My wife and I were on vacation last week, visiting Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
We saw many interesting things, but I was especially struck by a display at the Harriet Tubman Museum and Educational Center in Cambridge that focused on Samuel Green, a former enslaved man who worked as a farmer and minister. In 1857, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
His crime? Green possessed a copy of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Green worked with the Underground Railroad helping enslaved people flee to the North. When officials raided his house, they were unable to find any direct evidence linking Green to the Underground Railroad but did turn up a copy of Stowe’s book. Green, who was able to read and write, was charged under an 1841 Maryland law that made it a felony for Black people to possess “any abolition handbill, pamphlet, newspaper, pictorial representation or other paper of an inflammatory character, having a tendency to create discontent amongst or stir up to insurrection the people of color in this state…”
Green was sent to a prison in Baltimore. He was pardoned in 1862 but ordered to leave the state. He wasn’t able to return until after the Civil War.
As I reflected on Green’s ordeal, I couldn’t help but think of the power of the printed word. In this case, a book so terrified the ruling slavocratic elite that mere possession of it could send a person to prison.
We see a reflection of this today in ongoing Christian Nationalist attempts to restrict access to or ban books in schools and public libraries. In the modern era, the material targeted often has LGBTQ+ characters or themes, and the would-be censors are Christian Nationalists.
As our friends at EveryLibrary have noted, the backers of Project 2025, a Christian Nationalist blueprint for replacing America’s democracy with a theocracy, have called for leveling criminal charges against and possibly imprisoning librarians who make “pornography” available. Bear in mind that to Christian Nationalists, any book they don’t like qualifies as pornographic.
Books are powerful. Books can cause us to reconsider long-held assumptions. They can instruct us. They can change us.
That’s why books so terrify Christian Nationalists. That’s why they want to keep certain titles out of our hands.
It’s also why we have to make sure they don’t succeed.
