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Feb 19, 2016 · According to the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, the Harper Lee novel is one of the most challenged and banned classical books. Many of these objections come from...
Oct 8, 2022 · In 1966, author of "To Kill a Mockingbird" Harper Lee herself (who's known for having led a reclusive life, per The Straits Times ), challenged a Hanover County, Virginia school's decision to remove her book from their curriculum because it was "immoral," per History.
- Overview
- Moving Beyond the Ban Discussion
Biloxi, Mississippi, will remove the book from school curriculums.
A school board’s decision to remove To Kill a Mockingbird from eighth grade curriculums in Biloxi, Mississippi, is the latest in a long line of attempts to ban the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee. Since its publication in 1960, the novel about a white lawyer’s defense of a black man against a false rape charge by a white woman has become one of the most frequently challenged books in the U.S.
According to James LaRue, director of American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, challenges to the book over the decades have usually cited the book’s strong language, discussion of sexuality and rape, and use of the n-word.
“The most current challenge to it is among the vaguest ones that I’ve ever heard,” he says. The Biloxi School Board “just says it ‘makes people uncomfortable.’” LaRue finds this argument unconvincing, contending “the whole point to classics is they challenge the way we think about things.”
One of the earliest and most prominent challenges was in Hanover County, Virginia, in 1966. In that instance, the school board said it would remove the book from county schools, citing the book’s theme of rape and the charge that the novel was “immoral.”
The board walked back its decision, however, after residents complained about it in letters to local papers. One of the most prominent critics of the decision was Lee herself, who wrote a letter to the editor of the Richmond News Leader. It began: “Recently I have received echoes down this way of the Hanover County School Board’s activities, and what I’ve heard makes me wonder if any of its members can read.”
Many have denounced Biloxi’s ban by citing, as LaRue does, the book’s message of racial tolerance. Still others have taken a slightly different approach. Writer Kristian Wilson argues that although the novel shouldn’t be banned from schools, its use as a teaching tool should be reassessed.
“Lee’s is not the best book to teach white kids about racism, because it grounds its narrative in the experiences of a white narrator and presents her father as the white savior,” she writes.
Atticus Finch, the father and lawyer at the center of the novel, received a lot of attention in 2015 when Lee’s only other novel, Go Set a Watchman, was controversially published several months before her 2016 death, at age 89. In the book, seen as something of a follow-up to To Kill a Mockingbird, the main character Scout is shocked to spy her father at a Ku Klux Klan meeting.
Though many readers were dismayed, scholars have long argued that if you read To Kill a Mockingbird from a racial justice perspective, it’s clear that Atticus’ defense of Tom Robinson, the black man wrongly accused of rape, doesn’t mean that he favors changing the status quo of segregation. And in fact, his sympathy for the KKK is already present in the first book.
“Way back about nineteen-twenty there was a [local chapter of the] Klan, but it was a political organization more than anything,” Atticus tells his children at one point. When asked if he is a radical, an implicit question about his commitment to civil rights, Atticus says he’s “about as radical as Cotton Tom Heflin”—a white supremacist senator and member of the KKK.
Again, this doesn’t mean that To Kill a Mockingbird shouldn’t be taught in schools. But it does suggest that teachers should encourage their students to think critically about Atticus, not just the men who oppose him.
- Becky Little
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird has a long history with censorship. It holds the seventh slot in the American Library Association’s top ten most challenged and banned books list for 2017, and it also appeared on the 2009 and 2011 lists.
Nov 3, 2023 · 17 min. MUKILTEO, Wash. — Students first told Shanta Freeman-Miller about how it hurt to read “ To Kill a Mockingbird ” five years ago. The stories came out during Wednesday meetings of the...
- Hannah Natanson
Apr 15, 2024 · To Kill a Mockingbird takes place in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Great Depression. The protagonist is Jean Louise (“Scout”) Finch, an intelligent though unconventional girl who ages from six to nine years old during the course of the novel. She is raised with her brother, Jeremy Atticus (“Jem”), by their widowed ...
281. To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by the American author Harper Lee. It was published in June 1960 and became instantly successful. In the United States, it is widely read in high schools and middle schools. To Kill a Mockingbird has become a classic of modern American literature; a year after its release, it won the Pulitzer Prize.
