Banned Books Week: Stories of Censorship
Students in the bridge experience course LI 202, Free to All: Public Libraries in U.S. Society, researched cases of censorships in public libraries over the last two centuries. Using primary sources they wrote short reports about these cases and designed corresponding posters for Banned Books Week. Browse this guide to learn about the variety of cases in libraries.
Course Instructor: Johanna MacKay
Poster and Report by Elise Burton '26
In the mid-1950s, public libraries across the country were faced with a challenge to their collections. Since their development, public libraries have had to tread the delicate line between providing educational resources and improving literacy whilst still appealing to the general public’s desires. Nowadays public libraries’ collections contain a multitude of books covering a wide range of subjects, some fact, some fiction. In the past, however, this has not always been the case. This can be seen in bans on fiction books in libraries entirely, and in the 1950s, when comic books were protested and removed from circulation in many public libraries.
Popular comic books of the time were superhero comics, like Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. These characters and their stories often addressed important issues, such as justice and racism, including a 1946 Superman story that criticized the Ku Klux Klan (Young and Friedman). However, despite this, these comics were considered a menace to children, because they seemingly offered nothing educational. Comics contained violence and vivid illustrations of crime, and due to their primarily visual components, they also required less textual reading for children.
One such library that banned comics was the Santa Barbara Public Library. Santa Barbara had a large collection of comic books for children that were deemed “blood-and-horror” because of the violence contained within them (“Humor for Children”). Though highly popular, many parents, teachers, and librarians believed that they were unstimulating, “objectionable,” and bad for children (“Move Against Comics”). Libraries were meant to encourage “good” reading, and comics, in the eyes of these adults, were not good for their children. Santa Barbara community members sought to fundraise to “buy more and better children’s books for the Public Library to counteract the blight of comic books” (“Move Against Comics”). Sixty “horror” comics were then dropped by a regional distributor and removed from the Santa Barbara library (“P.T.A. Library Counter Comics”).
Aside from the fundraising efforts, parents and teachers in Santa Barbara also set up independent libraries to supply books to children. Marjorie Rankin, a children’s librarian for the Santa Barbara Library, was a strong supporter of the ban. She published a list of appropriate books for children to read instead of “lurid comic books,", which included Oliver Twist, Moby Dick, Wuthering Heights, and Huckleberry Finn (“School Libraries Replace Comics”). The irony of this list is that many of these books deal with difficult and horrifying topics, just like the banned comic books.
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