by Mickey Huff
It wasn’t always so. In the early twentieth century, booksellers were part of a literary establishment that looked down on the growing Modernist movement with its emphasis on realistic depictions of life, including sex. In Boston during the early 1920s, booksellers collaborated with a local decency group, the Watch and Ward Society, in suppressing as many as seventy-five books. Then Boston police got in on the act, banning a long list of titles that would become classics, including Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry, Theodore Dreiser’s American Tragedy, and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
The threat of government censorship led booksellers and others in the publishing world to rethink their role. They had seen themselves as cultural arbiters responsible for selling works with a strong moral tone. Increasingly, they came to believe their main job was to protect their customers’ right to make their own decisions about which books were immoral. Some even joined the battle to repeal the obscenity laws that made it a crime to sell those books. In 1957, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a poet and painter who had opened the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, was arrested with one of his clerks for selling Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl, which Ferlinghetti had also published. Their acquittal on obscenity charges encouraged others to challenge censorship laws.
By 1980 many of those laws had been repealed or narrowed by Supreme Court decisions. But advocates of censorship never gave up, and following the election of Ronald Reagan they launched a counterattack. Conservatives who had long championed a return to “decency” persuaded Reagan to create a “pornography” commission to recommend new restrictions. The conservatives were joined by a small group of feminists who argued that sexually explicit material violated the civil rights of women. The city of Indianapolis approved legislation, authorizing the victims of sexual crimes to sue booksellers who sold books or magazines that allegedly inspired the attacks by depicting or describing “the sexually explicit subordination of women.”
Booksellers played an important role in preventing the counterattack from seriously undermining First Amendment rights. In Michigan, a bookseller helped organize a coalition that prevented the passage of bills that provided drastic penalties for selling material with sexual content that is not obscene and therefore protected by the First Amendment. Booksellers joined in the legal battle that struck down the Indianapolis law. A Colorado bookseller led a campaign that persuaded 60 percent of voters in a referendum to reject a constitutional amendment broadening the state’s obscenity definition.
In recent years, booksellers have been active in defending reader privacy. In 1998, Kenneth Starr, a special prosecutor investigating possible crimes by President Bill Clinton, subpoenaed two Washington bookstores in an effort to identify books purchased by Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. Booksellers believed that complying with the subpoena would have a chilling effect on their customers’ right to read whatever they want, including books that the government might disapprove. They challenged the subpoena on First Amendment grounds, and a judge acknowledged the free speech issue, ruling that Starr was not entitled to everything he was demanding. The case was dismissed after Lewinsky herself turned over her records in exchange for immunity.
The issue of reader privacy surfaced again in Colorado in 2000, when police used a search warrant in an effort to obtain the reading records of someone suspected of manufacturing methamphetamine. The Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver waged a two-year legal battle to keep the records secret. The Colorado Supreme Court voted unanimously to quash the search warrant.
Today the reader privacy issue is being fought at the national level. The USA PATRIOT Act gives the government the power to demand any records it needs to investigate a terrorist threat or espionage by a foreign government. The FBI must apply for a court order, but it does not need to demonstrate that there is probable cause to believe that the person whose records are sought is engaged in illegal acts.
Booksellers were deeply distressed when they learned of the government’s power under the Patriot Act. Without a requirement to show probable cause, the government could get any record that is “relevant” to an investigation. In addition, the government was authorized to permanently gag recipients of its orders, raising the question of whether a bookseller could challenge the order in court or even consult an attorney.
In an effort to restore the safeguards for reader privacy, booksellers joined librarians, publishers, and authors in launching a Campaign for Reader Privacy in 2004. Although there was some fear that they might alienate customers, booksellers around the country circulated petitions calling on their members of Congress to amend the law. Within three months, 120,000 signatures were collected by more than 400 booksellers in 38 states.
In 2005, the House finally approved a Freedom to Read Protection Act, which had been introduced by Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Although the bill did not become law, public pressure did force Congress to make it clear that PATRIOT Act orders and their accompanying gags could be challenged in court. The Campaign for Reader Privacy will renew its efforts to restore the safeguards for reader privacy when Congress considers renewing the PATRIOT Act in 2015.
These examples of bookseller activism are highlights from what is now a long history of fighting censorship. The fight continues today at the local level as booksellers confront complaints about books on their shelves, efforts to ban titles that they sell in schools, and protests against authors who express controversial views during bookstore appearances.
No bookstore can offer every book. But booksellers are proud of their role in protecting the freedom to read.
CHRISTOPHER M. FINAN is president of American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE.org), the bookseller’s voice in the fight against censorship. He has been involved in the fight for free speech since 1982. Prior to joining ABFFE, he was executive director of Media Coalition, a trade association that defends the First Amendment rights of businesses. He is a trustee of the Freedom to Read Foundation. After working as a newspaper reporter, he studied American history at Columbia University, where he received his PhD. His latest book is From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America (Beacon Press). It won the 2008 Eli M. Oboler Award of the American Library Association. Finan received the 2011 Freedom to Read Foundation’s Roll of Honor Award.
