Just look at how vehemently, irrationally and with indignant hatred, especially children's books about alternative family structures and the "facts of life" are often even today challenged and deliberately censored by in particular religious puritans (and guess what, even sixty years after The Rabbits' Wedding was banned in Alabama, there are still braying ignoramuses who seem to actively consider author and illustrator Garth Williams' black and white rabbits getting married as somehow being unacceptable propaganda). It is now 2019 and there are still and often too many moves afoot in the United States (and elsewhere, for that matter) by the ignorant and the undemocratic (by Fascists, by Stalinists, by dictatorial Social Conservatives and members of the so called Religious Right) to have picture books and other types of children's literature banned and removed from library shelves, from class reading lists etc. Thus wow and how massively undemocratic and ignorant, was and still remains my main thoughts with regard to this occurrence! And to those apologists who might wish to point out that this event happened in 1959 (and therefore well in the past), I say this. It was a school library book, and although I indeed was a trifle embarrassed at having to read simple picture books in grade four because my English language skills were at that time not yet sufficient to tackle so-called middle grade fiction, having arrived from Germany with NO English whatsoever barely six months or so previously, both the narrative and especially Garth Williams' glorious and utterly evocative, tenderly expressive accompanying black and white pencil illustrations truly enchanted and made me smile.Īnd thus, imagine my consternation and rightful recent anger (whilst doing online research on banned and censored picture books) to discover that The Rabbits' Wedding was actually RESTRICTED, was very actively banned in Montgomery, Alabama in 1959 because Garth Williams had (oh gasping horror) portrayed white and black rabbits socialising with one another (and that a black rabbit ends up marrying a white rabbit was of course and I guess totally unacceptable to the racist, to the bigoted Montgomery Alabama powers that be, sigh).
Now I vaguely but very very fondly recall reading The Rabbits' Wedding (Garth Williams' utterly delightful 1958 tale of two sweet little rabbits who tie the proverbial knot) a few months after my family had moved to Canada from Germany (this being in the winter of 1977, thus more than forty years ago, when I was ten years old).
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