Disputes between censors and free speech advocates are always personal. This is one teacher's observations of what was taught and challenged in a high school English department, and what, according to the surrounding community, should have been taught.

       Opening lines of great books have a way of grabbing a reader—or losing one. And classic literature relied on this device as much as modern mystery writers:

     "All happy families alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.
     "Call me Ishmael." Herman Melville, Moby-Dick.
     "My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know." Albert Camus. The Stranger.
     "Elmer Gantry was drunk." Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry.
     "It was a pleasure to burn." Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451.
     "They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time." Toni Morrison, Paradise.

     All the books that began with those sentences, it so happens, have been challenged and banned numerous times. Simply because classic literature is frequently taught, classics end up getting the most scrutiny by concerned parents and community members. Sexuality and obscenity, crude language, violence, and religious/political references are the primary reasons for most challenges. The American Library Association (ALA) annually publishes the top 100 list of the most challenged and/or banned books in America. Besides the writers noted above, the lists contain such names as Maya Angelou, Mark Twain, Harper Lee, and Richard Wright. The ALA has celebrated Banned Books Week every September since 1982, as a response to a "sudden surge" in challenges to books in schools, libraries and bookstores. It is not uncommon for teachers to be suspended, removed, or fired for teaching certain books in public and private schools.

    What motivates these challenges? Despite what we may assume, it goes on all over the country; the deep southern states have no greater propensity to censor than do northern states. Whenever and wherever attempts at censorship occur, they are ultimately based on protection of identity. Censorship, "the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security" (OED), is something we all do daily in our own way, according to our own sense of who we are, what we want to be, and where the limits of the acceptable lie. This connects intimately to our own sense of who our children are, what we want them to be, and where we hope they will establish their own limits.
     Among the qualities that makes a classic a classic, however, is precisely that it asks us to reexamine and revaluate who we are, what we want to be, and what the limits of the acceptable are.  Conflicts are hard to avoid. There are many famous examples.


     In May of 1933, a case was filed in U. S. District Court Southern District of New York, titled United States v. One Book Called Ulysses. The case was predicated on the concept of obscenity, and it was a bellwether case regarding the reading and teaching of literature that was recognizably great, but also controversial and difficult.

     Ulysses by James Joyce is a novel centered around Stephen Dedalus, a confused history/English teacher, and Leopold Bloom, an advertising salesman (canvasser), told in episodic style parodying The Odyssey, its prose poetic in a stream of consciousness style. It presents marital infidelity, struggles discovering adult economies, non-marital infidelities, blasphemy, and Celtic Spring romance, no matter the impropriety. It is light-hearted and heavy, and a pain to interpret. A young girl in New York was given a chapter of the book by parents who were reading the book in serialized form, originally published in the magazine The Little Review. The girl found the masturbation scene, and the book was banned in the United States from publication and sale for over a decade. Importation guards were even instructed to hold and search packages arriving in New York from Ireland. Soon after, the court fined the publishers of The Little Review for obscenity. One of the judges stated the novel was "like the work of a disordered mind" (some readers would agree). The judge in United States v. One Book Called Ulysses decided, however, that it was not obscene, even going so far as to state, "coarse language in literature can be viewed as free expression."

     Coincidentally, also in May of 1933, a large group of Nazi students burned books in Berlin that were viewed by the students and the government as "Un-German" or not synchronized with the German ideologies (Hitler had come to power the preceding January). Predominant among the flames were Jewish publications and others deemed politically suspect and "degenerate." This burning and its notorious nighttime photographs, coupled with a fear of intolerance growing in America during the McCarthy era, was thought as the inspiration for Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury's novel is still banned today in many areas of Germany, particularly what used to be East Germany.

     The Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, concerned teacher John Scopes and his violation of the Butler Act, a Tennessee law enacted in March of 1925 that made it illegal to teach in public schools anything that differed from the Biblical characterization of the origin of the universe. Thus, Darwin's book On the Origin of Species and any mention of it or of his other treatises were banned. Ironically, this trial about censorship became the impetus for Inherit the Wind, a play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee, which came under censorship challenges of its own. It still challenged and banned in Tennessee, performed, if at all, on college campuses.

