Content area
Full Text
An interview with Judith Krug
Judith Krug has served as director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom since it was founded in 1968, and helped to found Banned Books Week in 1982. This year, Banned Books Week will be held September 23-30. To learn more, visit ala.org/bbooks. To hear a podcast of this Q&A, go to CurriculumReview.com.
Please tell us the story of how Banned Books Week got started.
Back in 1982, I got a call in June from the Association of American Publishers. They said, "We've just discovered there have been a slew of books banned. We should do something to bring this to the attention of the American public. While you're guaranteed your freedom to read by the First Amendment, if you don't use that right, it's going to die." I really liked the idea. And he said, "One of the things we could do is to put all of the books that we know have been banned in the last 10 or 15 years in a cage, and put a chain around the cage so people can visualize that these books are locked up because somebody or some group doesn't want you to read them and you should make up your own mind about them." So I went to the ALA's Intellectual Freedom Committee, laid the idea out before them, and six weeks later we celebrated the first Banned Books Week. And it has grown unbelievably since then. It's celebrated in thousands of libraries and a substantial number of bookstores.
How many school book challenges in the United States does your office hear about every year?
I can't give you precise numbers, but approximately three-quarters of the challenges we hear about are school-related. It is a whopping number.
Your Web site indicates that last year your office heard about more than 400 challenges, but that probably just scratched the surface.
My rule of thumb is, for every challenge we know about, there are four to five out there that we don't know about. We only recorded 405 challenges last year, down from 547 in 2004. And trust me, attempts to remove materials are not decreasing, they are increasing. There are a lot of reasons why people are not...