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…
Category: Education
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,…
Tales From the Code: The Christmas Panic
It was “The Night Before Christmas.” At least that was the name of the story in Panic #1, a 1953 release from MC Gaines’ EC Comics. This story not only stirred controversy and was banned in the state of Massachusetts, but it…
CBLDF Joins Coalition Defending Alice Walker’s The Color Purple
For the last month, a parent in Brunswick County, North Carolina, has been waging a war against Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Color Purple. CBLDF has joined a coalition led by CBLDF-sponsored Kids’ Right to Read Project to…
Book Challenges on the Rise in 2013
2013 saw a significant increase in book challenges, especially in the last quarter: CBLDF-sponsored Kids’ Right to Read Project just released a press release announcing a three-fold increase in challenges over the last three months, and a greater than 50%…
Student Newspaper Apologizes for Allegedly Racist Cartoon
Sports fans all over the country were baffled over Auburn University’s recent defeat of the University of Alabama in the Iron Bowl. As a result, the University of Alabama’s student newspaper, The Crimson White, published a satirical cartoon depicting an…