No Mockingbirds Allowed: Classic Banned

The Classic novel, “To Kill A Mockingbird” (TKAM) written by Harper Lee, has recently been pulled from the eighth-grade curriculum in Mississippi because it made some students uncomfortable.
The Biloxi school system sparked controversy for eliminating the novel, following the conversation on when and if a book should be banned from the classrooms.
Some argue that banning the book violates first amendment rights, and others feel the offensive language in the book is used to shed light on current issues of discrimination and racism in America.
The New York Times notes, “The novel is set during the Depression in a small Alabama town where a black man is accused of raping a white woman. Its candid exploration of racism and discrimination has been a beacon for controversy.”
Although Biloxi has received national attention for the decision about the novel, they are not the first school system to remove the book from its shelves.
The Hanover County school board in Virginia was also under fire when it first banned the book for the inclusion of rape in the story’s plot.
In fact, USA Today informs, “To Kill A Mockingbird came in No. 21 on the American Library Association’s list of the top 100 Challenged/Banned books from 2000 to 2009.”
The Biloxi school system has not publically announced what particular language in the novel makes readers uncomfortable, however critics believe its removal was influenced by much of the racially sensitive content. The book uses the “n-word” as frequent as it was spoken in the 60s, and 57 years later, it is not close to being normalized.
Lee did not censor the “n-word” in her original publication of TKAM, yet today it must be censored in news outlets.
The Biloxi school board has not completely banned TKAM, the book will still be available in their school’s libraries. Its removal from the curriculum will be replaced with a different novel that initially teaches the same lessons.
The Washington Post stated, “The novel won its author a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and made the values of the Civil Rights Movement particularly a feeling for the god-awful unfairness of segregation real for millions.”