Boy in the Hood
Robin Hood is one of the most beloved characters of all time. Who can forget Errol Flynn's turn as Robin Hood in the classic 1938 film?
There have over 70 versions of Robin Hood in TV and movies, and while this one is my personal favorite, you’ve got plenty of others to choose from.
How can anyone have a beef with Robin Hood?
However, Robin Hood rankled Mrs. White because, she claimed, the story pushed Communist doctrine.
“They want to stress it because he robbed the rich and gave it to the poor,” she said. “That's the communist line. It's just a smearing of law and order and anything that disrupts law and order is their meat.”
I should mention here that the story of Mrs. White was in a New York Times article from Nov. 14, 1953, which I came across while doing research for a book project.
It’s important to remember that this was going on during the dark years of Joe McCarthy’s reign, where the mere mention of the word “communist” destroyed people’s careers and lives.
The Sheriff of Nottingham at the time maintained that “Robin Hood was no Communist,” and the Indiana Superintendent of Schools said he would not ban textbook references the legendary outlaw of Sherwood Forest.
He said he could not find anything subversive about Robin Hood and the Merry Men.
Mrs. White, by the way, also had problems with the Quakers, because, she said “they don’t believe in fighting wars.”
Big Brother is Watching You
“All the men they can get to believe that they don't need to go to war, the better off the communists are,” she said. “It's the same as their crusade for peace--everybody lay down his arms and they'll take over.”
I would like to think that we as a nation had closed the book on this kind of insanity, but that’s not the case at all. All these decades later, book banning has returned to plague us once more.
Instead of “communist,” these modern day McCarthyites are using terms like “woke” to have books banned from school.
Earlier this month, the Hillsborough County Public School Board in Florida said students will no longer be allowed to read certain Shakespeare works in full due to state legislation prohibiting sexual content in classrooms.
The includes Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Macbeth.
Meanwhile, a school district in Iowa flagged hundreds of titles for removal from its libraries, ranging from Ulysses to The Catcher in the Rye, and—yes, seriously—1984—because they all contain descriptions of sex.
“As book bans escalate, coupled with the proliferation of legislative efforts to restrict teaching about topics such as race, gender, American history, and LGBTQ+ identities, the freedom to read, learn, and think continues to be undermined for students,” according to Pen America.
Book bans are most prevalent in Texas, Florida, Missouri, Utah, and South Carolina, and overwhelmingly, book banners continue to target stories by and about people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals.
Many states have enacted “wholesale bans” where entire classrooms and school libraries have been suspended, closed, or emptied of books, either permanently or temporarily.
This is largely because teachers and librarians in several states have been directed to catalog entire collections for public scrutiny within short timeframes, under threat of punishment from new, vague laws, Pen America said.
The most banned and challenged books this year include a graphic novel adaptation of Margret Atwood’s The Handmaiden’s Tale, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize.
I don’t know where all this is going, but if I were Robin Hood, I’d be feeling pretty nervous right about now.
Comments
You've got that right, Bijoux. You'd swear this story was a parody, but this actually happened. Tragic.
That's an excellent point, Dorothy. Trying to suppress something guarantees people will be more interested in it.
And there have been requests at some schools to ban the Bible over its explicit sexual and violent content. Once you let the genie out of the bottle...
Take care!