Island Trees Union Free School District Board of Education v. Pico 1982
Author | Daniel Brannen, Richard Hanes, Elizabeth Shaw |
Pages | 226-231 |
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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- Freedom of Speech
- Freedom of Speech
- Schenck v. United States 1919
- Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire 1942
- West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette 1943
- Feiner v. New York 1951
- Roth v. United States 1957
- New York Times Company v. Sullivan 1964
- Memoirs v. Massachusetts 1966
- United States v. O'Brien 1968
- Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District 1969
- Brandenburg v. Ohio 1969
- Cohen v. California 1971
- Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica Foundation 1978
- Island Trees Union Free School District Board of Education v. Pico 1982
- Bethel School District No. 403 v. Fraser 1986
- Frisby v. Schultz 1988
- Simon & Schuster v. Members of the New York State Crime Victims Board 1991
- Wisconsin v. Mitchell 1993
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