expressed in the book are sympathetic to
homosexuality; and that such attempts to suppress ideas violate the Supreme
Court's decision in Pico. The school board attorneys have indicated that
their defense, at least in part, will be that the board and superintendent
had a legitimate pedagogical desire to teach students that homosexuality is
wrong.
The Annie controversy in Kansas typifies numerous incidents of
homophobia-driven book banning around the country. Another school library
case in Louisiana is representative of often religiously inspired efforts
to censor books because they discuss "the occult." In Delcarpio v. St.
Tammany Parish School Board, the ACLU represents a group of parents and
children who are contesting the school board's removal from school
libraries of Jim Haskins' Voodoo and Hoodoo. The board was responding to
complaints from a parent associated with the local Christian Coalition.
Haskins' book traces the development of voodoo from its origins in Africa
to magical practices in Caribbean and Louisiana culture.
The St. Tammany School Board, ignoring a review committee that found
legitimate educational value in the book, ordered its removal for two
reasons: explicitly religious objections to the beliefs described, and
expressed fears that children might imitate some of the "hexes" that were
included. A federal district court judge ruled in October 1994 that both
reasons were unconstitutional. Disapproval of the religious ideas
described in a book is not a legitimate reason for censorship under Pico;
and banning books out of fear that occasionally readers might act on the
ideas they contain is just another form of thought control, according to
the court. The school board is appealing the decision, arguing among
other things that Pico should not be followed because there was not one
majority opinion for the Supreme Court in that case.
Only a tiny fraction of the school censorship incidents that occur are
actually brought to court. In some instances, parents, teachers, students,
librarians, and others in the community are able to organize and stop
censorship campaigns. In Oconee County, Georgia several months ago, for
example, community organizing by anti-censorship citizens persuaded the
school board to rescind its decision that all "sexually explicit" books
must be removed from school libraries. One of the anti-censorship group's
slogans was "Reading is Fundamental, not Fundamentalist." In Oregon,
voters have twice rejected statewide initiatives that would ban any books
from public and school libraries that reflect affirmatively on
homosexuality.
Homosexuality was also an issue, along with menstruation and alleged
racial slurs, in an epidemic of censorship at Hempfield High
School in Western Pennsylvania last fall. The superintendent ordered
confiscation of a literature anthology used in an upper-level English
course after he discovered the word "nigger" in an excerpt from Ralph
Ellison's masterpiece, Invisible Man, as well sexual imagery in writings
by the respected African American poet Nikki Giovanni. The book was
literally taken from the hands of students. A fundamentalist activist
who was vociferous in her opposition to the anthology also objected to a
brief reference to homosexuality in a story by Edmund White. The English
teachers who had been using the anthology brought a union grievance,
arguing that the unilateral actions of their bosses violated established
policy and procedure for challenges to curriculum materials. The
administration denied the grievance.
School book censorship is often but not always generated by those with
strongly held conservative fundamentalist beliefs, and little
appreciation for the values of tolerance, diversity, or intellectual
inquiry. But of the many hundreds of incidents that are documented each
year, some proportion also arise from objections that particular language
or themes are racist or sexist, or otherwise do not reflect liberal and
humane values. Indeed, demands for censorship of allegedly "sexist" works
often come from both right and left, where critics complain that sexual
content in books or other curriculum materials is necessarily "degrading"
to girls and women.
Thus, the urge to censor is hardly the monopoly of any political group.
But the greatest threat today comes from the fundamentalist right, with its
ideological hostility to other religious or philosophical systems, to
homosexuality, to sex education, and indeed to the basic idea of secular
education.
--endit--
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