Let's get everyone in Tennessee to read Maus!

Don’t let ignorance drown out history.

A local school board in Tennessee banned Maus — a Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel about the Holocaust — from its curriculum. It’s a book  students will read and remember. That’s critical when many young adults know shockingly little about the Holocaust. One survey found nearly two-thirds don’t know that 6 million Jews were murdered and almost a fourth believe the Holocaust is a myth.

 

The county where the ban occurred, McMinn, is situated between Chattanooga and Knoxville and, coincidentally, not far from Dayton, site of the Scopes Monkey Trial almost 100 years ago.

David M. Perry, a writer and historian, reflected in a piece for CNN how, at age 17, his first reading of Maus disoriented him. That, he wrote, was the power of the book that so frightens those who want to ban it: “When we are unsettled by history, when our perceptions start to shift, that's when we're ready to learn. To outlaw discomfort in the classroom is to outlaw good teaching.”

 

I don’t want to give in to ignorance. So I started a GoFundMe page to buy copies of The Complete Maus for 289 public libraries in Tennessee and for the two high school libraries in McMinn.

We don’t need a lot of money. The Complete Maus is roughly $35. I’m an Amazon Prime member, so it can be delivered at no charge. If my math is correct, one copy for 289 libraries and two for the high schools is only about $11,000. And the good news is we're about 40% there. Now we just need to finish the job. 

If you've donated, I thank you. If you can't, I certainly understand. Everyone can help by sharing this with people you know and posting it on your social media pages. 

Don't let ignorance win.