Island Trees Union Free School District Board of Education v. Pico 1982

AuthorDaniel Brannen, Richard Hanes, Elizabeth Shaw
Pages226-231

Page 226

Petitioners: Island Trees Union Free School District Board of Education, et al.

Respondents: Steven A. Pico, et al.

Petitioners' Claim: That removing vulgar and racist books from public school libraries does not violate the First Amendment.

Chief Lawyer for Petitioners: George W. Lipp, Jr.

Chief Lawyer for Respondents: Alan H. Levine

Justices for the Court: Harry A. Blackmun, William J. Brennan, Jr., Thurgood Marshall, John Paul Stevens, Byron R. White

Justices Dissenting: Warren E. Burger, Sandra Day O'Connor, Lewis F. Powell, Jr., William H. Rehnquist

Date of Decision: June 25, 1982

Decision: Removing books from public school libraries because of their political or social ideas violates the freedom of speech.

Significance: Island Trees limits the ability of public schools to remove offensive books from their libraries.

Page 227

Richard Ahrens, Frank Martin, and Patrick Hughes were members of the Board of Education of the Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 in New York. In September 1975, they attended a conference sponsored by Parents of New York United ("PONYU"). PONYU was a group of conservative parents that was concerned about education in New York's public schools. At the conference, Ahrens, Martin, and Hughes got lists of books that PONYU considered to be inappropriate for public school students.

When they returned from the conference, the board members learned that their high school library had nine of the books on the lists, and the junior high school library had one. The books included Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Best Short Stories of Negro Writers, edited by Langston Hughes. Some of the books contained graphic descriptions of sexual intercourse. One criticized President George Washington for owning slaves. Some of the books said hateful things about Jesus Christ and Jews.

BANNED BOOKS

The 1994 book, Banned in the U.S.A., offers a list of the fifty books most often banned or challenged in the 1990s. Some of the books included in the top five of this list are Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck (1937), challenged mainly on the basis of the profanity contained in it; The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger (1951); The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (1885), for its racial epithets; and The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier (1974), because it portrays school and church in a negative light.

A significant number of books on the list have won Newbery, National Book, Pulitzer, or even Nobel prizes: A Wrinkle...

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