Nat Hentoff The Day They Came to Arrest the Book

Nat Hentoff: The Day They Came to Arrest the Book

Nat Hentoff was born in Boston, Massachusetts and graduated at Northeastern University and Harvard, but also studied in Paris. At the moment he is a writer for two American newspapers and has been acclaimed for his essays concerning civil liberties and jazz.

One of his most famous books, The Day They Came to Arrest the Book, was written and published in the United States in 1982.

The story is set in a normal High School called George Mason High School and it's September, the beginning of a new school year. In their first History lesson Nora Baines, their teacher, hands out a book list with some historical important books, also including Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, which she wants them to read as a background for her teaching.

Only one week later a father of one of her pupils, Mr. McLean, who is black, has a meeting with the school's principal Mr. Moore, because he is shocked at the fact that his son has to read a book, including a lot of racist words like "nigger". A word which has been a common term at Twain's time. He wants the principal to ban the book at once and to keep it away from every single child at George Mason High because he and all other black people would feel offended. Moore, who only wants a peaceful solution tells him that he will talk with the teacher and the (new) librarian and will order a "censorship", even this is not the word he exactly uses. After this incident he does it, but Ms. Baines, the teacher, refuses to quit reading it in her class, because in her opinion it's only up to her what kind of books she uses in her lessons, specially if it is one, which has been used as school literature for years.

From now on, the school is split up in two: some worried parents, the principal and also a handful of pupils who want the book to be banned on the one side and Ms. Baines, the librarian Ms. Fitzgerald and the other pupils on the other one. Some of the parents also find out that the book isn't only racist, but also sexist and immoral, and start fighting for their rights.

At the first meeting of the school board decides a vote, that Huckleberry Finn has to be taken away from the library shelves and that it is not allowed to be taught again in regular lessons or read without the permission of the teacher and a parent.

Ms. Baines and the others are shocked and also the old librarian Mrs. Salters, who had left school shortly before and has not said why she had done so yet. She confides her secret to Barney, a boy who is pro-Huck-Finn, because she doesn't want to be silent anymore. She tells him, that Mr. Moore already wanted to ban a Charles Dickens book some time before. And when she confronted him with the fact that there are also immoral stories in the bible, he removed a chapter, because in his opinion he was neither able to ban the bible nor ban Dickens and ignore it. That was the reason why she left Mason High, because she couldn't accept things like that.

Barney decides to write an article about that incident and to publish it in the school newspaper. He also sends a copy of it to the local news.

From that point, the whole town and also the whole country is interested in it and shocked of the facts. TV-teams are sent and everybody is interviewed, also Mr. Moore, who pretends that Mrs. Salters is a liar.

Some days later there's a new public meeting of the school board and a new vote.

And a black, silent boy, who hasn't said a lot before starts talking. He says that he has read the book and didn't feel offended because of the discriminating sentences, specially when you know the background. In his opinion is the best way to deal with lies to expose them, to get them out into the light.

That's somehow the key sentence of the book, because it says everything that has to be said concerning censorship in a few words.

Suddenly they decide 1:4 that the book may stay in school.

Censorship at American schools is really a topical issue, because Huckleberry Finn, Go Ask Alice and several other books, for example by Judy Blume have already been banned.

I personally think, that it is nonsense, because it's important to speak about problematic books and not to take them away without any comment.

Even I haven't read whole Huckleberry Finn yet, I have indeed read some of Judy Blume's book, which are also mentioned in Hentoff's "The Day They Came to Arrest the books". And I think don't think that they are immoral or something like that, they only show