A Point of Light in Dark Times: Community Resistance in St. Francis, Minnesota
Last week, I went to a community meeting in St. Francis, Minnesota at the United Methodist Church (which looked, inside and out, exactly like the midwestern church you are currently imagining). St. Francis is a city of around 9,000 people about an hour north of the Twin Cities (One hour and forty minutes when it’s rush hour, it turns out).
The meeting celebrated a community that is fighting hard against a book ban imposed by their school board. The details of this ban are so commonplace as to be unremarkable, almost as if this contagion of censorship is being driven by small minds with big money on the national level and not real community concern. PEN America found instances of more than 10,000 books being banned last school year. I personally feel that is actually too many banned books, but I may be an extremist in that way.
The ban may not be so special, but the community in St Francis certainly is. Students in the high school staged a walkout (where, get this, the sat and read the banned books in front of the school), the teacher’s union, parent groups, and the ACLU are fighting hard and loud, and the board seems quite likely to agree to a settlement soon.
Dave Eggers, probably the writer most responsible for me switching to literary non-fiction (and who offered for free, the foreword to my first book just because I was a teacher and because he cares a lot about schools and books), came into town to host the event, which also featured Kelly Barnhill, whose novel When Women Were Dragons may well be the one that recommitted me to the power of fiction. You should read it.
Barnhill spoke of the contagion of book bans, but reminded us all that reading is contagious, that resistance is contagious. Bans like these, she said, felt like attempts by some to place limitations based on their own limitations.
A journalism teacher from the high school, (who from the reactions of students in the audience was very obviously one of those teachers), explained that the one cranky-old-teacher thing she did was make every one of her students memorize the first amendment, then had us all stand and taught us the movements she used in class to help us all remember it too.
But of course and as always, it was the students who captured the room, who were the start of this community’s resistance and who were still firmly and fiercely out front, leaving all of us in attendance inspired to catch up.
The students, a 10th, 11th, and 12th grader, said “I don’t want to grow up and be ashamed of where I went to school, and that’s why I’m speaking up.”
And they said, “the real danger lies in silence and not speech.”
And that though some argue book bans protect young people, a student questioned “what is protection if not allowing us to be who we are rather than who you want us to be?”
And one student, the only one who had raised a hand when Eggers asked in anyone had read New English Canaan, the first book banned in the U.S. (in 1637), said that taking the books from schools where some young person may find the safety or sympathy or empathy or ideas they need, “feels like a guy punch.”
And they said, quiet in a way that nearly took the walls down around us, “thank you for listening, and more importantly, thank you for hearing us.”
These students are incredible, and the parents, teachers, and community behind them is incredible. But there is nothing happening in St. Francis that couldn’t be happening in every other place that the right to read is being challenged.
Resistance is contagious.
Good Work:
