October 6, 1999
Banned Books
Library presents Free People Read Freely
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Forty-five words that define a nation, the first of ten amendments that comprise the Bill of Rights to the Constitution.
To celebrate and reaffirm our First Amendment freedoms, libraries across the nation sponsored Free People Read Freely events as part of Banned Books week, which ran from September 25-October 2. As part of this week, the Traverse Area District Library sponsored a talk Wednesday evening at the main library featuring Eric Suess, director of the Fraser Library in Macomb County and chair of the Intellectual Freedom Committee of the Michigan Libraries Association.
"Challenges come from any part of the spectrum and deal with any issues, there is no pattern," said Suess, noting that there have been 5,246 challenges reported in the years 1990-1998. "When someone challenges a book it is about something they truly believe, but freedom of expression is in the First Amendment."
Therefore, banning books doesn't jibe with the Constitution, he said. But this unalienable right granted by our Founding Fathers has not stopped people from challenging books by authors ranging from Judy Blume and Maya Angelou to John Steinbeck and Dr. Seuss. The Bible is one of the most frequently challenged books over the years and even the Diary of Anne Frank has been challenged in the past as pornographic.
Suess' undergraduate degrees are in government and international relations, with a focus on Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He approaches the issues of intellectual freedom in this country by contrasting to what he saw available to citizens in these areas. There, each time a new ruler took power, from Lenin to Stalin to even Gorbachev, they took control of the libraries immediately and purged unacceptable documents. Even the official Soviet encyclopedia was updated with pages acceptable to the new regime, which librarians were instructed to glue over the now offensive information.
These policies went beyond banning books to total control of information, he noted, and should spur people in this country to remain vigilant about protecting their freedoms.
"With each successive leader, literally 50-75 percent of the books on the shelves were removed and replaced with books more acceptable to the new leader," Suess said. "They knew that anyplace with books was a way to get information to the populace as a whole. When you control what access people have to information, it has a really chilling effect on the kind of life we live."
Jean Coonrod of Interlochen was one of 25 attendees at the lecture, bringing her teenage son with her to open his mind on this controversial issue. Coonrod was an elementary library volunteer for 20 years in Interlochen and is dedicated to intellectual freedom. She has read To Kill a Mockingbird aloud three different times to her three sons to make sure they understood how important it is to read books of all types.
"When I was in high school, our English teacher gave us a list of books we shouldn't read so we had to go read them," Coonrod recalled. "I'm always so amazed at what people want to ban; even at the library where I volunteered, people would rip down displays of bunnies and eggs we put up for Easter."
In his talk, Suess also noted how the Internet has changed the face of libraries and sees the growing push for filters in public institutions as both unconstitutional and unworkable. His own library and all others in Macomb County are facing a challenge from parents to put on filters but he disagrees with the idea. Instead, his library has chosen to put the terminals in a highly visible place where they can be monitored.
"Computer access is a whole new beast for librarians, but filters don't work," Suess noted. "With Internet access, you don't have the opportunity to pick and choose, it's all out there. But filters don't stop offensive material and can unintentionally screen out acceptable things."