Perspective: The right’s purge is targeting books children choose to read, not works they are assigned.
After McCarthy’s downfall and as civil rights campaigns expanded in the 1960s, censors loosened their standards in Northern states when it came to race. Still, thanks to powerful textbook commissions and school boards, books that questioned segregation remained unpublishable in the American South. Northern textbooks that portrayed children of different races were published in “whitewashed” versions there, absent of any references to or illustrations of Black Americans.
But the outsize attention to textbooks, combined with an often traditional literature curriculum, actually created a space in which liberal writers could thrive. Take Langston Hughes, for example. When Hughes was interrogated by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953, he had just published his juvenile book “The First Book of Negroes”
and was about to begin his “Famous Negroes” series, both of which advanced ideas about Black achievement and racial equity for the age group we now call “tweens.”to burn or remove Hughes’s poetry for its subversive ideas about race and capitalism in the early 1950s, he continued to write juvenile biographies containing many of the same ideas that flew under the censorship radar and opened young Americans’ eyes about racism. Works like “The First Book of Negroes” shaped many young readers’ thinking about democracy and civil rights —This trajectory was true for other writers, as well.
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