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Freedom to Read, Freedom to Learn
Though I am gone, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe.
Congressman John Lewis
July 30, 2020
When my father was a child, below the family radio was a small library. Turn of the century books that shaped America by authors Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jack London, and Zane Grey ignited his growing passion for reading. When Dad was in junior high school, his home room was the library, and he was in heaven.
It is no surprise, then, that my father passed his love of reading to his children. Growing up, we were word people. Our home had hundreds of books. There was even a dictionary in our bathroom. I recall seeing titles some would consider controversial such as James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye on our shelves—and not on the top shelf where children could not reach.
Simply stated, I did not grow up with parents who believed in banning books from our home or limiting our access to any type of literature.
As an English major in college and then a high school English teacher, I held fast to my beliefs that book banning was anathema to a democratic society. I taught school district-approved core novels to my students that have frequently been banned in the United States, among them, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.
Not ironically, my longstanding beliefs became challenged for the first time as a parent of a middle schooler. My oldest child, Anna, declared she wanted a copy of shock rocker Marilyn Manson’s autobiography, which I had heard was a litany of abuse against women. As appalling as I found Manson to be, I was at a crossroads.
Do I impose a restriction on what my child reads?
After deep reflection and soul-searching, I came to this compromise:
Anna, you can read the book, but I will read it, too, and we will discuss it.
Several years later when Anna’s youngest siblings were avid readers, I recall taking them to the bookstore, where on entering, my son, Kevin, declared loudly with arms outstretched,
We love books!
His passionate declaration engendered peals of laughter from those around him.
As I reflect today on the decision I made as a young parent, I have had no regrets. The lesson to my firstborn child was that censorship impedes rather than promotes critical thinking and reflection.
The American Library Association (ALA) tracks banned books by state each year. They report the following:
ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom documented 1,269 demands to censor library books and resources in 2022, the highest number of attempted book bans since ALA began compiling data about censorship in libraries more than 20 years ago. The unparalleled number of reported book challenges in 2022 nearly doubles the 729 book challenges reported in 2021. Censors targeted a record 2,571 unique titles in 2022, a 38% increase from the 1,858 unique titles targeted for censorship in 2021. Of those titles, the vast majority were written by or about members of the LGBTQIA+ community or by and about Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color.
Perhaps not surprising, ALA reports a 20% increase so far in 2023.
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s new initiative, Freedom to Read, Freedom to Learn, seeks to provide educators with practical ways to promote social justice and critical thinking. Their materials include classroom lessons, professional development, and quality research to support our work. One highlight of the many student lessons focuses on Congressman and civil rights movement hero John Lewis, who wrote this final article to be published on the day of his funeral: Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation.
Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble.
At the end of my father’s life, I had the privilege of returning the favor of reading to him just as he had read to me so many times. By his favorite reading chair was a tall stack of books that he had checked out of his local library just before he fell ill.
One evening at dusk, I plucked from the stack an e. e. cummings book of poetry. I sat by my father’s bedside and read to him.
you shall above all things be glad and young
For if you’re young,whatever life you wear
it will become you;and if you are glad
whatever’s living will yourself become.
Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need:
i can entirely her only love
whose any mystery makes every man’s
flesh put space on;and his mind take off time
that you should ever think,may god forbid
and (in his mercy) your true lover spare:
for that way knowledge lies,the foetal grave
called progress,and negation’s dead undoom.
I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance
His plucky response to me when I finished reading was,
I certainly did not recall how racy e. e. cummings’s poetry is!
My thoughts on reading the poem were a bit more nuanced at that moment, for I knew my father’s life was coming to an end. The man who lived and died on his own terms, through his love of literature, passed on a priceless gift to his children and grandchildren:
Be glad and young.
Be a learner.
Be a reader.
Yours for reading freedom,
Elizabeth
Elizabeth C. Orozco Reilly
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