After the Hanover County School Board banned 19 books last June, Kate Lindley launched “Free to Read,” her Girl Scout Gold Award project.
Lindley, who’d competed as a Reading Olympian as a Hanover student, was appalled at the censorship and determined to combat it. She coded a “Free to Read” app with information about the misbegotten ban and the books affected. And after the board banned more than 70 additional books in November, she set up Banned Book Nooks at two Hanover businesses: Morr Donuts in Mechanicsville and We Think In Ink in Ashland.
At its April 10 meeting, the Hanover Board of Supervisors honored Lindley and several other Girl Scouts from Troop 789 in Hanover who’d earned their Gold Awards, the highest award granted by Girl Scouts of the USA.
People are also reading…
But like their counterparts on the county School Board, the Board of Supervisors could not resist the temptation to censor. Cold Harbor Supervisor Michael Herzberg stripped Lindley’s proclamation of its context by removing mention of the School Board book bans that spurred her to action in the first place. And then, save absent Ashland Supervisor Faye Prichard, it unanimously approved the redacted document, effectively distorting the story behind it.
In support of a School Board ban of literary classics such as “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” among other titles, the supervisors censored a Girl Scout.
You can’t make this up.
“Honestly at first I just started laughing,” recalled Lindley, a senior at Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School who’s headed to Georgia Tech to study computer science.
“It’s kind of hilarious. For me, it’s very ironic that they decided to censor my project that’s meant to fight censorship.”
Asked in an email why he edited Lindley’s proclamation, Herzberg replied:
“Board proclamations are issued with a vote by the Board. Some books that contain porn and sexually explicit content were de-selected from Hanover Public Schools and I support that action. Books with porn and sexually explicit content do not have my support for a Board proclamation.”
Our young people are smarter than these politicians think. They can smell the stench of rank hypocrisy a country mile away. They aren’t fooled by folks spouting platitudes about the Constitution while supporting politicians who forswear their oath to the document as they toss lit matchsticks at the First Amendment.
They can distinguish a political exercise from an educational one.
“Their motivations don’t seem to me in any way to be noble or for the actual protection of students,” Lindley said. For technology-savvy high school students on the cusp of adulthood, censoring reading material is “a pointless waste of time.”
In Virginia, it could be worse. We could be like Missouri or other states that have criminalized those who don’t go along with this censorship agenda.
A suburban St. Louis library removed an illustrated edition of the Margaret Atwood classic “The Handmaid’s Tale” after Missouri passed a law subjecting librarians to fines and possible imprisonment for allowing sexually explicit materials on bookshelves, according to The Associated Press.
“There’s a depiction of a rape scene, a handmaid being forced into a sexual act,” Tom Bober, Clayton district’s library coordinator, says in the AP story. “It’s literally one panel of the graphic novel, but we felt it was in violation of the law in Missouri.”
“The laws are designed to limit or remove legal protections that libraries have had for decades,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, says in the story.
When you start locking up the librarians, it’s only a matter of time before the mob starts making a bonfire out of thousands of books as a prelude of the horrors to come.
Speaking of incarceration, it should come as no surprise that more books are banned in prisons than in schools and libraries combined. That was among the findings of Wanda Felsenhardt, a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Brandcenter, as she completed her award-winning entry in the Jurgen Comics Contest by VCU Libraries.
The contest is named for James Branch Cabell’s 1919 book “Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice,” the object of an ultimately unsuccessful obscenity lawsuit by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. It focuses “on telling stories of banned art as a way to consider the complex relationship between art and society and the long history of censorship.” (Disclosure: My wife sits on the board of VCU’s Cabell Library.)
According to Felsenhardt’s comic, among the banned books are “Prison Ramen: Recipes and Stories from Behind Bars,” Dungeons & Dragons manuals and — in Florida, which leads the nation in prison book banning — Klingon dictionaries. Klingons are a fictional race from the “Star Trek” series.
“People, no matter where they are, should have that connection to the outside world and have the ability to learn and better themselves through reading. ... I think reading is so fundamentally important,” Felsenhardt said.
Of course, there are documented links between low literacy and incarceration. But just as school boards cite “protecting the kids” to justify censorship, prisons point at “security” as a reason for censorship, even as prison libraries aid rehabilitation efforts.
“I don’t think reading a book is inherently violent or dangerous, ever. So just the fact that people want to ban things, any type of reading, is crazy to me,” Felsenhardt said. “Even being able to read things you disagree with is important just to become more well-rounded and have more empathy toward people who aren’t like you.”
In prison, not unlike in our public school districts and libraries, Black authors are often targeted. Topics such as civil rights, injustice or prison reform are red-flagged. Felsenhardt’s comic quotes James Baldwin saying: “The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: He or she has become a threat.”
Apparently, Lindley represents a threat in Hanover.
“I am honored that they think that my project is enough of a disruption that they feel the need to censor it in any way,” she said. “That is an honor to me and the work I’ve done, personally. But still, maybe not the best choice they could have made.”
To stock her Banned Book Nooks, she receives donations from the Amazon wish list on her Free to Read page on Instagram. Lindley plans to speak at Wednesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting so that the audience “can understand and appreciate my project for what it was and what it continues to be.”
That’s assuming the board allows her to speak freely.