Comic Book Legal Defense Fund joins nine other free speech organizations who signed a letter to Northville School District in Michigan urging them to keep the definitive edition of Anne Frank’s A Diary of a Young Girl in middle school classrooms. The book is currently under challenge after a parent complained about anatomical descriptions in the book.
The letter, which was sent to the Superintendent and Board of Education Members in Northville, emphasizes the power and relatability of Frank’s diary for middle school students. Frank’s honest writings about her body and the changes she was undergoing during her two-year period of hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam can serve as an excellent resource for students themselves undergoing these changes.
Anne Frank’s diary has been made available in its unexpurgated totality in the years since the death of her father, Otto Frank, who censored the diary during his lifetime. Her cousin, Buddy Elias, president of the Anne Frank Foundation, said of the full translated work: “It’s really her. It shows her in a truer light, not as a saint, but as a girl like every other girl. She was nothing, actually; people try to make a saint out of her and glorify her. That she was not. She was an ordinary, normal girl with a talent for writing.”
Kids' Right to Read Letter to Northville Schools Defending The Diary of Anne Frank