In celebration of Banned Books Week (September 21 - 27, 2014), we have a guest blog post by Barbara Gordon-Lickey, member of the ACLU of Oregon Education Committee.
I was in high school when I first learned that maintaining the freedom to read requires vigilance. I wanted to read Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. Although Lolita received much critical acclaim, it was controversial, to put it mildly, because it dealt with a sexual relationship between an adult man and a 12 year old girl. After its initial publication in France in 1955, Lolita was banned for several years in France and Great Britain, as well as several other countries. Surprisingly, it was published in the United States in 1958 without major incident, although some local libraries refused to buy it. Lolita was on the New York Times best seller list for two years and sold over 50 million copies, possibly because of its controversial subject matter. It was not an obscure piece of erotic literature.
Sometime around 1959, I found Lolita in the public library and brought it to the checkout desk. The woman checking out books, who may or may not have been an actual librarian, told me that I could not check it out because it was on reserve. I thought it odd that a book on reserve was on the shelf, but I did not argue. I checked the shelf about a half hour later. Lolita had been replaced on the shelf. Again I brought it to the checkout desk. This time the woman had some other excuse for refusing to let me checkout the book. Again I did not argue.
I went home and told my mother this story. She had never told me that I couldn’t read something and she was not about to let anyone else tell me. I remember that she was cooking dinner at the time. She took off her apron and said, “We are going down to the library right now.” When we arrived, my mother asked to speak with the librarian. She informed the librarian that it was not her job to tell me or any other library patron what she could or could not read. Needless to say, I checked out the book.
This is one of my fondest memories of my mother. It also inspired a respect for the First Amendment that, I am sorry to say, I did not act on for many years. But when digital privacy became a priority issue for the Oregon ACLU, I wanted to educate myself and others about how computers made it easy to keep records of who read what . Even more important, I wanted to know how those records were used. So I joined the education committee of the Oregon ACLU and volunteered to write an essay on “The Freedom to Read.” Maybe my mother’s bold defense of my freedom to read inspired me.
Find out what materials were challenged in Oregon libraries and schools in 2013 - 2014 (PDF).