SMU comes together for free speech

By Nancy Black

With the American flag waving gently in the background, SMU students assembled Thursday night to stand up for the condemned. This was not a death penalty protest, though. The crowd that came together on the steps of Dallas Hall was honoring banned books.

"Tonight we are gathered here to celebrate free speech; to celebrate free expression," said Doug Champion, senior English major, at the start of the evening. "To make a stand-though admittedly small and largely symbolic-against literary censorship, and more broadly, any censorship which attempts to put a brake on the transmission of an idea."

Sponsored by Sigma Tau Delta, SMU's English club, the candlelight vigil was held in conjunction with the American Library Association's national Banned Books Week. In its 19th year, the event runs from Sept. 23-30. The week's theme is "Fish in a River of Knowledge." Libraries and bookstores across the country set up displays of banned books to create more awareness of the growing infringements of the First Amendment in America.

"Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions," said Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. "It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us."

Beginning with Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, SMU faculty and students read from a wide range of outlawed literature.

Passages from "Catcher in the Rye," by J.D. Salinger, "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings," by Maya Angelou and "Lolita," by Vladimir Nabokov were presented.

"I find 'Lolita' to be a book that is morally repulsive in a number of ways," said Dr. Trish Travis, faculty sponsor of STD.

"It's sexual politics, its ideas about what kind of female body is beautiful, what kind of male exercise of power is permissible. I disagree with all those things that are here in the book, but I still think, in fact I would say, in part because I think those things, that's one of the reasons why it is my pleasure to teach it."

Travis explained that to talk about what she thinks is wrong with the book and what is right about it is what freedom of speech is all about.

At the end of the readings, STD passed out bookmarks whose corners were charred from fire as a grim reminder of the effects of censorship.