1927 October 28

New York Debates Censoring Offensive Racial or Religious Films

 

The New York legislature on this day debated whether to ban films that promoted racial or religious prejudice.

The demand for banning such films came largely from the Irish-American community, and was provoked by the recent film, The Callahans and the Murphys. The film reportedly led to “disorder, arrests and court convictions.” The legislative hearing room was crowded with representatives from Irish-American organizations.

In the 1920s the Irish-American community felt very much under attack from the Ku Klux Klan, which had considerable power even outside the South, and directed much of its energy to attacking Catholicism. Opponents of the proposed ban, interestingly, were not opposed to censorship, per se, but argued that the existing New York film censorship law was adequate.

In the 1930s, the Catholic Church emerged as the leading advocate of film censorship and played a major role in the notorious film censorship code that was adopted on June 13, 1934.

Learn more: Frank Walsh, Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry (1996)

Learn more at a timeline of movie censorship: https://www.aclu.org/files/multimedia/censorshiptimeline.html

Find a Day

Go
Abortion Rights ACLU african-americans Alice Paul anti-communism Anti-Communist Hysteria Birth Control Brown v. Board of Education Censorship CIA Civil Rights Civil Rights Act of 1964 Cold War Espionage Act FBI First Amendment Fourteenth Amendment freedom of speech Free Speech Gay Rights Hate Speech homosexuality Hoover, J. Edgar HUAC Japanese American Internment King, Dr. Martin Luther Ku Klux Klan Labor Unions Lesbian and Gay Rights Loyalty Oaths McCarthy, Sen. Joe New York Times Obscenity Police Misconduct Same-Sex Marriage Separation of Church and State Sex Discrimination Smith Act Spying Spying on Americans Vietnam War Voting Rights Voting Rights Act of 1965 War on Terror Watergate White House Women's Rights Women's Suffrage World War I World War II Relocation Camps

Topics

Tell Us What You Think

We want to hear your comments, criticisms and suggestions!