We’ve recently been hearing a lot about banned books in the news. Is it Banned Books Week? (No, that is coming up: September 18-24, 2022, so plenty of time to mark your calendars!) 

Unfortunately, the reason why banned books have been in the news lately isn’t a good one: a Tennessee school district has banned the classic Holocaust graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman (the son of Holocaust survivors). 

These recent headlines may have you wondering- what’s the history behind Banned Books Week? 

Banned Books Week was started in the 1980s- you can read about its history here. The American Library Association, a large promoter of the celebration, says “While books have been and continue to be banned, part of the Banned Books Week celebration is the fact that, in a majority of cases, the books have remained available. This happens only thanks to the efforts of librarians, teachers, students, adn community members who stand up and speak out for the freedom to read.” This is evinced in our current situation with Maus as local comic book owners in Tennessee have made the graphic novel free for students so that they are still able to read this important work. 

Of course we couldn’t end an article about Banned Books Week without mentioning the Supreme Court case that helped it become what it is today: Island Trees School District v. Pico (1982).  In this case, the Island Trees School District Board of Education ordered that certain books be removed from its district’s junior high and high school libraries, because the books were “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy.” (This was no “I know it when I see it” situation, a la Justice Potter Stewart in the infamous 1962 Jacobellis v. Ohio decision. ) 

In a 5-4 decision, the Court ruled that “although school boards have a vested interest in promoting respect for social, moral, and political community values, their discretionary power is secondary to the transcendent imperatives of the First Amendment.” The Board was not able to restrict the availability of the books in their schools’ libraries simply because they disagreed with the books’ contents. 

We’ll be curiously watching to see if the Tennessee situation reaches a court level as well.

Submitted by Babler,Emma on February 4, 2022

This article appears in the categories: Law Library

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