The Worst Form of Censorship
As we celebrate Black History Month, institutional racism is still preventing important works of Black literature and history from making it into New York prisons.
Imagine someone has written a book about you. The author understands you deeply. His book describes the forces that shaped you, your relationship to the world around you, the complex inner workings of your humanity. It gives you insight into why you are the way you are. The book, as it happens, is also incredibly popular. It is lauded by critics and taught in high schools and colleges. It is adapted to film and sits on bookshelves in millions of American homes. Everyone has read this book. Everyone except you. You’re not allowed to read it because someone in the government whom you have never met has reviewed the book and concluded that it contains information that might make you angry or behave in a way that the government doesn’t like. So, the government keeps the book from you.
At the end of 2023, Books Beyond Bars received a letter from a sixty-four-year-old Black man incarcerated in Eastern Correctional Facility. The letter requested “Black Literature.” In response, we sent him a copy of Richard Wright’s classic novel Native Son (1940)—one of the most important works in the history of American fiction. Native Son tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a poor young Black man living in Chicago in the 1930s and explores the powerful systemic racism that leads Bigger to commit crimes. James Baldwin later wrote that no Black American person exists “who does not have his private Bigger Thomas living in his skull.”
Richard Wright. Photo: Carl Van Vechten, 1939 (public domain)
The Eastern Correctional Media Review Committee decided to ban the book. BBB received a notice that certain portions of Native Son “incite violence based on race.” We were informed that if the requester of the book did not wish to appeal the committee’s decision, he could choose from the following options: he could have the publication sent to someone else at his expense, but “not another incarcerated individual”; he could receive the book with “the objectionable portions blotted or cut out”; or he could “have the publication destroyed.”
In a recent article for New York Focus, Rebecca McCray reports on the Native Son ban, and on the broader problem of books banned by New York prisons. The piece confirms that this kind of rejection is commonplace. In addition to restricting access to books about the criminal justice system, McCray observes, the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision “also forbids a vast range of seemingly innocuous materials: newspaper articles, front-end web design manuals, medical reference guides” and many more. McCray also quotes BBB’s Ben A. Schatz on the banning of Native Son specifically: “This is the worst form of censorship because it keeps an extraordinarily powerful message about racial injustice in the criminal legal system from the very people who are victim to it.”
As the fate of Native Son demonstrates, book censorship is alive and well in 2024. And as we celebrate Black History Month, we should acknowledge the blatant hypocrisy of incarcerating Black men at disproportionate rates in the name of “rehabilitation” and then banning them from appreciating one of the most significant literary representations of the Black American experience in American history. McCray adds the words of Kevin Mays, who spent 28 years in prison before his release in 2019. While incarcerated, Mays was among those denied a copy of Heather Ann Thompson’s book Blood in the Water, an account of the 1971 uprising at Attica prison, where he had also done time. “During the course of slavery,” Mays tells McCray, “the worst thing you could do was get caught reading a book. Educating yourself is about self-determination, and they didn’t want that,” he said. “There are a lot of similarities here.”
Front cover of Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water
There is a clear racial disparity, too, when it comes to authors who suffer disproportionately from censorship by prison authorities. As pointed out by the Equal Justice Initiative, numerous influential historical and contemporary Black writers, including James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, Bryan Stevenson, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and even Barack Obama have fallen foul of these regulations. Morrison’s works have suffered censorship so frequently that the New York Public Library dedicated a spotlight to her during its Banned Books Week in 2022. And as the celebrated author of The Bluest Eye and Beloved wrote, “access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations.”
In their 2021 book Library Services and Incarceration, Dr. Jeanie Austin explains that “‘Hate literature’ has been broadly defined in many cases to encompass literature related to Black, Indigenous, and Latinx history and culture as well as material that explicitly espouses white supremacist views; and white supremacist-related materials have, in some instances, not been banned in carceral facilities even when materials related to Black political thought are viewed by the facility as a security threat.”
At Books Beyond Bars, we are mindful of the ways in which Black authors are censored. As a group that provides books to incarcerated people, we believe in the power of access to information and literature, and we are committed to resisting the disproportionate amount of censorship that affects Black authors and Black incarcerated people. We hope that by fighting the banning of Native Son and drawing attention to this case, we can continue to raise awareness about issues of censorship and change the system from within.