       The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939, was burned publicly by an East St. Louis library, by the leader of the Associated Farmers of America, and by several agricultural entities in California. The book was declared obscene and sacrilegious, and a "complete and utter lie" (it was a work of fiction).

     Moby Dick has been perennially challenged, not so much because of the controversial Biblical analogies, but because Ishmael and Queequeg shared a room and a cramped bed in the Spouter Inn, and Queegueg put his arm over Ishmael, making Ishmael feel nervous but safe, commenting about marital comfort.

     In Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1960, an 11th grade English teacher was fired for teaching Catcher in the Rye, which in 1951-1952 had topped the New York Times best seller list. The teacher appealed and was reinstated.

     The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, an excoriating of sexual mores set in a dystopian future, has been banned and challenged since its publication in 1985. Much of its original interest had dissipated until the most recent presidential election, which helped spawn a television series on Hulu, and the book's reappearances on the New York Times best seller lists. Being controversial is great for sales.

     Ironically, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was challenged and banned in his namesake secondary school in Maryland. The pejorative "n" word and abuse of a child by an alcoholic father prompted complaints. Twain was no stranger to controversy, of course. His Autobiography was not published until 100 years after his death, because he and his family believed the repercussions of his words would bring irreparable harm.

     All these books have been taught at the high school where I served or were available in the school library. Whenever books become a battleground, the First Amendment, which legal minds know and the rest of us think we know, will certainly be invoked. The primary defense for any challenged book is always freedom of expression, most famously expressed by former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in an Ohio Case: Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964). The case revolved around a French film by Louis Malle called Les Amants (The Lovers) being shown in a Cleveland "art house."  While speaking of obscenity in the case and in the Ohio Revised Code, he famously stated, "I know it when I see it" as the court protected the film. But the advocates for censorship were not about to give up.


     The 1960s was a time of free thinking and experimentation, and education in the 1960s and 70s changed to a far more student-centered mode. It was a time when many parents and public officials felt that schools "lost their way." Starting in the 1960s, Mel and Norma Gabler, a Texas couple with pronounced beliefs, set out on a mission to attack textbooks of history, science, and English that diverged from a fundamentalist Christian conception of education and replace them with textbooks more consistent with that worldview.  As it happened, they were in a state where they could be effective on a wide scale. In Texas, unlike other states, all textbooks were selected by the State Textbook Committee, an arm of the State Board of Education, a practice that stopped only in 1989.

     The "crusade" started as an assault on history texts' mistakes, and there were many. Most were typos or date-time errors, but some were more serious, made in haste to publish. The Gablers compiled these mistakes into a "scroll of shame," a 50+ foot long paper proudly rolled out to the delight of newspaper reporters and tv cameras for the publicly open State Textbook Committee. The Texas government reprimanded and fined all guilty publishers, with fines totaling approximately a million dollars. Because of the cost of printing textbooks before being approved for sale nationwide, publishers began to make editorial decisions with the Texas committee in mind. "As goes Texas, so goes the nation" became a motto in the public-school publishing industry. Publishers were forced to diminish literature anthologies and history texts, with safer and abridged entries.

     The Gablers appeared on many national shows, gaining notoriety after appearances on CBS's 60 Minutes, ABC's 20/20, and PBS's MacNeil/Lehrer Report. The public was up in arms and divided. Hence, an advocacy group arose, People for the American Way (PFAW). Since the Texas committee only listened to complaints, not even recognizing citizens who spoke favorably about texts, PFAW argued the majority were denied a voice in the process. Public disclosure of the Committee caused numerous uproars.

     The Gablers lost their grip on the Committee and the State Board, but their damage lingered. They went on tour with their scroll and videos, covering as many states as possible, exposing the dangers of humanistic education and writings. I heard their presentation in Toledo, where I live and teach, and they were impressive and convincing performers. The Texas State Board of Education eventually shut down the Textbook Selection Committee, turning their efforts to teacher evaluation and trying to ensure that teachers taught only what is approved by the State BOE.


   Textbook adoptions by school districts are a big deal, especially for costs; textual materials are a required line item in a school's budget, and adoptions don't happen every year. Accordingly, textbook decisions are made with unusual deliberation and care. At the time of my last adoption experience, serving as chairman, there were only four publishers producing scholastic texts. Teachers, students, parents, and one long suffering board member participated in the committee. "All of these books suck!" was one unforgettable comment from a prominent district parent.

