Students hated 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' Their teachers tried to dump it.

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THE SCHOOL BOOK WARS

Students hated ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ Their teachers tried to dump it.

Four progressive teachers in Washington’s Mukilteo School District wanted to protect students from a book they saw as outdated and harmful. The blowback was fierce.

By Hannah Natanson
November 3, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT



Kamiak High School English teacher Riley Degamo is one of four teachers who sought to forbid teaching "To Kill a Mockingbird" in their liberal Washington district. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

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MUKILTEO, Wash. — Students first told Shanta Freeman-Miller about how it hurt to read “To Kill a Mockingbird” five years ago.

The stories came out during Wednesday meetings of the Union for Students of African Ancestry, a group that Freeman-Miller, one of the only Black teachers at Kamiak High School, founded at teens’ request. Students shared their discomfort with the way the 1960 novel about racial injustice portrays Black people: One Black teen said the book misrepresented him and other African Americans, according to meeting records reviewed by The Washington Post. Another complained the novel did not move her, because it wasn’t written about her — or for her.

A third spoke about how a White teen said the n-word aloud while reading from “Mockingbird,” disobeying the teacher’s instructions to skip the slur, the student recalled in an interview with The Post. She spoke on the condition of anonymity, for fear of harassment.

“The kid looked at every Black person — there’s three Black people in that class — and smiled,” the student said, according to meeting records and her memory. “And the plot is not even good.”

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By Hannah Natanson
Hannah Natanson is a Washington Post reporter covering national K-12 education. Twitter https://twitter.com/hannah_natanson

She challenges one school book a week. She says she’ll never stop.