One of the most banned books of all time - Mollie Godfrey
In 1998, a Maryland school district
removed one of American literature’s
most acclaimed works
from its curriculum.
Parents pushing for the ban
said the book
was both “sexually explicit”
and “anti-white.”
Following an outcry from other
parents and teachers,
the decision was eventually reversed.
But this was neither the first
nor the last attack
on Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why
The Caged Bird Sings.”
Few books have been challenged more
often than Angelou's memoir.
And while book banning decisions
typically aren’t made
at the state or national level,
most of the schools and libraries
that have banned Angelou’s book
have given similar reasons.
Most commonly, they argue that the
memoir’s account of sexual assault
and the violence of US racism are
inappropriate for young readers.
But these concerns miss
the point of Angelou’s story,
which uses these very themes to explore
the danger of censorship
and silence in the lives of young people.
Published in 1969,
“I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings”
traces the author’s childhood growing up
poor, Black and female in the southern US.
Central to the narrative is Angelou’s
experience of being sexually assaulted
when she was seven and a half years old.
Surrounded by adults who consider
the subject too taboo to discuss,
Angelou decides that she is to blame.
And when she finally identifies
her abuser in court,
he is killed by vigilantes.
Angelou believes her voice
is responsible for his death,
and for six years,
she stops speaking almost entirely.
The book chronicles Angelou’s journey
to rediscover her voice,
all while exploring the pain
and misplaced shame
that emerges from avoiding
uncomfortable realities.
The memoir’s narrative voice expertly
blends her childhood confusion
with her adult understanding,
offering the reader insights Angelou
was deprived of as a child.
She connects her early experiences
of being silenced and shamed
to the experience of being poor and Black
in the segregated United States.
“The Black female,” she writes,
“is caught in the tripartite crossfire
of masculine prejudice,
white illogical hate,
and Black lack of power.”
Her autobiography was
one of the first books
to speak openly about child sexual abuse,
and especially groundbreaking to do so
from the perspective of the abused child.
For centuries, Black women writers
had been limited by stereotypes
characterizing them as hypersexual.
Afraid of reinforcing these stereotypes,
few were willing to write
about their sexuality at all.
But Angelou refused to be constrained.
She publicly explored
her most personal experience,
without apology or shame.
This spirit of defiance charges
her writing with a sense of hope
that combats the memoir’s
often traumatic subject matter.
When recalling how a fellow student
defied instructions not to sing
the Black National Anthem
in the presence of white guests,
she writes, “The tears that slipped down
many faces were not wiped away in shame.
We were on top again... We survived.”
Angelou’s memoir was published amidst the
Civil Rights and Black Power movements,
when activists were calling
for school curricula
that reflected the diversity
of experiences in the US.
But almost as soon as the book appeared
in schools, it was challenged.
Campaigns to control lesson plans surged
across America in the 1970s and 80s.
On the American Library Association’s list
of most frequently banned
or challenged books,
“I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings”
remained near the top for two decades.
But parents, students, and educators
have consistently fought back
in support of the memoir.
And by 2013, it had become
the second most taught non-fiction text
in US high school English classes.
When asked how she felt about writing one
of the most banned books, Angelou said,
“I find that people who want my book
banned have never read
a paragraph of my writing,
but have heard that I write about a rape.
They act as if their children are
not faced with the same threats.
And that’s terrible.”
She believed that children who are
old enough to be the victims
of sexual abuse and racism are
old enough to read about these subjects.
Because listening and learning
are essential to overcoming,
and the unspeakable is far more
dangerous when left unspoken.
