As part of a series designed to teach children about ordinary people making a difference, Brad Meltzer wrote I am Billie Jean King, a 40-page biography replete with comic illustrations. The strap on the cover describes, “a picture book of a determined little girl who became one of the best tennis players of all time and changed the world”.
An accurate take on somebody who campaigned for female equality in sport and once had to, literally, fight the battle of the sexes on the court. Earlier this year, a mother in Leon, Florida tried to have the publication removed from a school library because it referenced King at a certain point realising she was a lesbian.
Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates, another illustrated tome for primary schoolchildren, suffered a similar fate. To some, this snappy account of the great Puerto Rican-born Hall of Famer overcoming the discrimination he suffered as a Black Latino in 1960s United States to win two World Series is an inspirational read. Not to others. Even though Clemente died when a plane he personally chartered to bring relief supplies to earthquake-ravaged Nicaragua crashed, parents in Duval County, Florida took umbrage at his story including actual stories of real racism and requested it to be taken out of circulation.
Complaints of a similar timbre caused the withdrawal of several more children’s books featuring a whole host of sporting icons. Jim Thorpe, the Native American who was a high school football star before winning Olympic decathlon gold in 1912, was deemed verboten.
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As was Jackie Robinson, the man who endured so much racial hatred when breaking the Major League colour barrier in 1947. A demented constituency found offence too in the distinguished achievements of Hank Aaron, who shipped all sorts of abuse on his way to becoming one of the greatest hitters ever, and the life of Wilma Rudolph, who battled polio, scarlet fever, and segregation before winning three Olympic golds in 1960.
Every name mentioned in this column so far would feature on any list of the most influential American sportspersons of the last century. Yet, books telling their stories have come under increased scrutiny from self-appointed mullahs declaring war on factually correct works, arguing that the mere mentioning of racially tinged episodes somehow constitutes “white shaming”.
Myopic conservatives would prefer children never accessed these tales of remarkable men and women overcoming prejudice to achieve greatness in and out of the sporting arena. Just in case they learned along the way the nation’s past was, like that of most every other country, invariably chequered.
Over the past two years the increasingly bonkers culture wars opened a new and vicious front in public and school libraries. Led by republican lobby groups such as Moms for Liberty and emboldened by Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s far-reaching Stop WOKE legislation, thousands of books, ranging from sports biographies designed for kids to classic works of literature by Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood, have been whipped off shelves and placed in cold storage. Some eventually return after enough hackles are raised in the media, more don’t.
The approach is all-encompassing, stultifying, and breeds ignorance. Witness the treatment of Baseball Saved Us, Ken Mochizuki’s kids’ classic about how Japanese American boys shamefully interned in camps by the US government during the second World War played the game every day to make their incarceration more tolerable. Based on a true story. Inspired by actual events. A work detailing how the cherished national pastime brought solace to these beleaguered lads is not suitable. Thou shalt not speak of any part of our history that is in any way embarrassing is a new commandment on the extreme right.
While Florida and Texas inevitably lead the way in disgracing themselves in these matters, the national mood is so demented that earlier this year Mason City Community School District in Iowa banned Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights. It was reckoned to be age-inappropriate and cited for “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act”.
An especially odd finding since, as Bissinger himself quickly asserted, there is no sex act depicted anywhere in his seminal chronicle of a season with a West Texas high school football team. Worse still, it turned out the authorities in that case had deployed ChatGPT to assist it with figuring out what to censor.
Sexual content (real or imagined) is the red flag in a lot of these cases. A founding member of Moms for Liberty and chair of the Sarasota School Board, Bridget Ziegler, played a huge role in lobbying for the state’s Parental Rights in Education Act, a wide-ranging piece of legislation prohibiting teachers from, among other things, saying the word gay in schools.
Wearing all those different zealot hats, Ziegler has often been the public face of a puritanical movement determined to excise all books mentioning LGBTQ+ issues. Of course, it emerged the other week that the crusader and her husband Christian (currently being investigated for rape) were in a throuple relationship with another woman.
“Don’t join the book burners,” said president Dwight D Eisenhower in a commencement address in Dartmouth College at the height of McCarthyism and the Red Scare in the 1950s. “Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go into your library and read every book ...”
Or at least the ones you can still find.
