Morrison Stays Involved

Toni Morrison, whose books have been censored or threatened with censorship for years, has been in the news several times in the past few weeks. On June 3, 50 publishers, writers, and other intellectual freedom supporters got together to launch the Free Speech Leadership Council, a branch of the National Coalition Against Censorship. For the launch, the featured speaker was Morrison. When I read about this gathering, all I could think about was how cool it would have been to be there, not just to hear Morrison, but to just be in the same place as all of these people so active in the movement to protect the right of people to read what they want.

As part of her speech, Morrison talked about learning that her book Song of Solomon was not allowed at a Texas prison because of the fear that it would cause a riot. Instead of being angry that her work was being censored, Morrison’s reaction was to think about how powerful her book must be to enact that kind of fear. It is an awesome response to censorship, and one that must be a fear for many people who try to censor books.

In addition to the Free Speech Leadership Council, another of Morrison’s recent projects was editing and contributing to the book Burn This Book, a collection of essays about censorship. The blurb about Morrison’s recent activities had this quote from Morrison on censorship: “The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard by the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing underground, essayists’ questions challenging authority never being posed, unstaged plays, cancelled films – that thought is a nightmare.”

That is an aspect of censorship that I hadn’t thought about. Fighting against censorship is important not just for the works of yesterday and today, but also for the potential works of the future. If potential authors and creators decide that creating isn’t worth the risk, all of the debate about censorship fades away because there won’t be anything left to censor.

As long as there are people like Morrison, who are willing to publicly lead the charge, hopefully there will be people like librarians who are there to back them up to protect all creativity, past, present, and future.