Truth Is Trouble: Toni Morrison’s Advocacy Against Censorship
NYPL
In observation of Banned Books Week 2022, The New York Public Library is dedicating a spotlight to one of American literature’s most renowned authors and powerful advocates against censorship: Toni Morrison.
Both celebrated and censored, Morrison was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Nobel Prize in Literature, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Through all her renown, Morrison’s books are a regular fixture on the American Library Association (ALA)’s Frequently Challenged Books list, with her novels Beloved and The Bluest Eye consistently challenged in schools and libraries. Morrison’s novels, which explore the Black experience from slavery and Reconstruction to the Great Depression to the Korean War, have been challenged for their unflinching exposition of racism, violence, and sexism.
Celebrating Morrison’s legacy for Banned Books Week is more than just acknowledging the rich storytelling she gifted us through these narratives of the Black experience. Toni Morrison was an ebullient warrior against censorship, outwardly and powerfully advocating for libraries and open access to literature for decades.
“Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission. No committee decides who may enter, no crisis of body or spirit must accompany the entrant. No tuition is charged, no oath sworn, no visa demanded,” said Morrison. “Of the monuments humans build for themselves, very few say 'touch me, use me, my hush is not indifference, my space is not a barrier.' If I inspire awe, it is because I am in awe of you and the possibilities that dwell in you.”
While spending five decades teaching, editing, supporting emerging writers, and publishing plays, novels, children’s books, essays, and even a libretto, Morrison was named a Library Lion in 1982, joined NYPL's board in 1985, and was named a Life Trustee of the Library in 2006.
As Morrison wrote “fear of unmonitored writing is justified—because truth is trouble” (Burn This Book, 2009). Join NYPL to take a stand against censorship by exploring Morrison’s advocacy for open access to reading.
As part of NYPL’s Banned Books Week celebration, The New York Public Library is honoring Morrison through giveaways, public programming, and book talks for Beloved, The Bluest Eye, and other commonly banned books for all ages. See more here.
Morrison's words are engraved on a wall at NYPL's 42nd Street flagship location, the Stephen A. Schwarzman building.
Read Morrison’s Most Challenged Books
The New York Public Library is honoring Banned Books Week (September 18–24) with instant digital access to Toni Morrison’s novels Beloved and The Bluest Eye through our free e-reader app, SimplyE. Both these titles will be available for unlimited checkout to anyone with an NYPL library card from September 15 through October 31. There will also be giveaways of these books in our branches.
The Bluest Eye (1970)
Set in the Depression Era, The Bluest Eye follows 11-year-old African American Pecola Breedlove who is consistently regarded as "ugly" by those around her due to her mannerisms and dark skin. Facing increasingly violent racism and sexual abuse, Pecola prays for blue eyes. The Bluest Eye has been challenged for “depictions of child sexual abuse” and “sexually explicit content.”
Beloved (1987)
Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this novel follows formerly enslaved Sethe, whose household is haunted by the malignant ghost of her baby. Based on the true story of Margaret Garner, the controversy of the novel includes Sethe’s painful reflection on killing her own daughter to spare her from the horrors of slavery and the scathing exposition of the torture of American slavery.
Toni Morrison on Banned Books
The Letters in the Bathroom
This year, the ALA reports a record number of challenges to remove books from the shelves of schools and libraries. (The Bluest Eye is on 2021’s list.)
“I’m probably a little silly, perhaps, about the banning of my books,” said Morrison in a 2009 interview with NPR. “I tend not to pay an awful lot of attention to it, most of the instances I know about fall into the category of the absurd.”
Morrison’s awareness of the absurdity included the censorship and celebration of her voice. Listen to this NYPL talk with Angela Davis where she describes the two letters hanging in her bathroom—an invitation to accept her Nobel Peace Prize and a letter informing her that Paradise has been banned due to its potential to incite the “breakdown of prisons.”
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Morrison’s most notable experience with a banned book was with Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where she first expressed the same arguments those who contested the book had:
“Fear and alarm are what I remember the most about my first encounter [with the novel],” pens Morrison. “Palpable alarm. [The novel] chosen randomly, without guidance or recommendation, was deeply disturbing.”
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been challenged in public libraries across the country and taken off shelves for its use of profanity (namely the use of the n-word) and for the morality of the protagonist.
But a new outcry against book banning in the 1980s piqued Morrison’s interest as an adult. In a 1996 edition of the book, for which she wrote the introduction, she expressed her new stance on book banning:
“[Banning] stuck me as a purist yet elementary kind of censorship designed to appease adults rather than educate children. Amputate the problem, band-aid the solution.” Morrison admitted she now loved the book and explained the dangers of dismissing a book immediately.
A rare version of the Morrison edition is available in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building General Research Division.
Burn This Book
Morrison would go on to talk about book banning in Burn This Book: Notes on Literature and Engagement, a collection of essays she edited advocating for freedom of speech and against banning books in educational and public institutions. The book includes insights from contemporary authors with Morrison’s introduction focusing on the act of banning books:
“The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard by the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing underground, essayists' questions challenging authority never being posed, unstaged plays, canceled films—that thought is a nightmare. As though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink.”
Read More of Toni Morrison's Works at NYPL
Novels
- The Bluest Eye (1970)
- Sula (1973)
- Song of Solomon (1977)
- Tar Baby (1981)
- Beloved (1987)
- Jazz (1992)
- Paradise (1997)
- Love (2003)
- A Mercy (2008)
- Home (2012)
- God Help the Child (2015)
A Selection of Children’s Books (written with her late son Slade Morrison)
Poetry
Music
- Margaret Garner: An Opera in Two Acts (composed by Richard Danielpour)
Morrison revisits the tragedy of Margeret Garner through opera. The libretto is a loose retelling of the tale that inspired Beloved.