NATIONAL COALITION AGAINST CENSORSHIP
Acacia O’Connor
In just a few months, the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), the oldest civil liberties coalition in the US, will celebrate its fortieth year. NCAC opposes censorship locally and nationally regardless of the likelihood of success in a court of law. We take action both when the censor is a public institution and when it is a private company. In its wide reach, NCAC is unique among First Amendment organizations and provides a service increasingly valuable at a time when spaces for communication are increasingly privatized and when litigation can be a long and expensive process.
NCAC was founded in 1974, in the aftermath of Miller v. Calijornia, a landmark Supreme Court decision that established “community standards” as a test for what the law could consider obscene. The organizations that came to comprise NCAC shared a commitment to free speech and a concern that the new “community standards” test would lead to an increase in obscenity prosecutions and more censorship. In the digital age, the concept of community is even more nebulous, and concerns over the chilling effect of “community standards” are especially relevant.
Over the years, NCAC has worked on issues relating to sexuality and sex education, government control of information, science censorship, video games, books, art, online speech, academic freedom, and more. Fighting censorship is an ongoing battle; there is no last stand. While its targets change, the desire to resolve problems (imagined or real) by speech restrictions and censorship remains a persistent human impulse.
Today, we’re a coalition of over fifty organizations including literary, artistic, religious, educational, professional, labor, and
civil liberties groups, who support NCAC’s mission to protect freedom of thought and expression and oppose censorship in all its forms. In addition to our current signature initiatives—the Arts Advocacy Project, Youth Free Expression Project, and Kids’ Right to Read Project— NCAC maintains an overview of the full range of debates around free-dom of speech in America. We do so through our coalition of allied organizations as well as through our work as a convener of the Free Expression Network (an information-exchange structure including all the key US First Amendment organizations). Our newly launched wiki, Censorpedia (wiki.ncac.org), is a rapidly expanding repository of information about censorship cases around the world.
Many Americans today are dismissive of claims of censorship, preferring to relegate it to a bygone era or to see it as something that happens in other, “undemocratic” countries. Whenever a book is removed from a school library or an app is barred from the iTunes marketplace because its content violates the terms of service, someone will predictably respond: “They can still get it elsewhere, at a store or on Amazon. They can go to the library. It’s not censorship.” The myth that censorship is a single, easily identifiable beast is a useful fantasy for those who would control information.
That myth will not convince an artist faced with losing a grant because a work offends some congressman’s religious sensibilities, or a librarian facing pressure to remove a particular book. Those facing censorship feel the nagging suspicion that something is wrong, but often don’t know what to do next: their jobs are at stake, and the loudest, most fanatical voices are against them.
NCAC helps communities resist censorship in their work, their schools, their universities, their libraries. We’re there to offer insight and guidance and raise awareness of where a specific case fits into the bigger picture. We can advise on best practices and connect people with national organizations equipped to take up their fight.
As the landscape of media has changed, so have the threats to free speech. In some cases, the change is more superficial: where adults panicked that comic books are destroying the nation’s youth, today they raise the alarm about video games. Other changes are real: we have the Internet, Twitter, and multiplying platforms of communication that simultaneously make it possible for everyone to share ideas yet very hard for any one authority figure to control access to information. But will the Internet deliver on this promising development in terms of media democracy, or will the private companies that serve as intermediaries impose their own terms of service on our new public square? And might not governments use social media as a tool for surveillance?
The privatization of the Internet, just like the privatization of exhibition spaces and educational institutions, makes First Amendment protections largely irrelevant, leaving free speech to the whims of private entities. NCAC has the organizational flexibility to confront such challenges as they come along, and we are determined to continue doing so. One thing we have realized in our forty years of existence is that we can never take our right to free expression for granted—to forget is to risk losing it altogether.
KIDS’ RIGHT TO READ
Acacia O’Connor
In March 2013, someone in the Chicago Public Schools sent around a directive to remove any and all copies of the graphic novel Persepolis from classrooms and libraries. It was unclear where the mandate had come from, who it applied to, and above all, why, after many years in Chicago classrooms, the beloved memoir about a young woman growing up during the Iranian Revolution should suddenly be banned, without explanation.
Months later, and despite every effort by the Kids’ Right to Read Project (KRRP), CPS has refused to divulge what exactly happened. All we know is that someone wanted Persepolis removed without conducting a formal review process and without consulting with educators or anyone else. The district deftly, if slowly, spun the removal as a legitimate and apolitical “curriculum change” and only superficially responded to Freedom of Information Act and other requests for clarification.
