A PRISONER in an Alabama jail has claimed in a lawsuit that his jailers prevented him from reading a Pulitzer prize-winning book about America’s racial history, thereby violating his civil rights.
Kilby correctional facility prisoner Mark Melvin says he was sent Douglas Blackmon's award-winning history Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War IIin September 2010, but was told he was not allowed to have it, according to a civil rights lawsuit filed by the Equal Justice Initiative in the US district court for the middle district of Alabama.
The news comes as the US marks Banned Books Week, an annual nationwide celebration of the right to read.
The complaint claims that Melvin, serving a life sentence after being charged at 14 with helping his older brother commit two murders, was denied access to the book because of regulations which allow officials to withhold mail if it could be “an attempt to incite violence based on race, religion, sex, creed or nationality”.
The book tells of the tens of thousands of “free” black Americans who were bought and sold as forced labourers decades after the official abolition of slavery.
The director of Equal Justice Initiative, Bryan Stevenson, said banning th book was “not only misguided, but . . . injurious to anyone who is trying to advance our society on issues of race”. – (Guardian service)