Battle Over Books
Fayetteville, AR, mom is determined to clean up schools’ collections
By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 9/1/2005
Laurie Taylor is on a crusade. Her cause? To move more than 70 books the Fayetteville, AR, mom has decided are sexually repugnant into a restricted area in every school in her district. “I’ve asked that if the books are objectionable or harmful to children, that children not have access without the permission of their parents,” says Taylor, a mother of two students in Fayetteville’s public school system.
Two of the books Taylor wants restricted to all K–12 students include the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Beloved by Toni Morrison and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.
Fayetteville’s school district has agreed to review her requests—one book at a time. The process of reconsideration takes the district several weeks per book, according to superintendent Bobby New. And with the school year about to start, organizing teachers and volunteers taxes an already stressful time. “I think the community as well as the school board are sensitive to her,” says New, “but it is an overwhelming task to respond to multiple requests.”
Taylor says she was tipped off to the book titles by a Christian radio show, Point of View, which found the books in her local schools and asked for them to be moved to a different section.
Her first three requests were successful, with the books moved into a parents-only area in the library after being reviewed by the school board. Her next effort has been directed at the novel Push (Knopf, 1996), which Taylor claims mentions inappropriate sexual acts involving minors. Nominated by the NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literary Work of Fiction, Push, by poet and novelist Sapphire, tells the story of a 16-year-old who is pregnant for the second time by her father.
“I’m going to do this for every book that could be pornography,” says Taylor. “It’s unconscionable for a child to have access to these without their parents’ knowledge.”
