The Dangerous Lesson of Book Bans in Public School Libraries

An obscure Supreme Court case provides a roadmap through the curricular culture war.

- By David French

A small group of parents attends a conference where they're educated about the threats to American morality embedded in modern education. There they obtain a list of books believed to present a clear and present danger to young people. They bring that list to a meeting of the local school board. It turns out that 11 of the titles are found in school district libraries or curricula.

Alarmed, school board members direct the superintendent to remove the books and to put out a press statement declaring the tomes "anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Sem[i]tic, and just plain filthy." The board says, "It is our duty, our moral obligation, to protect the children in our schools from this moral danger as surely as from physical and medical dangers."

A book review committee is formed, and it recommends retaining most of the books. But the school board disagrees. Nine of the books are removed: Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut; The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris; Down These Mean Streets, by Piri Thomas; Best Short Stories of Negro Writers, edited by Langston Hughes; Go Ask Alice, of anonymous authorship; A Hero Ain't Nothin' but A Sandwich, by Alice Childress; A Reader for Writers, edited by Jerome Archer; The Fixer, by Bernard Malamud; and Soul On Ice, by Eldridge Cleaver.

Did this happen in Texas in 2022? No: The year is 1976, and the place is the Island Trees Union Free School District on Long Island, New York. These events formed the core of Island Trees School District v. Pico, a quirky and mostly forgotten Supreme Court case that is suddenly relevant once again. That relevance is related less to legal precedent than to a powerful moral argument that a plurality of the court made in its dicta. That moral argument should guide our disputes about books in schools today.