The history of book bans in the US goes back to 1637 but has recently increased dramatically, nearly 200% during the 2023-24 school year. This rise is driven by conservative policies claiming many books have themes that go "against" American history. But are these books really problematic? The World's Lex Weaver shares her experience attending a banned-book symposium hosted by Morgan State University in Havana, Cuba, where authors and historians discussed their worries about the future of education. The post ‘What’s the greatest knowledge a person can have? Know thyself’: Morgan State University hosts banned-book symposium in Cuba appeared first on The World from PRX.
The three-day symposium held by Morgan State University, a historically Black university based in Baltimore, was hosted at Casa de las Américas and the National Union of Artists and Writers of Cuba (UNEAC).
American and Cuban authors, historians and journalists including Molefi Kete Asante, Nancy Moréjon, Nikole Hannah-Jones and Yulexis Almeida discussed the national and global impacts of their work being curtailed by what many of them believe to be political agendas.
“It is always a fascinating discussion when we all get together because then there’s the whole question of history and what it means and what do we really understand in that understanding,” said Jacqueline Jones, dean of the School of Global Journalism & Communication at MSU, during the symposium’s open.
Since 2016, MSU has maintained a Memorandum of Understanding with the University of Havana to establish “mutually beneficial education, research relationships and creative activities.”
“When we have students with us, they often hear all this for the first time. Their understanding of Cuba is what they see on TV back in the States,” said Jones. “So, I’m grateful for the opportunity for them to learn as part of the process and encourage them to read, which you find in US schools, there’s been no energy or the desire to read the way some of us did when we were kids.”
I traveled to Cuba with almost 30 MSU staff and affiliates and two SGJC students as part of The World’s Global Classroom, funded by the Lumina Foundation. The trip was led by Jones alongside Dewayne Wickham, dean emeritus and director of the Center for New Media & Strategic Initiatives.
Wickham has worked for decades in Cuba to build journalistic thoroughness and integrity for US students. He often brings students to learn about lost and burgeoning Cuban history, hoping that their time in the country will allow them to develop their own beliefs about Cuba, not just from US media and educational institutions.
“I’m trying to get young people to be heavily armed intellectually,” Wickham, a Vietnam War veteran, said when I caught up with him this month. “And Cuba, for me, is the great learning lab because it is one of the last vestiges of the Cold War. The Cold War has ended virtually everywhere else in the world, except Cuba. Some people might say it’s North Korea, but Cuba, literally, is the American manifestation of the Cold War.”
Wickham has taken over 40 trips to Cuba since 1999. His first was on an invite from the Congressional Black Caucus when he was a reporter at USA Today. Since 2000, Wickham has fundraised and organized these yearly reporting trips, as he calls them, to Cuba.
“It’s good to kind of prime the pump and to get them to understand that one of the great failures of American journalism is too much repeating and not enough reporting,” he told me.
I saw firsthand how beneficial the relationship between MSU and the University of Havana is in fostering educational connections and building stronger reporting. As a journalist myself, while in Cuba with the group, just like Wickham aims to do for his student journalists, I found myself unlearning a lot of what I know about Cuba and US-Cuba relations from my own American education.
During the symposium, called Banning Black Books, Silencing Black Voices: America’s Apartheid, I learned that Cuba has a rich history and connection to the African continent and heard — for what may be the first time publicly — authors share their experiences about how book bans have affected them and will impact North American and global education.
While Cuba has been experiencing ongoing power outages and a shortage of essential resources due to back-to-back tropical storms that hit the island last fall and ongoing sanctions by the US and its allies, the Cuban spirit remains steadfast.
It was clear that the Cuban people empathized with the US education and political crisis.
“There are people here that love you and understand what you’re going through in the US,” Alberto Granado Duque, director of Casa de África in La Habana Vieja, told our group in Spanish during a tour.
For the past two years, the US has experienced unprecedented levels of censorship on books nationwide, mostly commonly in the form of book banning, so much so that it felt safer to host the symposium outside of the country, where authors could speak freely, and students and staff could learn more about the history of the enslavement of Africans in both countries.
Cuba also, ironically, doesn’t experience book bans, making it the perfect place to host a banned-book symposium, according to Wickham. Most books being banned in the United States focus on LGBTQ, racial or gendered themes, according to Pen America.
“I think the banning of books robs our children of their history,” said Michael Cottman, assistant to the SGJC dean and author of “The Wreck of the Henrietta Marie.”
Last year, Cottman joined a list of Black authors to receive notice that his book — based on historical accounts of slavery — was being banned. He first learned of this ban when a library let him know his book would be removed from its shelves. “The Wreck of the Henrietta Marie” profiles the wreckage of a ship that carried Africans to the West Indies to be sold as enslaved people. The discovery of the wreckage is one of only a handful known of slave ships. Cottman, an avid scuba diver, explored the wreckage and discussed his findings and the ship’s history.
At the symposium, Cottman shared one of the reasons he thinks his book was banned: “I’ll tell you one thing in the book that scared people … it’s the National Association of Black Scuba Divers.”
“I joined this group because white divers wouldn’t dive because they didn’t think I knew what I was doing. They didn’t trust me in the water. When we traveled and dived, white people were stunned to see Black scuba divers because we are not people associated with water unless we’re on a slave ship. It’s because we endured years at sea. The water and the connection. We not only survived, we succeeded and were successful. That’s what they’re afraid of … because we overcame so much adversity … who could overcome this adversity except us?” he said.
And it’s not just the US censoring prominent authors of color.
In 2023, Nancy Morejón, an internationally recognized Cuban poet, scholar and critic, saw her honorary presidency revoked at the 40th annual le Marché de la Poésie, a renowned French poetry festival in Paris.
Morejón reveres Cuba in her writing and activism. She attributes her success to her access to free university education, which she became eligible for in 1961 under Fidel Castro’s leadership.
“My father didn’t have the money to pay for university for me,” she said at the symposium. “Without the existence of the Cuban revolution. I wouldn’t be here talking to you today. That’s my feeling. I tell it all over the world, wherever I go.”
However, this has also made her subject to right-wing criticism, and campaigns against supporters of Cuban liberty began against Morejón, leading to her withdrawal from the festival.
Many artists, writers and poets advocated Morejón’s right to freedom of expression. They noted the global silencing of Cuban revolution supporters because it does not support Western narratives that generally paint the Cuban regime as oppressive to its people.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian who holds the Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University, is one of the most prominent authors mentioned when discussing US book bans for her latest work, the 1619 Project.
Talking at the symposium, Hannah-Jones shared the impact of the historically-lensed publication, which features expanded essays from prominent historians, not just herself.
She said that when the project came out, first published in the New York Times Magazine in August 2019, it received “traditional conservative outrage, and then it kind of died down.”
“Then it became known that thousands of schools are often privately teaching the 1619 Project,” she said. “And that’s when you saw the aftermath … because there’s a fear that if children learn this history more accurately, they will go and become adults and make different choices. And for all of us adults reading this [book], we’re saying, ‘My God, why didn’t I know this? I never learned this before.’”
The post ‘What’s the greatest knowledge a person can have? Know thyself’: Morgan State University hosts banned-book symposium in Cuba appeared first on The World from PRX.
