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LONG ISLAND BOOK BATTLES
When the Supreme Court made the call
BY SOPHIA CHANG
sophia.chang@newsday.com; Staff writer Jennifer
June 19, 2007
Long Island has had its share of controversies over what constitutes acceptable reading for students.
None was more heated than the book-banning controversy that rocked the Island Trees school district in the 1970s, ultimately delineating First Amendment rights for students in a protracted and hard-fought manifestation of the era's culture wars.
On one side was the politically conservative school board.
In March 1976, the board, headed by Levittown resident Richard Ahrens, pulled nine books out of the high school library and one from the junior high, saying the volumes were "anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and just plain filthy."
Their list of banned books included the Pulitzer Prize-winner "The Fixer" by Bernard Malamud, Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughter-house Five," and Richard Wright's "Black Boy."
On the other side was a group of Island Trees students led by student council president Steven Pico and civil liberties advocates who sued the school board over violating their First Amendment rights.
Six years later, the suit reached the Supreme Court, which ruled that while schools "rightly possess significant discretion to determine the content of their school libraries," they cannot ban material based on ideology.
But the issue of school sovereignty was so loaded that even the land's highest court could not fully agree.
Justice Lewis Powell wrote in a dissenting opinion that he was worried about changing education policy through litigation.
The books were ultimately returned to Island Trees' libraries.
But beyond the immediate impact, the case has a robust First Amendment legacy, said Arthur Eisenberg, legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union and one of the litigators for the students in the lawsuit.
"I think it has served as a limitation on organized political efforts to remove books from schools, based on ideological content," Eisenberg said.
And the Supreme Court decision also clarified another constitutional right, said scholar David Hudson of the First Amendment Center in Nashville, Tenn.
He pointed out that Justice William Brennan wrote that the right to free speech also includes the right to receive information.
"That's a First Amendment principle that applies way outside the school library. I think that was a real golden nugget," Hudson said.
No formal process for dealing with controversial books came out of what happened in the 1970s, said current Island Trees Superintendent James Parla.
"That was just an unfortunate situation that happened 30 years ago."
Staff writer Jennifer Sinco Kelleher contributed to this story. -- LegitimateAndEvenCompelling 01:54, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
The paragraph as written misrepresents the statements made in the plurality's opinion. The quoted words, "perfectly permissible," are not the court's holding, but a statement made by the respondents' counsel at oral argument (the citations to the oral argument transcript make this clear.) When discussing the respondents' statements, Justice Brennan uses the phrase, "in respondents' view" to further distinguish the statements made by respondents at oral argument from the opinion of the court. The introductory statement goes too far when it claims "the court says" it is perfectly permissible to remove books that are pervasively vulgar, at least based on the quoted language. It is reflective of original research.
Moreover, in using the phrase, "perfectly permissible," the respondents' counsel was discussing books that were educationally unsuitable, not books categorized as "pervasively vulgar."
The actual holding of the case may be found one paragraph below, clearly identified as the holding by Justice Brennan: "In brief, we hold that local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to "prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion." West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S., at 642 . Such purposes stand inescapably condemned by our precedents."
I have edited the article to remove the original research and to include the full holding of the court, including the original quotation, so as to accurately represent the plurality's opinion (that is, let the court speak for itself.)
Could someone make Board of Education v. Pico redirect here? It won't let me do it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.96.128.36 ( talk) 21:41, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
![]() | This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
![]() | This article was nominated for deletion on September 17, 2005. The result of the discussion was keep after a rewrite. |
LONG ISLAND BOOK BATTLES
When the Supreme Court made the call
BY SOPHIA CHANG
sophia.chang@newsday.com; Staff writer Jennifer
June 19, 2007
Long Island has had its share of controversies over what constitutes acceptable reading for students.
None was more heated than the book-banning controversy that rocked the Island Trees school district in the 1970s, ultimately delineating First Amendment rights for students in a protracted and hard-fought manifestation of the era's culture wars.
On one side was the politically conservative school board.
In March 1976, the board, headed by Levittown resident Richard Ahrens, pulled nine books out of the high school library and one from the junior high, saying the volumes were "anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and just plain filthy."
Their list of banned books included the Pulitzer Prize-winner "The Fixer" by Bernard Malamud, Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughter-house Five," and Richard Wright's "Black Boy."
On the other side was a group of Island Trees students led by student council president Steven Pico and civil liberties advocates who sued the school board over violating their First Amendment rights.
Six years later, the suit reached the Supreme Court, which ruled that while schools "rightly possess significant discretion to determine the content of their school libraries," they cannot ban material based on ideology.
But the issue of school sovereignty was so loaded that even the land's highest court could not fully agree.
Justice Lewis Powell wrote in a dissenting opinion that he was worried about changing education policy through litigation.
The books were ultimately returned to Island Trees' libraries.
But beyond the immediate impact, the case has a robust First Amendment legacy, said Arthur Eisenberg, legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union and one of the litigators for the students in the lawsuit.
"I think it has served as a limitation on organized political efforts to remove books from schools, based on ideological content," Eisenberg said.
And the Supreme Court decision also clarified another constitutional right, said scholar David Hudson of the First Amendment Center in Nashville, Tenn.
He pointed out that Justice William Brennan wrote that the right to free speech also includes the right to receive information.
"That's a First Amendment principle that applies way outside the school library. I think that was a real golden nugget," Hudson said.
No formal process for dealing with controversial books came out of what happened in the 1970s, said current Island Trees Superintendent James Parla.
"That was just an unfortunate situation that happened 30 years ago."
Staff writer Jennifer Sinco Kelleher contributed to this story. -- LegitimateAndEvenCompelling 01:54, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
The paragraph as written misrepresents the statements made in the plurality's opinion. The quoted words, "perfectly permissible," are not the court's holding, but a statement made by the respondents' counsel at oral argument (the citations to the oral argument transcript make this clear.) When discussing the respondents' statements, Justice Brennan uses the phrase, "in respondents' view" to further distinguish the statements made by respondents at oral argument from the opinion of the court. The introductory statement goes too far when it claims "the court says" it is perfectly permissible to remove books that are pervasively vulgar, at least based on the quoted language. It is reflective of original research.
Moreover, in using the phrase, "perfectly permissible," the respondents' counsel was discussing books that were educationally unsuitable, not books categorized as "pervasively vulgar."
The actual holding of the case may be found one paragraph below, clearly identified as the holding by Justice Brennan: "In brief, we hold that local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to "prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion." West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S., at 642 . Such purposes stand inescapably condemned by our precedents."
I have edited the article to remove the original research and to include the full holding of the court, including the original quotation, so as to accurately represent the plurality's opinion (that is, let the court speak for itself.)
Could someone make Board of Education v. Pico redirect here? It won't let me do it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.96.128.36 ( talk) 21:41, 22 October 2008 (UTC)