As we reported in our latest edition of Censorship News, Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon was recently removed from an Indiana high school’s AP English class on April 28 after a parent and school board members complained about its content. Two days later, the book was returned to the class when a committee of educators and parents ruled in favor of keeping the book.
Too bad the story doesn’t end there.
The book is again up for review, now by the Franklin Township school board, which will hear an appeal of the committee’s decision at its June 21 meeting, leaving the fate of Song of Solomon in future AP classes uncertain.
In a joint letter, NCAC and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression write to urge the school to retain the book, saying:
The racial and sexual themes treated in Song of Solomon are essential to the fullness of this rightly renowned novel and are appropriate to the level of material that advanced placement students, most of whom will go on to college, must be able to read and consider.
That Song of Solomon conveys, through poetic and musical language, the sometimes discomfiting truths of life is hardly reason enough to hide it from our nation’s young people. In fact, that may be the very reason it should exist in the classroom.
Stay tuned for more updates following Monday’s meeting.