As the Persepolis controversy was unfolding, the district announced it would be closing fifty-four schools, mostly in African-American and Hispanic neighborhoods. As part of KRRP’s work on Persepolis, I spoke to a high school language arts teacher not long after the closings were announced. I said I realized that, compared to the school closings, the Persepolis controversy might be small beans.
“It’s not a small beans issue,” the teacher replied, distressed. To her, it is all part of the same problem. The school board officials and administrators—who are appointed, not elected—aren’t accountable to anyone and they know it. “My kids’ school is going to be closed. What can I do? I can’t vote them out, I can’t do anything.”
The Kids’ Right to Read project combats book challenges and bans on a grassroots level: it holds public officials accountable and alerts them to the First Amendment implications of book banning, works with the media to expand the conversation around free speech, and advises local activists and those embroiled in censorship controversies. Cofounded by the National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, it is also supported by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and Association of American Publishers. We intervene whenever there’s a book challenge, urging schools to protect students’ freedom to read.
Even the smallest of censorship incidents—those which affect a single classroom of middle school students or a modest public library branch—is a flash point for the most combustible issues in our culture and society today.
Last year, as the tide continued to turn on the debate over gay marriage, a number of children’s books were censored because they spoke matter-of-factly about nontraditional families. Ironically, one of these books—In Our Mothers’ House by Patricia Polacco—was selected for a school library specifically because some students in the school came from nontraditional families. In Erie, Illinois, another censored book, The Family Book by Todd Parr, was being used for a course on Tolerance, Diversity and Anti-Bullying. And Then Came Tango, a play about two male penguins raising an egg together, based on the frequently challenged children’s book And Tango Makes Three, was set to be performed in Austin Public Schools, until a principal complained. The performance was canceled. “Elementary schools typically . . . do not delve into human sexuality, religion, or other politically hot topics,” the district’s director of fine arts wrote by way of an explanation.
The written word is deeply affecting and enduringly powerful. That same power, which makes books like Persepolis or The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian so beloved, scares others. For a lonely student in a small town, grappling with physical abuse, or questioning his or her sexuality, books like Bastard Out of Carolina, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, or Looking for Alaska can be lifesaving. Many have tried to keep these books out of the hands of students, for the sake of that abstract concept: innocence. Yet ignorance is not innocence: the real damage is done by keeping students from getting the information they need and by indicating they should be ashamed to explore subjects like sex, depression, drugs and abuse.
In the firm belief that intellectual freedom is crucial to our development as well-rounded, socially engaged and empathetic human beings, the Kids’ Right to Read project fights for young people’s right to explore and grow by reading good books.
ACACIA O’CONNOR is coordinator of the Kids’ Right to Read Project, a coalition project of the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC.org). Her position with KRRP combines many of her passions, including but not limited to literature, libraries, language, and freedom of speech. Also an Italian translator, Acacia received her master’s degree in literary translation studies from the University of Rochester.
THE LIBROTRAFICANTE OPPRESSION DETECTION KIT
Tony Diaz, El Librotraficante
When Arizona legislators tried to erase our history, we decided to make more. When Arizona House Bill 2281 was used to ban Mexican American studies, we decided to take a stand. What started as the Li
brotraficante Caravan to smuggle banned books back to Tucson has blossomed into a movement. In March of 2012, we organized six cities, smuggled over 1,000 books donated from all over the country, and opened four underground libraries.
The Librotraficante movement is the tip of the pyramid. It stands on the base created by its parent organization, Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say, which I founded, to promote Latino literature and literacy in Houston, Texas, in 1998. In that time, we have worked with most of the authors whose work was banned by the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD). The writings of our most beloved authors form the base of our movement.
Currently, Arizona HB 2281 has been used to make only our history illegal; however, these anti-intellectual laws, like Arizona’s anti-immigration laws, will also spread. Although right now only Mexican American studies is outlawed, Arizona HB 2281 will pave the way to outlaw Asian studies and African American studies, not just in Arizona, but in other states. The end result would be disastrous: the dismantling of ethnic studies courses that have stemmed the drop out rate, an attack on critical thinking, and a trampling of the intellectual landscape of America.
We must not allow that to happen, and we are making some progress.
Texas Republican Senator Dan Patrick introduced Senate Bill 1128, and Texas Republican House of Representative Giovanni Capriglione introduced House Bill 1938 in spring of 2013. Last year we organized
the Librotraficante Caravan to smuggle books banned in Arizona, back to Arizona, and this year we defended ethnic studies in our own back yard.
We formed a Texas-wide coalition that fought against HB 1938 and SB 1128, which would discredit ethnic studies at Texas state colleges and universities and effectively eliminate Mexican American, African American, and women’s studies programs among others. Both bills are now dead.4 We leave records of these struggles posted online as a testament to this stage of the civil rights movement of which we, and many others, are a part. Look for it sooner than later before the hackers strike, as the Librotraficante.com website regularly gets attacked.
