Vol. 77/No. 39      November 4, 2013

“It was nothing but public pressure that made them change their minds,” Donald Matthews, president of the Randolph County NAACP, said in a phone interview from Randleman, N.C., Oct. 20. “The novel has long been a staple of summer reading.”

Published in 1952, Invisible Man won the National Book Award the following year. It is about a nameless African-American man who narrates the story of his life buffeted by a racist society from his youth in the South to adulthood in New York City.

“I am an invisible man,” he says. “When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination — indeed, everything and anything except me.”

The American Library Association sent a letter to the board Sept. 23 urging them to lift the ban. “Those objecting to particular books should not be given the power to restrict other users’ rights of access to the material,” wrote Barbara Jones, director of the group’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. “If parents think a particular book is not suitable for their child, they should guide their children to other books. They should not impose their beliefs on other people’s children.”

“We urge that you be guided by the U.S. Supreme Court, which held that public school officials may not remove books from school library shelves simply because of their disagreement with the views or ideas expressed in the books,” the letter said.

The attempt at banning sparked interest in reading the book among students and others in the county, which is 81 percent non-Hispanic Caucasian, 11 percent Latino and 6 percent African-American. Vintage Books, the publisher of Invisible Man, sent 100 copies to a local bookstore to be distributed for free to high school students. “By the end of the night all the free copies were given away,” said Matthews, “and another 25 or 30 were sold.” And there was a long waiting list for it at the public libraries.

The letters page of the local Asheboro Courier-Tribune was filled with calls for reversing the ban. And board members said they were deluged with email, overwhelmingly for putting the book back on the shelves.

The torrent of emails was “very enlightening,” School Board Chairman Tommy McDonald told the Los Angeles Times. The response made him realize that “my job is to make sure that book is there whether I want to read it or not.”

“The Randolph County Board of Education righted a wrong,” said the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina Legal Foundation in a Sept. 25 statement after the vote. “The freedom to read is just as essential to a healthy democracy as the freedom of speech and all other rights protected by the U.S. Constitution.”
 
 
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‘Militant’ victory part of fight against prison, other censorship
Defend freedom to read, think for ourselves
 
 
 
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