Students at the Plymouth-Canton Schools in Michigan got a crash course in politics this week.

That’s because one family launched an official complaint on December 20, 2011 to have the fictional novel Beloved, by Toni Morrison, banned from the AP English curriculum due to racial themes, sexual content, and passages about ghosts (the spirit of a murdered child haunts the Ohio home of a former slave). The novel won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988 and is set in the years following the American Civil War. It tells the tale of a slave who escapes to Ohio, where a posse arrives to retrieve her and her children under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. She kills her two-year-old daughter rather than allow her to be recaptured.

Plymouth-Canton Schools release reading lists to parents ahead of time, and the book was on the class syllabus since the beginning of the term, so to have this surface now makes little sense unless part of some political agenda.

Read on and Share the Knowledge:
http://bbark.deepforestproductions.com/column/2012/01/22/banned-books-awareness-beloved/