Nearly all the 381 books pulled from the U.S. Naval Academy Library in April are back on the shelves after the Pentagon instituted its own criteria for banning books.
“I am thrilled to report that, as a result of the public pressure, most of the banned books have recently been returned to the shelves at the Naval Academy,” said Robert P. Jones whose book, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, was one of the titles initially banned and now returned to circulation.
Robert P. Jones
That pressure included an American Academy of Religion webinar featuring authors of some of the prohibited texts and campaign in Annapolis, Md., to provide free copies of the books to midshipmen.
The change of course also followed a memo the Pentagon issued in May instructing all Department of Defense libraries to use standardized search terms to eliminate materials in violation of the Trump administration’s prohibition against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, ABC News reported.
The Navy’s search terms apparently were more rigorous than those ultimately required by the Pentagon. A defense official said that the new review using the DOD search terms found only two or three book titles included in the Navy’s earlier search.
The now-official standardized search terms to ban books include “affirmative action,” “anti-racism,” “gender dysphoria,” “gender identity,” “gender transition,” “transexuals” and “white privilege.”
A Navy spokesman confirmed most of the 381 books originally flagged by the academy are back in circulation, according to the ABC News report.
“The Navy has reviewed library collections at all Department of Navy educational institutions to ensure compliance with directives issued by the president and Department of Defense,” Cmdr. Tim Hawkins said. “The Navy has identified and sequestered library materials potentially incompatible with the military’s core mission, pending the Defense Department’s formal review.”
Maya Angelou (Photo: Wake Forest University)
Titles initially removed from the Naval Academy Library included Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide, and Collective Memory by Janet Jacobs; White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America by Anthea Butler, history professor at the University of Pennsylvania; America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America by Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners; and How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram Kendi, a humanities professor at Boston University.
The Pentagon said 20 books have been set aside for further review, including some not tagged in the Navy’s initial purge, the Associated Press reported. The anti-DEI review also extended to the libraries, social media accounts and websites associated with all branches of the military.
“The back-and-forth on book removals reflects a persistent problem in the early months of the Trump administration, as initial orders and demands for an array of policy changes have been forced to be reworked, fine-tuned and reissued because they were vague, badly defined or problematic,” AP noted.
While the National Library Association said a list of the remaining 20 banned books has not been made available, The 19th News reported Angelou’s book was restored at the Naval Academy library along with To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
Owners of Old Fox Books, Janice Holmes and Jinny Amundson.
Jones said he learned White Too Long had been restored from a photograph sent him by Jinny Amundson, owner of Old Fox Books in Annapolis, Md., and William Marks, a retired Navy officer and academy alumnus. The image shows “my book back on the shelf, nestled next to books by the great religion scholar Martin Marty.”
The 19th News reported Amundson and Marks led a campaign that raised more than $70,000 to provide midshipmen free copies of banned books, which they could pick up at the store located a block from the academy.
“The motto of the Naval Academy is ‘from knowledge, seapower,’” Marks said. “What we mean is without knowledge, education and intellectual growth, we will never become a strong Navy. So this contradiction really struck me, that instead of encouraging knowledge and encouraging discussion, the Pentagon was actually suppressing knowledge and limiting discussion.”
Marks said the campaign was titled “Operation Caged Bird” after Angelou’s 1969 memoir and to allude to the caged feeling induced by censorship.
“What struck me was the very arbitrary and even cruel nature of the books that got removed,” he said. “These books were a cross-section of American culture. They were important to the discussion of American history.”
Amundson said she already was preparing to order copies of the banned titles when Marks reached out to her. “For a bookseller, the idea of censoring any kind of books just gives us heart palpitations. And it’s our community. The (midshipmen) think of our shop as a place they love and one of their sort of unofficial bookstores. We have the mids, the faculty, the administration that come in and think of our space as their own.”
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