The Front Line of the Fight for Free Speech

10-13

One of the things I was looking forward to most when I started my trip was that I would get to visit Jim Dana at his home in Grand Haven, Michigan.  Jim, the executive director of the Great Lakes Booksellers Association, has been a close friend for many years.  So when Cecile Fehsenfeld, a member of the ABFFE board, invited me to speak at Schuler Books in nearby Grand Rapids, I asked Jim if I could stay with him.

I didn’t expect that we would spend the first night at the local high school listening to the fall concert of the school chorus.  But Jim’s son, Joe, a senior, was scheduled to perform.

Jim was polite in his invitation to attend the concert, but he didn’t give me much of a choice: I could go to the concert or I could stay at his house, watching a TV that is not hooked up to either cable or satellite.  (I have encountered many largely useless TVs in the homes of booksellers during this trip.  They seem to like to keep them for decoration and the occasional DVD.)

I was glad I went.  It wasn’t just that the music was beautiful.   The selection was striking.  Although this was a public high school, almost all of the music was religious.  There were a few “ethnic” songs, but they were all spirituals!

Ah, yes.  I had forgotten for a moment that I was in western Michigan, a territory that was settled by Dutch immigrants and is still governed by a conservative, evangelical religion centered in the Christian Reformed Church.

Some of these good people have caused us problems.  That’s how I got to meet Jim and Mary Dana.  In 1990, they were owners of the Bookman, a bookstore in Grand Haven that became a target of the American Family Association.  The Danas had refused to stop selling Playboy.

Soon the threat to free speech broadened into a statewide campaign to pass tough anti-obscenity legislation.  Jim volunteered to help organize the opposition and called on other Michigan booksellers to join him.  They formed the Michigan Booksellers Association and hired a lobbyist in Lansing, the state capitol.  (Cecile and her husband, Bill, were founding members.)

The booksellers joined librarians, writers, theater owners, video retailers and magazine distributors to launch a public campaign that featured an anti-censorship video starring Garrison Keillor.  It was shown in movie houses and video stores throughout the state.

We defeated the obscenity legislation, but there are no permanent victories in the fight for free speech.  We have continued to have trouble in western Michigan.  In 2000, the superintendent of schools in Zeeland banned the use of Harry Potter books in the classroom and required children to have their parents’ permission to check them out of the library.

This spring a group calling itself the Livingston Organization for Values in Education (LOVE) tried to ban books by Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison and Richard Wright.  (LOVE persuaded the U.S. Attorney to ask the FBI if assigning these books to minors might constitute a criminal act!)

So, I was not entirely surprised to learn several days before I flew into Grand Rapids that a new censorship controversy had erupted there.

An English teacher at the high school had ordered an anthology of plays for Advanced Placement classes only to discover that it contained Suzan Lori-Parks’ Top Dog/Underdog, a play that includes, according to the local press, more than 70 uses of the “s-word” and “more than 40 uses of the f-word and descriptions of sexual activity.”  A shocked member of the school board wants to cut the play out of 140 books.

Of course, as the author of a book about censorship, I was delighted to have a live controversy to discuss at my event at Schuler’s.  To help drum up local interest, the bookstore had organized a panel discussion with Marcia Warner, the head of the Grand Rapids library, Mary Bejian, the field director of ACLU of Michigan, and Ander Monson, a creative writing teacher from a local college.  It was moderated by Shelly Irwin, who has a talk show on the local public radio station.

But it’s easy for itinerant loudmouths to spout off about the evils of censorship.  We’re gone the next day, leaving the people in the local community to do the actual fighting.  Because these confrontations are often between people who know each other, they can be especially bitter.  Librarians risk their jobs by defending civil liberties.  

Grand Rapids is fortunate to have a head librarian like Marcia Warner.  She told the audience that she had grown up in a home without books.  When she finally discovered them, she also found her life’s work.  A veteran of the impoverished Saginaw library system, she is particularly passionate about the importance of adequate funding for the libraries in minority communities.

Marcia was eloquent in defending intellectual freedom.  She had brought with her a copy of Top Dog/Underdog, and while the controversy does not directly concern the library, she made it clear that she opposes the effort to scissor the play.  Marcia explained that it is library policy to give minors full access to its collection.

Book lovers like Marcia, Jim and Mary Dana, and Bill and Cecile Fehsenfeld are the front line troops in the fight for free speech.

This would be a very different country without them.