“That was first time in my life that I saw a living writer. I assumed most of them were dead.” Alice Faye Duncan recalls the day in the sixth grade at Snowden Elementary School in Memphis that the poet Etheridge Knight spoke to her class. Duncan, the child of two educators, was the one walking around with “oodles” of journals, filled with poems and short stories. It was that day her life changed. After that, “I told anyone who would listen, ‘I’m going to be a writer.’”
Today, Duncan is an award winner, the author of 12 books, including her latest, Yellow Dog Blues, the story of a boy and his runaway dog, the Blues Trail, and Beale Street. The New York Times and the New York Public Library have honored the book (with illustrations by Caldecott Medal-winner Chris Raschka) as one of the Best Illustrated among children’s books published in 2022. Duncan’s writing is considered to be in line for awards as well.
Now, Duncan’s 2018 book, Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop, has been pulled into a growing controversy — the banning of books aimed at young readers in conservative-leaning states. Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop received a Coretta Scott King Books For Children Honor Medal in 2019, but since January it has been banned “pending investigation” by the Duval County (Jacksonville, Florida) Board of Education. Speaking on the WKNO-TV series A Conversation With (available at wkno.org), Duncan calls book-banning “anti-intellectual” and “unhealthy” and says it “contributes to the dumbing down of America.”
Duncan’s book is one of almost 200 on the Duval County banned book list. Calls and emails to the Board of Education have not been answered. According to PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans, more than 1,600 titles have been banned or restricted in libraries across America.
Tennessee, through what’s called the Age-Appropriate Materials Act, is one of the states leading the movement to restrict student access to certain books. The act, signed into law in April by Governor Bill Lee, requires “each public school to maintain and post on the school’s website, a list of materials in the school’s library collection.”
While the new Tennessee law is aimed at screening “obscene materials or materials harmful to minors,” the study by PEN America estimates that at least 40 percent of bans nationwide “are connected to either proposed or enacted legislation” or from “political pressure to restrict the teaching or presence of certain books or concepts.” Among those concepts is racism. Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop looks at the ill-fated 1968 strike by sanitation workers from the point of view of a 9-year-old girl, whose father is one of the strikers.
Another of Duncan’s books, Evicted!: The Struggle For The Right To Vote, also published in 2022, chronicles the story of voter registration drives led by Black people in Fayette County, Tennessee, starting in the 1950s.
“My mission is to write books to leave a record for the children who weren’t there,” she says. “Because if we don’t share the history as we are seeing it, people will say it never happened.”
Duncan has three other books currently in the works and says she won’t allow censorship to affect what she writes, or how. You can learn more about Alice Faye Duncan and her books at alicefayeduncan.com.