     At the end of the process, we selected McDougal-Littell's The Language of Literature, a grade specific anthology with suggested writing and discussion activities that correlated with the written entries. At the time they were the most expensive textbooks ever purchased for our school. Perhaps the best of a bad lot, they did have many selections proven versatile and valuable. Grades 9-12 texts were each scanned for reading literacy levels by the Gunning-Fog Index (a great name for a literacy reading levels test), and proven to be appropriate to the indicated grade level. For comparison, all but one of the major 24-hour news channels' daily presentations scan at a 4th-6th grade level (paid infomercials shown at off times were excluded).

     Individual texts undergo the same scrutiny. The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, a popular book taught at our high school (and held by our library), is an inspirational series of poems, sometimes illustrated, about the life and death of a young charismatic prophet named Almustafa. Gibran, born in Lebanon, was considered a political and religious rebel. Even though written in the 1920s, The Prophet became a 60s counter-cultural favorite in America, partly for suggesting that people of all races and religions could and should co-exist with forgiveness, not repression.

     Sounds safe—but wait for it. The book, popular in our library and excerpted in our anthologies, helped set off a fire storm of race relations. A young Islamist of rigid beliefs fell under the influence of a similarly-titled book published in his faith (not available in our school), which fundamentally decreed that non-Muslims were infidels and unworthy. Names of white and black students were splattered on bathroom walls using a substance inappropriate for walls; it made the local news. Of course, a Human Relations committee was formed, which met in the school library in evenings, making it easy to exclude the press, comprising parents, teachers, local white and black clergy, two students, one white and one black, some administrators, and one long-suffering board member. Discussions were animated and productive...for a while. One of the students, an African-American girl who was as eloquent as all of the adults (if not more so) and later won the English Award for achievement over her four years at the high school, spoke to the committee about race relations and how literature can help understanding without hindrance. At which point one of the local ministers said directly to her, "You speak beautifully, but you speak too white, and you're not Black enough." An attempt at reconciling the silence-inducing blunder was made by another member, by referring to Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (itself often challenged), as it appeared in our new anthology. The meeting, and the committee, ended quietly and ineffectually.

     A few years later, we were in the news again. Someone was challenging a book by an Ohio born author, a winner of a Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and countless other awards. Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio, as Chloe Wofford. In 1993 she became the first Black woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. She should have been bullet proof, but like other Nobel laureate authors such as Steinbeck and Faulkner, that was not the case.

     The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison's first novel, is a tragic story of abuse and deprivation, set in Lorain, Ohio, about the time of the Great Depression. Pecola Breedlove is a young Black girl, 11, who is the center of the novel. She idealized Shirley Temple's blonde hair and, especially, her blue eyes, believing that if God or somebody could grant her blue eyes, she would no longer be ugly and her torments would leave. Cholly Breedlove is her dangerously abusive and violent father, who fights with and takes out the frustrations of his life on the women in his life. In one unforgettable scene, Cholly rapes his daughter; this was its tragic segment.

     I received a call one evening from a local parent (and volunteer coach) that I knew well; he asked about the book. It was shown to him by a neighbor whose daughter brought it home as an assignment. He asked if I had read it and if I would consider removing it from our school. Yes, I had, I told him, and no, I would not. I told him any community member can challenge a book through the Board of Education, and that there was a form to fill out and return. Faculty home phone numbers were published openly in school directories at that time, and soon after I received numerous calls, mostly giving their names, but a few remaining anonymous. The most memorable was from a man and woman who were both on the line, accusing me of being "the district pornographer." I replied that I couldn't be, because I wouldn't have a teaching license, and I'd be making so much money I wouldn't need to teach. They hung up. It still bothers me that my wife, a highly decorated teacher, was home when that call came in.

