Record efforts to ban books are fueling fights in Texas, Virginia and across the country. Just this week, a group including free-speech advocates, authors, parents and the publisher Penguin Random House filed a federal lawsuit against a Florida school district over the removal of books covering gender and LGBTQ issues.
Yet only one previous case of a library book ban has ended up before the Supreme Court: Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 v. Pico. And, outside law school classrooms, it has largely been forgotten.
The country was engulfed then, as now, in a debate over which books should be allowed in schools and libraries. The American Library Association recorded a rise in censorship activity, from 100 book removals or challenges annually in the early 1970s to 1,000 annually by the end of the decade. In Virginia, a pastor fought a public library for offering books such as Philip Roth’s “Goodbye, Columbus” and Sidney Sheldon’s “Bloodline,” calling them “pornography.” In Indiana, a group of senior citizens publicly burned 40 copies of a book called “Values Clarification” for its discussions of moral relativism, situational ethics and secular humanism. (It also mentioned marijuana and divorce.)
The Pico saga began in Levittown, a hamlet on Long Island, in September 1975, when three members of the Island Trees school board attended a conference sponsored by a conservative education group, Parents of New York United. At the conference, PONY-U shared a collection of excerpts from books it deemed “objectionable.”
The president and vice president of the board thereafter searched the library of Island Trees High School. They discovered nine of the listed books, including Richard Wright’s “Black Boy” and Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Another was found in the junior high library.
A few months later, the board formed a book review committee, which recommended removing two of the books and making a third available only with parental approval. The full board rejected these recommendations, instead withdrawing all nine books for being “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Sem[i]tic and just plain filthy.”
The New York Civil Liberties Union, on behalf of Island Trees student council president Steven Pico and four other students, sued the board in response on Jan. 4, 1977. Ira Glasser, the organization’s executive director, said at a news conference that the ban had been part of a recent “epidemic of book censorship” by “self-appointed vigilantes.” Vonnegut, who was also in attendance, chain-smoking, said he was “distressed that this sort of thing can happen in my country.”