On November 22, 1999, public school superintendent Gary Feenstra of Zeeland, Michigan, ordered that all books in the popular Harry Potter series be removed from elementary and middle school libraries, and likewise banned the reading of the books in Zeeland classrooms. The restrictions were placed after numerous parents and religious figures in the area objected to children being subjected to what they deemed as inappropriate influences.
“As we expose our kids to the occult, we expose our kids to blood, to violence, and desensitize them to that,” a local reverend told CNN at the time. “What I can expect is those kids, as they mature, have a very good chance of becoming another Dylan Klebold and those guys in Columbine.”
Public outcry was immediate. While Harry Potter and his fellow students at Hogwarts were indeed wizards and witches, they hardly subscribed to the occult and instead were considered role models in the larger sense for children everywhere. There was also a clear line between good and evil within the world of Harry Potter, with the main protagonist distinctly on the side of good and standing against the kind of violence that the books were accused of promoting.
Just as Harry and his friends Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley had done when faced with injustice in the books of Harry Potter, real-world students likewise united to protest the banning of the books that they loved. Muggles for Harry Potter was thus born, bringing together eight diverse organization – from booksellers and publishers to teachers and librarians – in an effort to combat what they saw as censorship.
“Muggles for Harry Potter is fighting for the right of students and teachers to use the best books available for children, even when some parents object,” Christopher Finan, president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, explained. “The Potter books are helping turn videogame players into readers. We can’t allow censorship to interfere with that.”
Looking back decades later, it is hard to imagine the uproar that Harry Potter caused at the turn of the twenty-first century. The seven connecting novels written by J.K. Rowling have since sold over 500 million copies worldwide and been translated into eighty languages, making them the best-selling book series in history. The eight film adaptations, meanwhile, are the third highest grossing film series of all time, having generated $7.7 billion in worldwide receipts.
Harry Potter attractions at Warner Bros. Studios in London and Universal Studios in both California and Florida continue to be tourist destinations for millions of fans despite the fact that the last Harry Potter book was released in 2007 and corresponding motion picture in 2011. Harry, Ron and Hermione appear to be more popular than ever – making it even harder to believe that the book series had ever been singled out as a bad influence on children.
That negative response went far beyond the restrictions enacted by the Zeeland superintendent of public schools. In 2010, it was reported that at least six Harry Potter book burnings had occurred within the United States. Organized by religious leaders in their respective communities, these events garnered nationwide media attention and while Harry Potter were their main targets, other elements of popular culture were tossed into the flames as well.
In March 2001, for instance, a bonfire in Butler County, Pennsylvania, included Bruce Springsteen and Pearl Jam albums, while a similar event in Alamogordo, New Mexico, in December of that year witnessed the burning of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare to go along with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. “Behind that innocent face is the power of satanic darkness,” an organizer in New Mexico said at the time. “Harry Potter is the devil and he is destroying people.”
Not all Christians agreed with such sentiments. The Reverend Danielle Elizabeth Tumminio developed a semester-long seminar at Yale University while pursuing her master’s degree in Theology partially in response to what she perceived as misinterpretations of Harry Potter by others within the religious community. Her corresponding 2010 book God and Harry Potter at Yale details her efforts at teaching the course, as well as the ways that Harry Potter intersects with Christian thought as opposed to being its enemy.
Others sprang to the defense of Harry Potter as well, staging counter-protests in Alamogordo, New Mexico, that coincided with the book burning and attracted several hundred supporters of Harry Potter. The Alamogordo Public Library, meanwhile, announced that its Harry Potter display – created for the release of the first Harry Potter film a month earlier – would be extended and even received an influx of public donations as a result.
“Harry is alive and well at their library,” director Jim Preston assured the people of Alamogordo. “With this money we are purchasing additional copies of Harry Potter, Tolkien, and Shakespeare.”
While book burnings may have been spectacles that grabbed the media’s attention, attempts to ban Harry Potter in schools like those in Zeeland, Michigan, far-and-away surpassed the number of literal fires ignited across the country. By the year 2000, challenges to using Harry Potter in the classroom and the inclusion of the books on the shelves of school libraries had been waged in thirteen states.
It was the actions of public school superintendent Gary Feenstra in Zeeland, however, that united opponents of censorship in general and Harry Potter fans in particular to take action. The children who were directly affected by the restrictions immediately started letter-writing campaigns and petitions to get the decision overturned. They were soon joined by the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the Freedom to Read Foundation, the Association of American Publishers, the National Council of Teachers of English, the Children’s Book Council, the Association of Booksellers for Children, the National Coalition Against Censorship and PEN American Center.
Together these groups of children, parents, teachers and publishers launched Muggles for Harry Potter to not only coordinate efforts already underway in Zeeland but bring awareness of the issues surrounding censorship to others across the country. A website was launched, for instance, that enabled anyone to report censorship initiatives against Harry Potter in their own communities and disseminated information about ways to combat such attempts.
In Zeeland, Michigan, those efforts paid off. In response to the protests against the restrictions placed on Harry Potter, an advisory committee was formed to evaluate the decision of public school superintendent Gary Feenstra. On May 11, 2000 – slightly less than six months after the Harry Potter books were removed from school libraries – Feenstra announced that he was rescinding his previous restrictions based on the advisory committee’s recommendations.
For their efforts on behalf of Harry Potter, Mary Dana of Grand Haven, Michigan, and Nancy Zennie of Zeeland were honored at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. on September 25, 2000, as part of the national kickoff for Banned Books Week. Thirteen-year-old Julia Mayersohn of Union City, New Jersey, and eleven-year-old Billy Smith of Santa Ana, California, were likewise presented with Olympic-style gold medals by Pat Schroeder, a former U.S. Representative and president of the Association of American Publishers.
Julia Mayersohn had written letters to Family Friendly Libraries expressing her opposition to the organization’s efforts to have Harry Potter removed from publicly funded institutions and encouraged other fans to do the same. Billy Smith, meanwhile, used his summer vacation to read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to children from low-income homes whose families could not afford to purchase the book themselves.
Efforts in other locales besides Zeeland, Michigan, to censor Harry Potter were eventually overruled by courts, resulting in the books remaining in schools across the country despite such opposition. Muggles for Harry Potter itself evolved a year after its formation into kidSPEAK!, expanding its efforts not only on behalf of Harry Potter but other books that continue to get challenged every year within the United States.
Muggles for Harry Potter may be no more but the banning of books – and the efforts to combat censorship – continues nonetheless.
Anthony Letizia