Dangerous Books for Dangerous Times

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Battles have erupted at schools, school boards, and library meetings across the country. Book removals in schools have surged in recent years, and two different national reports find that more books are being banned than ever before, with record highs expected.

In the 1970s, one student took a school library book ban to the Supreme Court. As much as it was a local issue, he believed it brought the First Amendment into question. “And when those two are in conflict,” he said, “to me, the First Amendment has to win. I found book banning in general, at age seventeen, to be against everything I had been taught up until that age.”

Steven Pico grew up in suburban Levittown, Long Island, in the 1970s. When he was in high school, he began attending school board meetings as a student representative. At one of those meetings, a librarian whispered to him, “The school board members went into the library last night and removed books.” That was how he first learned that they were banning books.

The Island Trees School Board on Long Island had ordered nine books removed from the schools, calling them anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy. Levittown was a typical suburban, predominantly white, conservative community. The school board had obtained lists of books that a coalition of right-wing groups claimed were objectionable for children. One of the books, The Fixer by Bernard Malamud, was a Pulitzer Prize winner. It was banned because of a few derogatory terms—even though the book itself opposed antisemitism. Another banned title was by Alice Childress, because it mentioned that George Washington owned slaves. Pico said her book was meaningful to him, as was Go Ask Alice, which he also considered an important book for young adults.

The banned list also included Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Pico noticed that half the banned books were written by African American authors, and he saw the board’s actions as an attempt to silence those voices. “That scared me,” he said, “because clearly the school board was trying to deny certain aspects of American history and prevent slavery, for example, from being discussed in our schools.” He decided that the movement needed a student leader, and that the fight went beyond his own community. He hired a lawyer and sued the Board of Education in federal court, claiming that the bans violated students’ First Amendment rights.

In January 1977, with Kurt Vonnegut Jr. by his side, Pico publicly announced that he was suing the Island Trees Board of Education. “I thought we had a right to be exposed to a diversity of ideas,” he said, “not just the ones they politically agreed with.”

The vice president of the school board, Frank Martin, disagreed. He argued that decisions about school libraries should be left to local communities. “Why should we be prohibited from determining what’s in our library?” he asked. “There’s a tremendous amount of local control over educational matters, and the Supreme Court has no business getting involved in the day-to-day operations of the school library.”

The case lasted more than five years. The books in question had been approved by professional educators, and the controversy became national news. Eventually, the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Pico recalled that the justices seemed agitated. Justice Powell asked whether it was the job of school boards—not courts—to decide what was suitable. Justice Rehnquist questioned whether Pico could simply buy the books elsewhere. Chief Justice Burger wondered if judges should overrule elected school boards. Justice Stevens asked about “bad taste.”

The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that only books considered “pervasively vulgar” or “educationally unsuitable” could be removed. For the first time, the Court recognized that students have a constitutional right to receive ideas—all ideas. Pico called it “a fantastic decision,” saying that anyone who respects the First Amendment and the free flow of ideas should be overjoyed.

However, the Pico ruling turned out to be one of the most fractured decisions in Supreme Court history. There were seven different opinions, and no single opinion had five justices signing on, meaning it wasn’t a clear majority. Justice Brennan wrote what lawyers call a “plurality opinion,” not a binding precedent. The Court never followed up with a definitive ruling, leaving uncertainty about how Pico applies today.

That uncertainty is clear in modern cases, such as when high school librarians in Pennsylvania were ordered to clear their shelves of fourteen titles. Pico still considers his case a landmark precedent, but as new cases move toward the Supreme Court, it’s unclear whether it will be upheld. “When I announced this lawsuit at age seventeen,” he said, “my goal was clear: I wanted to see those nine books returned to my school system without restriction.” That’s what eventually happened, after five and a half years and a Supreme Court decision. “It helped hold back the floodgates of censorship for many, many years,” he said.

Justice Brennan had written, “Local school boards may not remove books simply because they dislike the ideas contained in them.” Pico agreed. “Nobody’s denying that parents have a responsibility and an obligation to be involved in their children’s education,” he said. “Of course they do. But banning is not the solution.”