Welcome to Using Graphic Novels in Education, an ongoing feature from CBLDF that is designed to allay confusion around the content of graphic novels and to help parents and teachers raise readers. In this column, we examine graphic novels, including…
Category: Education
NY District Court Upholds Government’s Right to Search Laptops at the Border
In 2010, a graduate student named Pascal Abidor was traveling from Canada to New York when he was removed from his train and detained by American border agents. In addition to being handcuffed and questioned, his laptop was also seized.…
Utah Librarian To Receive Downs Intellectual Freedom Award
In January 2013, a months-long dispute over Patricia Polacco’s In Our Mothers’ House was finally resolved when the Davis School District in Farmington, Utah, returned the picture book to open library shelves. Since April 2012, the book about a lesbian…
Fight for the Freedom to Read with CBLDF in 2014!
Roll up your sleeves! Join the fight! Joining the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund puts you on the front line of the fight against censorship! Your membership dollars provide the tools to fight back when comic book readers, retailers, and…
The Color Purple Remains in North Carolina Classrooms
Throughout December, a parent in Brunswick County, North Carolina, waged a war against Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Color Purple. That war has been lost with the recent decision by the school board to retain the book in…
Massachusetts Library Stands by Tintin
Yesterday, library officials with the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts, refused to reshelve — and thus restrict access to — several Tintin titles after a group of parents filed a complaint about racist caricatures in the books. Scott Merzbach covered…
Censorship 2013: Student Protest Saves Persepolis in Chicago Public Schools
When a blogger leaked a March 14 email from the principal of Lane Tech College Prep in Chicago, Illinois, students in the district took immediate action. Within hours of discovering the email, students used social media to organize a protest…
Censorship 2013: Wertham Fabricated Evidence Against Comics
Early in 2013, a library sciences researcher at the University of Illinois proved what many of us already thought: Fredric Wertham, the child psychologist behind the anti-comics screed Seduction of the Innocent, fabricated much of his evidence against comics. The…
CBLDF’s 10 Most Read Stories of 2013
CBLDF ran hundreds of stories about censorship and helped fight dozens of book challenges in 2013. Let’s take a look at the top 10 most read stories of the year: Help Defend The Perks of Being a Wallflower In June,…
Petition Challenges School District’s Attempt to Ban Books
A petition on Change.org came to CBLDF’s attention this week. The petition challenges a proposed policy in the Muhlenberg School District in Reading, Pennsylvania, that would require all teachers in the district “to read and check each [book] for violence,…