My Banned Book

Like most librarians (and most non-librarians of my acquaintance), I’m not a big fan of censorship.  Unless there are really vile exigent circumstances, I prefer to choose my own reading, viewing, and listening material rather than have Big Brother in some guise pre-determine what’s not good for me.

The American Library Association’s Banned Book Week having just concluded (they’re against banning rather than for it), I heard a story on The Takeaway a few days ago about book banning in libraries and schools.  That made me recall an incident from when I was attending the School of Library and Information Studies at Wayne State University over 30 years ago.

And about the time I got a book removed from a library's collection.

I was taking a class in collection development—how to build and maintain a library’s collection so as to best fulfill the institution’s mission statement while adhering to the budget.  The instructor (Edith Phillips, if I remember correctly) gave us an interesting assignment.   We were to imagine ourselves as directors of public libraries.  An upset patron had come to us demanding that a particular book be withdrawn from the collection.  Each of us was to choose a controversial book and then write a paper explaining how we’d handle the situation, balancing our professional standards and personal dedication to the First Amendment against the standards of the community (as if those could actually be determined).

This being very early in the 1980’s most of my fellow students (women—I was always in the minority in my classes . . . and in my workplaces) chose the 1971 classic, Our Bodies, Ourselves.   I’d never read it, but I assumed it to be along the lines of How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive:  A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot (another best-seller of the same period) only with a different focus.  Seriously, I knew that the women’s health book was highly controversial.  And I’m pretty sure that all the women argued against banning the book.

I chose a different approach.  Years earlier, I’d been a part-time student assistant in a university library (not Wayne State University) with closed stacks.  When we weren’t paging books requested patrons, we reshelved returned books.  And when we were caught up on that, we were supposed to perform shelf reading—working our way through the collection shelf-by-shelf to make sure no books had been misshelved.  (It was even more boring than it sounds.)  While shelf reading, I ran across a truly disturbing book.

Take Your Choice:  Segregation or Mongrelization was a racist polemic by a guy named Theodore Bilbo.  He’d served two non-sequential terms as governor of Mississippi and then a single term in the U.S. Senate.  Those were his qualifications for opining on the issue of segregation.  I’d never seen anything like it.  I found it irresistible in a repugnant sense, like a terrible traffic accident you can’t take your eyes off.  I smuggled it home (I wasn’t about to let anyone see me checking it out), read it cover to cover, and smuggled it back in.

Mr. Bilbo purported that the book was an objective look at the issue, even quoting from published sources.  Well, actually all of quotes were from the same source—a self-published book by another racist crackpot.  Bilbo’s basic thesis was that the colored folk were happy in their assigned place and so were the white folk in their assigned place.  That’s the way that God set it up, and Mississippi wasn’t going to mess with God’s Divine Plan so long as he (Bilbo, not God) was in charge.

Having received the assignment from Dr. Phillips, I returned to those closed stacks (I had connections).  The vile book was still there.  They’d installed a theft detection system since my previous escapade smuggling it into and out of the building, but I knew how to beat it.  (No, I won’t tell you . . . librarians have professional secrets, just like magicians do.)  Taking it home, I re-read it. It was every bit as appalling as I remembered it being.

 

When I wrote up my paper, I fully endorsed removing Take Your Choice:  Segregation or Mongrelization from the imaginary collection I supervised as pretend library director.  The subject matter wasn’t the issue.  My main reason for agreeing to remove the book was that it contained demonstrably fraudulent information that purported to document the genetic inferiority of blacks to whites.   Had the book used similarly false documentation to prove the contention that the earth is flat, I similarly would have acceded to a patron request to withdraw it even though the flat earth theory is hardly a burning controversy.  Furthermore, there were practical risks in keeping the book in the collection.  Had someone with an ax to pick against my imaginary library somehow run across it, they’d have had a perfect gallows from which to hang me and my library.

When I turned in the paper, I clipped it to the book.  Not only did I get an A on the paper, Dr. Phillips had me read it to the class to demonstrate that there are situations in which removing a book from a collection can be justified.

Finally, I returned to the library from which I had smuggled out the book.  Disregarding the alarm that went off when I entered the building (“It’s okay—I’m smuggling your book back in rather than out”), I walked back to the Director’s office.  I knew her personally (we used to play pinochle with mutual friends some weekends), so I thought the book should be brought to her attention.  I dropped it on her desk and gave her the short version of my story.

The next time I visited that library, I checked the catalog.  The book had been withdrawn from the collection.

 

Postscript:  So much for relying on my memory of events thirty years in the past.  The library director cited in the post has contacted me to point out two facts:

1. The stacks were no longer closed when I returned to the library to retrieve the book for my library studies assignment.
2. She has never engaged in censorship,

My first error was semi-intentional.  Even as I wrote the post, I was trying to remember when the stacks had been opened to the public.  Despite my uncertainty, I succumbed to the temptation to embellish the story.  (And I did know how to beat the theft detection system originally installed in that library.

The second error was the result of a false memory on my part.  I just checked their online catalog (as I should have when I writing the post), and the book is still in their collection.  I owe the director an amends for implying that she would have removed an objectionable book as the result of a patron complaint.  (For that matter, I never actually complained or requested that the book be withdrawn.)  Censorship is a slippery slope to venture out on.  The case can certainly be made that there's historical value in retaining artifacts of an earlier time even when they've become controversial.  It may be difficult for a college student of the early Twenty First Century to believe that a governor and senator would ever publish anything as insensitive and potentially incendiary as that book was. 

So I hereby apologize to said director for my error.  She is a woman of principle whom I've long admired.  I was wrong, and I thank her for correcting my mistake.