NEW YORK – Steven Pico, then a student council president, remembers sitting at a Long Island school board meeting in the mid-'70's when a librarian whispered to him that board members had entered the library after hours seeking out books to ban. Talk of the ban turned out to be true. After attending a 1975 conference sponsored by a conservative political group, Island Trees School board members removed titles such as Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" and Richard Wright's "Black Boy," deeming these and other books to be "anti-American," "anti-Christian," anti-Semitic and "just plain filthy."Pico and four other students would get all the books returned to shelves after the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that the board couldn't reject titles in a "narrowly partisan or political manner.” The decision marked one of the few times the court weighed in on book bans in school libraries and resonates today as book challenges are being passed at a record-breaking pace. Then, as with now, many book bans are by authors of color and religious minorities. RELATED: Weaponized grooming rhetoric is taking a toll on LGBTQ community and child sex abuse survivors'I READ BANNED BOOKS': Tennessee library releases a library card to combat book bansOPINION: Teachers are suffering, so we're putting our appreciation into actionToday, conservative lawmakers in several states have found political currency in banning books under the guise of parents' anger that their students are learning about unsavory aspects of the nation's history such as slavery and segregation. Pico and other literary advocates have grown increasingly concerned about the uptick in the number of book challenges, the politics behind them and the way race features prominently in challenged tomes."Politicians are using book banning as part of the game plan to frighten parents, to scare voters, to pit one group of Americans against other groups of Americans and divide communities for political gain," Pico said. Johanna Miller, director of the education policy center at the New York Civil Liberties Union, said book banning is less about keeping children safe and more about telling certain people they do not belong."This is an issue where the white majority is using its power to push against people who have different life experiences and to say that not only are those experiences themselves not something that we're going to honor and respect, but we're not even going to talk about them or learn about them," she said. Between Sept. 1 and Nov. 30, more the 330 unique cases of book challenges were reported, doubling the number of accounts from 2020, the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom said. Staff at the organization concede that the true number is likely higher, given librarians and educators might have quietly removed books to sidestep controversy.
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