In 1987, one of the U.S.A.’s most decorated writers published what would become one of her most celebrated works. And since that novel’s publication, Toni Morrison’s Beloved has been the target of challenges and bans across the nation.

Morrison’s novels are no strangers to opposition and censorship. The Bluest Eye took the #10 spot on the American Library Association’s Top 100 Most Banned and Challenged Books: 2010-2019. Song of Solomon has experienced suspensions from various school reading curriculums. And when the Texas Department of Criminal Justice sent Morrison a notification stating that her 1998 novel Paradise was being removed from all Texas prison libraries, Morrison iconically framed the document and hung it in her bathroom.

While attempted book bans are nothing new, the United States has seen a dramatic uptick in recent years. The number of book challenges/bans recorded by the American Library Association in the five year span of 2014-2019 averaged 361.6. The year 2021 alone saw a record breaking 1,597 challenges/bans. That unprecedented record was broken a mere one year later, in 2022, at a staggering 2,571 challenges and bans. Beloved stood among those books challenged in 2022.

A Bit About Beloved

Beloved follows the life of Sethe and her children. Sethe escapes slavery in 1855, a few years after the passing of The Fugitive Slave Act. This act dictated that runaway slaves remain the property of their slaveholders—even if those slaves had escaped to a free state—and which prioritized the return of slaves to their “owners.” The story opens with Sethe and her daughter Denver living in post Civil War Ohio. Their simple lives are complicated by the arrival of a mysterious young girl, whom Sethe believes may be the ghost of her dead daughter, Beloved. As the story unfolds, the reader discovers how Beloved died. Years earlier, when Sethe learned that her former slaveholder had found her and had arrived at her home to claim her, Sethe—in an act of love and desperation—killed Beloved, then only an infant, hoping to spare her from the horrors of slavery.

The narrative is based on the real life of Margaret Garner, a Kentucky woman who escaped slavery with her family in 1856. When federal marshals came to recapture her and her family, Garner, rather than allowing her children to be taken into slavery, attempted to kill her children. Margaret Garner was not charged for her actions because, under Kentucky law, Margaret was considered property—how can livestock commit “murder”? Beloved uses this real life event to explore the trauma and dehumanization slaves experienced, and to ask whether death would be a preferable alternative to life as a slave. The book’s honesty and deft handling of this event earned the novel the 1989 Pulitzer Prize, and helped Morrison earn the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature.

The novel is now regarded as an American classic, a peer among John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. For decades, the novel has been a gem in the catalogue of nearly all American high school and public libraries. Yet now, a vocal minority has grouped it with other works they deem as inappropriately sexual and violent, as too mature, as something against which our high schoolers must be protected, and even as “pornography.” You cannot help but feel alarmed at the idea of pornography being exposed to minors, but are those seeking to ban Beloved being honest about their concerns?

A Who And A Why

One organization supporting the wave of book challenges/bans is Prager University [PragerU]. PragerU founder Dennis Prager was even a speaker at a Mom’s for Liberty convention in 2023; the political activist group, Mom’s for Liberty, has found itself a major player in the dramatic uptick in book challenges/bans. PragerU’s stated purpose is to act as a free, conservative counter to what they view as a liberal bias in “culture, media, and education,” and the organization has found success in this mission. Though PragerU is “not an accredited university, [and doesn’t] claim to be,” the organization recently was approved for use in Florida and Oklahoma classrooms. Some materials PragerU offers are lesson plans, worksheets, and (primarily) videos. A few of PragerU’s videos, like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, address the institution of slavery in the United States.

One such video, from the series Leo and Layla’s History Adventures, features a cartoon Christopher Columbus explaining his life as an explorer to a pair of time-traveling children from the modern day. The kids bring up a concern over Columbus’s involvement in slave trading, to which the Cartoon Columbus responds “Slavery is as old as time and has taken place in every corner of the world…Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no? I don’t see the problem” (emphasis mine). The argument cartoon Columbus ultimately makes is that it’s unfair to judge the value’s of the past through the values of the modern day. Cartoon Columbus’s better-a-slave-than-dead statement is never questioned.

