SOURCE: Saney, Isaac. “The Case against To Kill a Mockingbird.” Race & Class 45, no. 1 (July-September 2003): 99-110.

In the following essay, Saney discusses the media's response to the 1996 banning of To Kill a Mockingbird from the standard curricula of public schools in Nova Scotia.

For many years the Black Educators' Association and parents, amongst others, have lobbied the Nova Scotia Department of Education and school boards to remove various books from the school curriculum and school use. Similar initiatives have taken place in New Brunswick and other provinces across Canada. Pressure from the community forced the Department of Education to face up to its social responsibility to provide enlightened education and teaching materials and address the issue of restricting racist materials in the province's classrooms, in the same way that pressure had forced the government to abandon its legislated policy of segregated schooling for the African Nova Scotian population, a...