The Island Trees book ban, 40 years later

My childhood in Levittown was idyllic. Kids were everywhere. And the Island Trees school district seemed to me a fine place to grow up.

During my last two years in high school, however, Island Trees became embroiled in a bitter controversy over book banning, an experience that reshaped my sensibilities — about my hometown, censorship, and racism.

At that time, I did not know that Levittown developer William Levitt prohibited his homes from being “used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race.” Courts later would declare such racial covenants unenforceable. But the damage was done. I grew up in a Levittown almost wholly devoid of people of color.

In 1975, my junior year, the Island Trees Board of Education removed from school libraries nine books, including two Pulitzer Prize winners, after they appeared on a list of books, compiled by a conservative group, considered unfit for public school libraries.

The books included "Black Boy" by Richard Wright, "The Fixer" by Bernard Malamud, "The Naked Ape" by Desmond Morris, "Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut, and Eldridge Cleaver's "Soul on Ice."

Parents, teachers, and students were outraged. The board defended itself saying the books were “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and just plain filthy” and that “it is our duty, our moral obligation, to protect the children in our schools from this moral danger.”

I went to the next board meeting. Several things amazed me. Did police officers always attend these meetings? Did shouts and profanities regularly ricochet around the room? 

A board-created review committee recommended that five books should go back on the library shelves. The board ignored that advice and banned all but one, "Laughing Boy" by Oliver La Farge.

Looking back, the most significant thing about the books is that so many were written by, edited by, or about people of color. Banning them smacked of racism, pure and simple. That these events unfolded in what was then an all-white community with a history of racially restrictive housing covenants only made matters worse.

I admire Steve Pico and the other students who sued the board of education. That lawsuit made it to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1982, by which time I had graduated from college and was working in Washington. I took the day off and waited in a long line to secure one of the seats reserved for spectators.

That June, a divided Supreme Court ruled in favor of the students' demand for a trial. Justice William Brennan wrote that “school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to ‘prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of public opinion.’” Six months later, the board finally allowed the books to return to the library shelves.

Even now, I find those events unsettling. Yes, the board finally reversed its wrongheaded decision to ban the books. And yes, the outrage woke me from my adolescent naiveté about my hometown.

But have the attitudes that led the board to ban the books really changed? Nationwide, we seem to have entered a new era of intolerance and censorship, from both ends of the political spectrum. Thanks in large part to my involvement in the Island Trees book-banning debacle, I have long thought that the best way to combat odious ideas is not to shut them down but rather to present better ideas in the hope that others will listen. But are we really listening?

This guest essay reflects the views of David Balton, a Levittown native who now lives in Washington.