Long Island, NY, School Board Voluntarily Returns Banned Books to School Library
The school board of the Island Trees Union Free School District, on Long Island, New York, on this day returned to its school libraries books that it had previously banned.
The books were returned following the Supreme Court decision in Island Trees v. Pico, on June 25, 1982, which resulted in a split vote that left the ban intact.
The returned books included such acclaimed novels as Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. Local supporters of the ban had labelled the books “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” “anti-Semitic,” and “just plain filthy.” A North Dakota school burned Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five on November 10, 1973.
Read the American Library Association Library Bill of Rights:
http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/And more: Joan DelFattore, What Johnny Shouldn’t Read: Textbook Censorship in America (1992)
Learn more at the National Coalition Against Censorship here.
Learn more at First Amendment Schools: http://www.firstamendmentschools.org/about/aboutindex.aspx