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Banning Toni Morrison and Alice Walker in Michigan, but not just yet
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Forget winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. Perhaps you've truly arrived as a great American writer when a school system wants to ban your book, and so it goes for Pulitzer Prize Winner and Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison.
The public schools superintendent in Shelby, Mich., Dana McGrew, removed Morrison's book Song of Solomon from a high-school Advanced Placement English Class's reading list this spring. He said he did so because the book was dividing the community after a small group of parents targeted the novel, calling it pornographic because of "graphic sexual and violent references."
However, when the book was removed from the list, the horse had already left the barn. According to the article at MLive.com, McGrew relayed that "19 of the 21 students in the AP English class read Song of Solomon earlier this year. The others chose to read a different book." The book will not be taught next year because too few students have signed up for the school system's AP English course. After media attention, the Shelby school board voted on May 19 to reinstate the book in a split decision of four to three.
McGrew said the parents may not stop with Song of Solomon. He told a reporter that he's heard rumors that the same group plans to go after Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple next. Walker's novel won a 1983 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Song of Solomon, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977, is the coming-age-story of an African-American male in Michigan, Macon "Milkman" Dead III. It has been praised for its lyrical style and Morrison's revelation of a "fully-realized black world."
The Color Purple is Walker's provocative tale of an African-American girl, Celie, who is sexually abused by her father and through self-realization heals. On her journey she marries an unloving man and later experiences an attraction to a woman who shows her kindness and love. The book became more popular after it was made into a movie by Steven Spielberg that starred Whoopi Goldberg, Margaret Avery, Oprah Winfrey, and Danny Glover. The movie drew 11 Oscar nominations.
The book Johnny Got his Gun by Dalton Trumbo is also rumored to have been pegged by the Shelby group as offensive. It's an anti-war story that's been described as "shocking, violent, terrifying, horrible, uncompromising, brutal, remorseless and gruesome." It is also a National Book Award winner.
Morrison has traveled this road before. Her Pulitzer Prize winner Beloved was banned in a Kentucky school after two parents complained.
Ironically, the near banning of Song of Solomon comes as "Burn this Book, a collection of writings on censorship written by famous writers, hits bookshelves. Morrison edited the book, which is also a project of the PEN American Center.
The video below is of Morrison's PEN American Center 2008 lecture on censorship that fed the new work Burn this Book. She will be a guest on WBUR public radio tomorrow, Tom Ashbrook's show "On Point."
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