     The process dragged on, and the school and our English department were up in arms. The Board meeting was finally set and the agenda published, and the challenge was to be voted. Prior to that, I tried to contact Ms. Morrison through a letter to her at Princeton. She, or a staffer, thanked me for "supporting her writing in its true form." An ACLU member, who remained anonymous, called the president of the Board to inquire about the controversy. The Board voted 5-0 to keep the book on our list, in part thanks to our Human Relations Committe's having updated the book complaint form to include the question, "Did you read the entire book or work?" As a concession, though, the Board would now require a parental permission form to be distributed to the students prior to assigning this book. The long-suffering Board member assigned me the task of designing the parental form, which came with a teacher-selected alternative text from the reading list of the same course. Demand for The Bluest Eye skyrocketed.

     In 2013, the Ohio State Board of Education president tried to ban The Bluest Eye in Ohio, labeling it as "pornographic." A not unexpected backlash came from the ACLU and numerous other sources, including Morrison herself. In an interview on WCMH in Columbus, she said, "I resent it, I mean if it's Texas or North Carolina as it has been in all sorts of states, but to be a girl from Ohio, writing about Ohio having been born in Lorain, Ohio, and actually relating as an Ohio person, to have the Ohio, what—Board of Education?—is ironic at least."

 
   In closing, let me remind the reader that what despots fear most is a stubborn, well-educated adherence to free speech as defined in the First Amendment. The choices of what is spoken, read, and believed need to be free of insult and defamation, especially in our schools, libraries, and bookstores.

     When I entered teaching in the early 1970s, our English department offered class electives called "Man in Turmoil," "Change," "Black Literature" and "The Bible as Literature," as well as the usual British, World, and American Literature and Composition courses. Imagine those electives offered in today's perilous social-media-infused world. Reminiscent of Berlin in the 1930's, in Spring 2019, a belligerent group of "identitarians," self-proclaimed white nationalists, stormed a Washington D.C. bookstore called Politics and Prose, protesting Jewish author Jonathan Metzl's reading of his book, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America's Heartland. Armed with bullhorns, chants, and shout-downs, they disrupted and frightened an orderly gathering. Fortunately, no damage or violence occurred.

     Perpetual malevolence is best fought by quietly listening and reading, perhaps Ulysses.


American Library Association (ALA). Office for Intellectual Freedom, On American Library Association website, ala.org.

"Brief for claimant-appellee." United States Circuit Court of Appeals ... United States of America, libellant-appellant, against one book entitled Ulysses by James Joyce. Random House, Inc., claimant-appellee. Published 1934, New York, US.

Gates, Sara, "Ohio Schools Leader Calls for Ban of The Bluest Eye, Labels Toni Morrison Book Pornographic." huffpost.com Sept. 13, 2013.

Gibran, Kahlil, The Prophet.  NY: Knopf, 1923.

"The Gunning's Fog Index (or FOG) Readability Formula."
 https://readabilityformulas.com/gunning-fog-readability-
formula.php#:~:text=The%20underlying
%20message%20of%20The,for%20most%20people%20to%20read.
Retrieved 10 January 2014.

Jacobellis v. Ohio (No. 11). Argued: March 26, 1963. Decided: June 22, 1964. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/378/184

Joyce, James. Ulysses. 1922. Duke Classics, 2012.

McDougal Littell Language of Literature. McDougal Littell, 1999.

Martin, Douglas. "Norma Gabler, Leader of Crusade on Textbooks, Dies at 84." The New York Times, August 1, 2007.

Moore, Randy. Evolution in the Courtroom: A Reference Guide. ABC-Clio Inc., 2001.

Morrison, Toni, The Bluest Eye. NY: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1970.

Neary, Lynn. "Grapes of Wrath and the Politics of Book Burning." National Public Radio.  npr.org. September 30, 2008.


    Daniel Thomas  holds a B.S.Ed. degree from Bowling Green State University, and M.B.A. and Ed.S. degrees from the University of Toledo. Now retired, he was a high school English teacher for thirty-five years, serving as department chair for twenty years. He received National Board Certification in 2001, and was recognized as a Jennings Scholar.

     He coached basketball and track and field, and is still a track and field official. He served as President of his Teachers' Association, and tutored special students in math and reading.

     He enjoys wine collecting, occasionally teaching wine classes. He and his wife, Anne, are ballroom dancers, belonging to a local Cotillion.

     Dan has been a member of Toledo Torch since 2009. This paper was delivered to that club on May 20, 2019.

      He can be reached at dwthomas327@gmail.com