Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird" was banned. Here's her response.

Nobody has a right to shape your consciousness against your will by refusing you access to knowledge and thought.

Gregory Peck starred as Atticus Finch in the 1962 Universal Studios version of To Kill a Mockingbird. Photo: Advertising still, public domain.

Nelle Harper Lee, the daughter of a lawyer from Monroeville, Alabama, was born in 1926. She thought to become a lawyer herself, but destiny had other plans: she began to write and eventually showed a series of short stories to an editor at Lippencott. Encouraged by his response, she spent 2-1/2 years coalescing the stories into a coherent novel.

To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960, and it blew everyone away. It was an instant best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. Screenwriter Horton Foote almost immediately took it up, and the film based on his script was produced by Universal and released in 1962.

True to its subject matter — a white lawyer defending a black man against false claims he raped a white woman — was shot in black and white and won an art and set decoration Oscar for Alexander Golitzen, Henry Bumstead, and Oliver Emert—an Oscar for screenwriting for Horton Foote—and a best actor Oscar for Gregory Peck, whose portrayal of lawyer Atticus Finch stands as one of the finest studies in the archetype of the noble, truth-loving, bravely stand-your-ground American ever enacted.

To Kill a Mockingbird remains a bestseller with more than 30 million copies in print. In 1999, it was voted "Best Novel of the Century" in a poll by the Library Journal.

To Kill a Mockingbird remains one of the most banned books in American culture.

The bans started early. In 1966, the same year Lyndon Johnson appointed Lee to the National Council of the Arts, the Hanover County School Board in Richmond, Virginia, tried to ban Mockingbird. Lee’s response to this attempt at “whitewashing” knowledge is classic. She writes:

Recently I have received echoes down this way of the Hanover County School Board's activities, and what I've heard makes me wonder if any of its members can read.

Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that “To Kill a Mockingbird” spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners. To hear that the novel is "immoral" has made me count the years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of doublethink.

I feel, however, that the problem is one of illiteracy, not Marxism. Therefore I enclose a small contribution to the Beadle Bumble Fund that I hope will be used to enroll the Hanover County School Board in any first grade of its choice.

On November 5, 2007, George W. Bush presented Lee with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. This is the highest civilian award in the United States and recognizes individuals who have made “an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors."

And well-deserved it was, too.

The Tyranny of the Minority: The List of Banned Books for 2024

Here’s what gets your book banned:

• Any depiction of whites as privileged or racist

• Any depiction of any sexuality that is not cis-gendered and heterosexual and/or

• Any depiction of sex at all, as if this were an alien concept to a species whose replication depends upon it

Here are some of the most banned books (among nearly 3,000 books challenged last year) in America as we sink deeper into TrumpMind.

• Fahrenheit 451 … Ray Bradbury

• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

• Captain Underpants (series) by Dav Pilkey

• Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

• Looking for Alaska by John Green

• George by Alex Gino

• And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell

• Drama by Raina Telgemeier

• Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James

• Internet Girls (series) by Lauren Myracle

• The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

• Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

• I Am Jazz by Jazz Jennings and Jessica Herthel

• The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

• Bone (series) by Jeff Smith

• The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

• Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan

• A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo by Jill Twiss

• Sex is a Funny Word by Cory Silverberg

• Alice McKinley (series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

• It's Perfectly Normal by Robie H. Harris

• Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult

• Scary Stories (series) by Alvin Schwartz

• Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

• Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out by Susan Kuklin

• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

• The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

• The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

• Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

• It's a Book by Lane Smith

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

• The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

• What My Mother Doesn't Know by Sonya Sones

• A Child Called "It" by Dave Pelzer

• Bad Kitty (series) by Nick Bruel

• Crank by Ellen Hopkins

• Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

• Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

• The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby by Dav Pilkey

• This Day in June by Gayle E. Pitman

• This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki

• A Bad Boy Can Be Good For A Girl by Tanya Lee Stone

• Beloved by Toni Morrison

• Goosebumps (series) by R.L. Stine

• In Our Mothers' House by Patricia Polacco

• Lush by Natasha Friend

• The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

• The Color Purple by Alice Walker

• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

• The Holy Bible

• This Book is Gay by Juno Dawson

• Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

• Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

• Gossip Girl (series) by Cecily von Ziegesar

• House of Night (series) by P.C. Cast

• My Mom's Having A Baby by Dori Hillestad Butler

• Neonomicon by Alan Moore

• The Dirty Cowboy by Amy Timberlake

• The Giver by Lois Lowry

• Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

• Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya

• Draw Me a Star by Eric Carle

• Dreaming In Cuban by Cristina Garcia

• Fade by Lisa McMann

• The Family Book by Todd Parr

• Feed by M.T. Anderson

• Go the Fuck to Sleep by Adam Mansbach

• Habibi by Craig Thompson

• House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

• Jacob's New Dress by Sarah Hoffman

• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

• Monster by Walter Dean Myers

• Nasreen’s Secret School by Jeanette Winter

• Saga by Brian K. Vaughan

• Stuck in the Middle by Ariel Schrag

• The Kingdom of Little Wounds by Susann Cokal

• 1984 by George Orwell

• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

• Almost Perfect by Brian Katcher

• Awakening by Kate Chopin

• Burned by Ellen Hopkins

• Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

• Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers

• Glass by Ellen Hopkins

• Heather Has Two Mommies by Lesle´a Newman

• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

• Madeline and the Gypsies by Ludwig Bemelmans

• My Princess Boy by Cheryl Kilodavis

• Prince and Knight by Daniel Haack

• Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology by Amy Sonnie

• Skippyjon Jones (series) by Judith Schachner

• So Far from the Bamboo Grove by Yoko Kawashima Watkins

• The Color of Earth (series) by Tong-hwa Kim

• The Librarian of Basra by Jeanette Winter

• The Walking Dead (series) by Robert Kirkman

• Tricks by Ellen Hopkins

• Uncle Bobby’s Wedding by Sarah S Brannen

• Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

Nobody has a right to forcibly shape your consciousness by refusing you access to knowledge of any kind. …

… Fight.