In another video of that same series, Leo and Layla meet Frederick Douglass. Cartoon Douglass explains why unlawful protest—which the video calls “radical”—is harmful to a cause. Cartoon Douglass proposes that the U.S. was built to gradually eliminate slavery, and thus the best way to abolish slavery is through compromise and through working lawfully within “the American system.” These words put into the mouth of Frederick Douglass should raise eyebrows, as Douglass supported and assisted in The Underground Railroad—which worked outside the American System to help slaves break the law by escaping slavery (Douglass himself was an escaped slave)—practiced civil disobedience by unlawfully going into whites-only spaces as a form of protest, described himself as a “radical” in his support for women’s suffrage, and tirelessly recruited for the Union during the Civil War. Most incredibly, this video doesn’t mention, or even allude to the Civil War, an event resulting from “the American system” failing to deliver on what cartoon Douglass promised. If PragerU’s version of history is correct, that slavery can be—and as this video implies, was—abolished by working and compromising lawfully inside “the American system,” one is left wondering how the born-from-compromise Fugitive Slave Act came into being, how the Supreme Court came to their 1857 decision in the Dred Scott v. Sanford case that the Constitution does not extend to African Americans, or how “the American system” collapsed into the bloodiest war in U.S. history.

The final video I’ll mention gives a brief biography of Confederate General, Robert E. Lee(1). Among other points, the video mentions that Lee crushed a slave rebellion led by abolitionist John Brown, and mentions that Lee believed freed slaves should be educated but not be allowed to vote. Lee stopping an abolitionist rebellion against slavery and being against Black Americans voting are presented as reasons why Lee should be honored in the modern day. Furthermore, the video quotes Robert E. Lee saying, “[Slavery is] a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, since blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa.” The video offers no further commentary on this quote or its implications, presents the quote as a positive for the argument about why Lee should still be honored, and seems to intend that the viewer be in unquestioned agreement with the quote.

Together, these videos lay a foundation for a version of slavery that couldn’t have been so bad. Better that Black individuals be enslaved in the Americas than free in Africa. Better to work alongside and find compromise within the system that allows the institution of slavery, that allows the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act and a Supreme Court decision that upholds slavery. Better that a human live as property than be dead.

In light of such a view on slavery, the contempt for at least one American classic becomes clearer. How are students meant to buy into PragerU’s narrative on slavery presented in their history class, if they’re reading the condemnation and damning refutation of that narrative in their English class? If Beloved is left in school libraries, is it not simply a matter of time before a student checks out the book and begins to question some significant inconsistencies? Could it be that the reason we didn’t notice for over 35 years that one of our most cherished novels was too mature, too violent, and too pornographic for high schoolers is because the real issue some people take with Beloved has little to do with “maturity,” “violence,” or “pornography”?

Conclusion

When I speak of Beloved, I speak of all the books that have recently come under scrutiny from groups like Moms for Liberty and from indoctrination(2) centers like PragerU. One thing these organizations and I agree on is that books have the power to influence the way people view and understand their world. The goal to present an incomplete, fragile version of history cannot find success without simultaneously finding a way to control the conversation around that history. To read a book is to be in conversation, is to glimpse the world through eyes that are not your own, is to briefly surrender your control over how you currently understand your world.

As with Beloved, if we inspect long enough the ideas and narratives of those seeking to ban books, and the ideas and narratives of the books they are seeking to ban, we will see how quickly the thin veil of “too mature,” “too violent,” “too pornographic!”—falls away.

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1: The Robert E. Lee video has since been deleted by PragerU, after it received harsh criticism, hence why a re-upload is linked.

2: This is not an editorialization. Dennis Prager has openly described what he does as “indoctrination” (see his Moms for Liberty speech, linked in this article).

Cover picture my own

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