On Wednesday, Sophia and I met with our university’s head of special collections and university archives, Carolyn Parsons. Sophia knows her as she is a former student so it is nice to have someone who knows more about the archiving process as my partner.

We will probably meet with her again to get an interview but for this meeting we discussed what our project was and we finalized our book decision. We had originally chosen Maurice because the backstory is really interesting to me but there is no local case so we had to change it. We chose To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee because it was recently banned in Accomack County in Virginia and it has been banned and challenged all over the country.

Carolyn showed us how to look up legal cases through LexisNexis. She also suggested that we look up school board meeting minutes that discuss the removal of the book .Hopefully, we can find the patron complaint as well.  After we have as much research as we can we will go back and get a more thorough interview so we can find more resources.

Once the meeting was over, we began to do our separate research, Sophia focused on the Accomack County case and she even found and audio recording of the school board meeting minutes that banned the book. We found a lot of news reports on other counties in Virginia going back to 1966. I focused on out of state because Sophia was finding a lot on local cases so I wanted to see how the cases differed based on geographic location. In Mississippi, the book was banned and unbanned within a two week period. The book wasn’t fully restored because students who want to read the book have to get their parents permission. Although not every case gets resolved,  I’ve found that the reasons for banning it are the same in every case that I have seen.

For now we are going to continue doing research and hopefully we will be able to contact some of the school districts that have banned To Kill A Mockingbird and get their perspective on the banning. We are mainly focusing on the Accomack County case but we would like to get statements from as many places as possible. 

The Simpson Library at the University of Mary Washington.