- Five students’ five-year defiance of their school district’s 1970s book ban culminated in a US Supreme Court decision in 1982 that has resonance today as censorship of books increases. books.
- Between Sept. 1 and November On October 30, more than 330 unique cases of book challenges were reported, doubling the number of accounts since 2020, the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom said.
- Common themes raised in banned and contested text then and now are race and sexual content.
NEW YORK – Steven Pico, then student council president, recalls sitting at a Long Island school board meeting in the mid-1970s when a librarian whispered to him that board members had entered the library after hours. looking for books to ban.
Talk of the ban turned out to be true. After attending a 1975 conference sponsored by a conservative political group, members of the Island Trees school board removed titles such as Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” and Richard Wright’s “Black Boy,” believing these and other books they were “un-American.” anti-Christian, “anti-Semitic” and “just plain disgusting”.