Immoral

When Virginia’s Hanover County School Board removed all copies the Harper Lee classic "To Kill a Mockingbird" in 1966 on the grounds that it was "immoral," Lee wrote the following letter to the editor of The Richmond News Leader, found in "Understanding To Kill a Mockingbird":

Monroeville, Alabama

January, 1966

Editor, The News Leader:

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.

--Harper Lee

Source: http://www.brainpickings.org/2012/10/01/literary-icons-on-censorship