From Seattle to Brooklyn, public libraries have stood up against book banning
Along with Brooklyn Public Library, The Seattle Public Library has stood up for the right to read freely, and against those who censor your thoughts by banning books.
It’s a proven fact: Books free your mind.
Suppressing democracy and freedom of thought is wrong.
If you’re a teen or young adult from 13 to 26, and live anywhere in the United States, sign up for a free Books Unbanned eCard (Brooklyn) and read whatever interests you. With a Books Unbanned (Seattle) eCard, you can check out from both libraries’ online collections of e-books and e-audiobooks.
If your school or local public library is under attack, and extremist authoritarians are busy trying to prevent you from reading any book you want to read, you now possess more digital freedom to read — from coast to coast.
In early May 2023 the Illinois Senate became the first state to ban book bans. The Democratic Governor will sign it into law. This is book banning resistance at its best.
Minds open up to new ideas through the power of reading. No one has the right to take this fundamental freedom away.
No one has the right to prevent free thought in a democracy.
Those who want to restrict the right to freely access ideas contained in books are on the wrong side of history.
Anyone who wants to take away the right to read freely is promoting an un-American idea.
Access to a diversity of ideas and information, especially for the most often banned types of books – LGBTQ+ and books with people of color as the main character in a story, is essential.
Extremist groups are attempting to remove the right to read freely.
There’s a wonderful feeling in finding an author who feels like they know you.
Any book that reflects your life experience back to you, serves to open your mind, and helps you to clearly see your personal truth, is a book worth reading.
Read what you enjoy reading. This can literally be anything you’re deeply drawn to.
Minds are meant to be opened up, not closed down.
Read anything and everything about the world, nature, books, art, science, and most importantly of all, yourself.
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, when first published, was considered too shocking in its poems about sexuality, including same-sex relationships.
In 1855, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote this to Walt Whitman, after Whitman had sent Emerson a copy of Leaves of Grass.
“I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.”
A District Attorney in Boston banned sales of the newly published 1882 sixth edition of Leaves of Grass, considering it obscene. Whitman refused to take out the words and passages that offended the DA.
Whitman’s writing voice seems as clear to a modern reader as if he wrote it last week.
Section 51, Song of Myself
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Now considered one of the greatest books ever written in America, Leaves of Grass has been read widely throughout the world, and influenced writers and artists such as Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Bukowski.