ALA Prez Accused of Abetting Censorship

Oprah Winfrey's move last month to withdraw her recommendation of The Education of Little Tree (Delacorte, 1976), an award-winning young adult novel by Forrest Carter, has ignited controversy within library circles because of the response it got from American Library Association President Loriene Roy.

Roy said she was surprised that Winfrey recommended the book because of “questions about the author's identity” and the book's “simplistic plot that used a lot of stereotypical imagery.”

“When did [the American Library Association] president get into the business of aiding and abetting censorship by literary criteria?” asked Mary Chelton, a professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at Queens College in New York.

Roy was traveling and unavailable for comment, says an ALA spokeswoman.

“I expect better of the ALA president,” Chelton says. “This is ridiculous and deeply offensive to those of us who have spent entire careers defending the public's right to read what they please!” Little Tree is about an orphan Cherokee boy's experience with racism in the 1930s. It was later learned that the book's author was a white supremacist who penned Alabama Governor George Wallace's infamous “Segregation forever” speech. “I'm sorry, but bigots have First Amendment rights, too,” Chelton adds.