100-year-old Grace Linn destroyed anyone attempting to have books removed from classrooms in a matter of minutes. Linn was one of the crowds of concerned residents protesting the removal of about 80 books from public school libraries based on the concerns of one parent in front of 500 people at Florida’s Martin County School Board, according to Advocate.
Linn began by stating that she was “a hundred years young” and then talked about her late husband Robert Nicoll, who perished in World War Two. He was only 26 when he defended our democracy, the Constitution, and our freedoms, she remarked.
The Daily Beast claims that when Nicoll was first reported missing in combat, Linn was seven months pregnant. When their little daughter Nicci was three days old, she learned that he had passed away.
Nazi Party and their Policies
She continued by equating the local book prohibition to Nazi policies. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party, better known as the Nazi Party or NSDAP, was a far-right political organization in Germany that was active between 1920 and 1945 and was responsible for developing and promoting Nazi ideology. The German Workers’ Party, which served as its forerunner, was active between 1919 and 1920. The extreme German nationalist, racist, and populist Freikorps paramilitary culture, which fought against the communist revolutions in Germany after World War I, gave rise to the Nazi Party. The purpose of the party was to convert workers from communism to völkisch nationalism. To win the support of business leaders, the Nazi political approach initially emphasized anti-big business, anti-bourgeois, and anti-capitalist rhetoric. By the 1930s, antisemitic and anti-Marxist themes had become the party’s principal concerns. Up until the Great Depression, when declining living standards and high unemployment drove Germans towards political extremism, the party had little popular support.
Nazi Book Burnings
The German Student Union launched a campaign known as the Nazi book burnings in the 1930s to formally destroy books in Nazi Germany and Austria. Books that were deemed subversive or toeing the line against Nazi ideology were the ones that were set on fire. Among others, these publications have authors who were Jewish, half-Jewish, communist, socialist, anarchist, liberal, pacifist, and sexologist. Karl Marx and Karl Kautsky’s writings were among the first to be destroyed, but eventually, a large number of authors, including Albert Einstein, and Helen Keller, writers in French and English, and any book opposed to Nazi ideology, were also burned. Moreover, books were mass-burned by the Nazis in occupied countries like Poland as part of a program of cultural genocide.
Liberties Trampled by Nazis
The ability to read the books they forbade was one of the liberties that the Nazis trampled. They suppressed free speech, outlawed, and set fire to literature. The fundamental right and obligation of our democracy is the freedom to read, which is guaranteed by the First Amendment. Even so, it continues to come under fire from public and private organizations claiming to be telling the truth. Then someone behind Linn spread out a big yellow quilt with images of dozens of novels that are frequently prohibited, including This Book is Gay, Lawn-Boy, 1984, Maus, and The Color Purple.
Book Banning
As she put it, Linn designed the quilt “in response to the book banning throughout our nation and Martin County last year when I was 99 to remind us all that these few of so many more prohibited and targeted books need open exhibition and protection and read if you wish to.”
Together with the books, Linn included symbols of progressive ideas in the quilt, such as a Pride Flag and a frame bearing the phrase “Love is Love.”
She asserted that “burning books is the same as banning books.” “The same motivation underlies both: fear of knowing. Fear is not freedom, liberty, and controlling. My husband died as a father of freedom”.
Wrapping Up
I am the mother of freedom. Banned books need to be prominently displayed and safeguarded from school boards like this. The audience then cheered vociferously.
Afterward, Linn told the Daily Beast that after her speech, a man with teary eyes approached her.
“I have to thank you, he said,” When my grandma escaped Auschwitz at 11, she was just 11 years old. Even though all of my other relatives passed away, I wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t managed to escape.
I answered, ‘I am so delighted you are here,’ she continued. Linn added that she had no intention of giving up the fight against book bans.
“I’ve always felt obligated to do it. History will repeat itself when it is ignored, misused, or forbidden to be used, and we had enough of that with the rise of Nazism in Germany.