Virginia schools ban To Kill a Mockingbird over 'offensive wording'

Accomack County Public Schools on Virginia's eastern shore have decided to at least temporarily pull Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from campus shelves after a parent of a biracial child complained about the novels' racial language.

"I keep hearing, 'This is a classic, this is a classic,'" the parent, Victoria Coombs, said at a school board meeting. "I understand this is a literature classic... But there [are so many] racial slurs in there and offensive wording that you can't get past that." Coombs argued it is "not right to put that in a book" or teach such a book to a child because to do so would be "validating that these words are acceptable."

While it is certainly true that both books include racial slurs, they do so to accurately represent the historical racism each work condemns. In Mockingbird, the main characters defend a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in the pre-Civil Rights South; and Huck Finn decides he'd rather risk hellfire than abandon his runaway slave friend.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Still, this is hardly the first time either work has been banned over accusations of racism. The Accomack school district will soon convene a meeting with a librarian to determine whether the ban should be permanent.