Issue 62, Summer 1996
When a parent demanded that Poetry in Black America be removed from school libraries in Okaloosa County, Fla. for “inciting violence,” the Florida Coalition Against Censorship arranged for challenged poet Nikki Giovanni to speak with school officials. The board retained the book.
An obscenity trial of the Pink Pyramid Bookstore in Cincinnati for renting a video of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, is scheduled for early August. NCAC together with the ACLU filed a brief signed by 60 prominent film critics, artists, and museums — including Martin Scorsese, Alec Baldwin, and the Museum of Modern Art — unsuccessfully arguing that an obscenity prosecution is unconstitutional because of Salò‘s artistic, literary and political value (CN 55, 56).
NCAC friends in Oregon have joined the “No Censorship, No on Measure 31” campaign, opposing an initiative which would allow every city and county to make its own censorship laws. The Oregon constitution does not permit denying free expression to the category of sexual speech.