Court to challenge book-banners

Press, 29 May 1982, Page 15

Court to challenge book-banners

From

PETER PRINGLE,

in Washington

Attempts to ban several classics, including Mark Twain and Hemingway, from the library shelves and classes of teen-age schools are increasing alarmingly across the United States.

A Virginia school wanted to ban Huckleberry Finn largely because of its persistent use of the word “nigger?”. An Arizona school board recently discarded a required reading list of works by Hemingway, Conrad, Homer, Poe* Twain,, arid Steinbeck. In Long Island, a retired New York policeman’s campaign ■to remove from the school library Bernard Malamud’s- Pulitzer prizewinning novel. “The Fixer,’’ about a Jew persecuted in Czarist Russia, has gone to the Supreme Court. This rush of book-banning is said to have its roots in the work of the Moral Majority and its leader, the Rev. Jerry Falwell. He has been leading the fight against < text-books about sex in direet-mail campaigns. The American Library Association says that the number of books being challenged for one reason or another tripled in 1981. Others attribute the increase to Ronald Reagan's election and normally reticent con-

servatives flexing their political muscles .at the focal level.

The Virginia school, on the advice of its racially mixed human relations committee, recommended that "Huckleberry Finn” be scratched from the school time-table because, as John Wallace, one of the school's administrators. complained, the book “ridicules blacks.”

“It speaks of black Americans with implications that they are not honest, that they are not. as intelligent as whites,; and they are not human,” he says. “All of this, of course, is meant to be satiricial. It is. But this kind of ridicule is extremely difficult . for young blacks to handle.”

The ban provoked some vigorous replies. A local Virginia professor of English, George Mason, said the word nigger is. of course, “a terribly offensive word in our own time and should definitely not be used by anyone who respects others.. but it might help to explain to students that in slave states the word was merely the

ordinary colloquial term for a slave, and not necessarily abusive.”

The “Washington Post,” under a headline “Selling Huck down the river,” said it was ludicrous to put Huck in a brown-paper wrapper. “Huck was a fabulous liar altogether too engaging for comfort, and we rode down the Mississippi on a raft with a black man. a runaway slave named Jim, who was the kindest and most morally attractive character in the book. The book . . . offended all those illiberal and smallminded social values that most richly deserved to be offended.”

The newspaper also pointed out that the novel satirises the racial attitudes of the time and is one of the true classics.

In New York, the campaign against “The Fixer" is the only one to reach the Supreme Court so far. The book’s removal from the Long Island school library is being challenged as an infringement of First Amendment rights.

The policeman leading the campaign, Frank Martin, seems to be against the book mainly because it depicts prison guards shouting obscenities.

When the ban began in 1975, the school board said it was removing “The Fixer” and several other books, including Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five,” Desmond Morris’s "The Naked Ape,” and Eldridge Cleaver’s “Soul on Ice,” because they were “anti-American, antiChristian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy.” Opponents of the ban argued that the First Amendment, guaranteeing freedom of speech, was at stake and that the banners were politically motivated. The first federal judge to review the case said that while he felt the board’s action reflected “a misguided educational philosophy, it does not constitute a sharp and direct infringement of any First Amendment rights.” ~

A divided appeal court decided the case should go back to .trial to consider the motives of the ban lobby. The Supreme Court is due to hear the case in July. — Copyright, London Observer Service.