“Toni Morrison's 'Beloved,'" at the Rock Island Public Library Downtown Branch -- November 10.
Thursday, November 10, 2 p.m.
Rock Island Public Library Downtown Branch, 401 19th Street, Rock Island IL
One of the most universally admired novels of modern times, and the widespread controversy it has engendered, will be explored in the Rock Island Public Library's latest Frieze Lecture Series presentation Toni Morrison's “Beloved,” a a November 10 program in which Augustana College's assistant professor of English Dr. Ashley Burge will discuss how the author's masterpiece has faced multiple banning attempts for its frank depiction of the horrors of slavery.
Set in the period after the American Civil War, Beloved tells the story of a dysfunctional family of formerly enslaved people whose Cincinnati home is haunted by a malevolent spirit. The narrative derives from the life of Margaret Garner, an enslaved person in the slave state of Kentucky who escaped and fled to the free state of Ohio in 1856. Garner was subject to capture under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and when U.S. marshals broke into the cabin where she and her husband had barricaded themselves, she was attempting to kill her children—and had already killed her youngest daughter—in hopes of sparing them from being returned to slavery. Morrison's main inspiration for Beloved was an account of the event titled "A Visit to the Slave Mother Who Killed Her Child" in an 1856 newspaper article initially published in the American Baptist and reproduced in The Black Book, an anthology of texts of Black history and culture that Morrison had edited in 1974.
The book's publication resulted in the greatest acclaim yet for Morrison. But although Beloved was nominated for the National Book Award, it did not win, and 48 African-American writers and critics, among them Maya Angelou, subsequently signed a letter of protest that was published in the New York Times Book Review in January of1988. Later that year, however, Morrison's novel did receive the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award, the Melcher Book Award, the Lyndhurst Foundation Award, and the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award. It was also the recipient of the seventh annual Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights Book Award, given to a novelist who "most faithfully and forcefully reflects Robert Kennedy's purposes—his concern for the poor and the powerless, his struggle for honest and even-handed justice, his conviction that a decent society must assure all young people a fair chance, and his faith that a free democracy can act to remedy disparities of power and opportunity."
Still, Beloved has been banned from five U.S. schools, with the common explanations for its censorship including the inclusion of bestiality, infanticide, sex, and violence. Twenty years after its publication, Morrison's novel was abruptly abandoned by an AP English class at Eastern High School in Louisville, Kentucky, at the order of the school's principal. The class had nearly reached the end of the book when a parent complained about language on page 13. In Virginia, Beloved was considered for removal from the Fairfax County senior English reading list due to a parent's 2017 complaint that "the book includes scenes of violent sex, including a gang rape, and was too graphic and extreme for teenagers." Parental concern about Beloved's content inspired the Beloved Bill, legislation that would have required Virginia public schools to notify parents of any "sexually explicit content" and provide an alternative assignment, if requested. The bill was vetoed by Governor Terry McAuliffe, and when McAuliffe ran again for the governor's office in 2021, a major event in the election was his statement during a debate that, "Yeah, I stopped the bill that—I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach." His opponent Glenn Youngkin seized on the remark, and produced a television commercial in which a parent recounted her effort to get the book banned. Youngkin was ultimately elected.
Toni Morrison's "Beloved" will be presented at the Rock Island Public Library's downtown branch on November 10, participation in the 2 p.m. program is free, and more information is available by calling (309)732-7323 and visiting RockIslandLibrary.org.
