Censorship in America threatens, particularly in the forms of book banning, challenging and censoring, American literary identity and community as well as freedom of speech as it is granted in the Constitution.
This week, in honor of the United States’ public freedom to read whichever books it chooses, the American Library Association, along with countless other organizations in the national book community have come together to celebrate the 30th annual Banned Book Week.
According to the event’s website, http://www.ala.org/advocacy/banned, Banned Book Week began in 1982 .
Since then, and still today, books have been banned from schools and censored and challenged nationwide.
According to the ALA’s website, classic novels including “The Great Gatsby,” “To Kill A Mockingbird,” “The Catcher in The Rye,” “As I Lay Dying” and “The Lord of The Flies,” have been frequently challenged throughout their respective histories.
Ted Atkinson, professor of American literature, said he thinks understanding the context in which books become banned or censored and how it affects the reasoning behind the censorship is important. 
“What happens over time is the reasoning for banning a single book changes depending on the historical context,” he said. “For example, ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ originally the banning came from fearing that he was a bad example for children and then later it became more about the issues of the language used and the potential for it to be offensive.”
Atkinson also said the practice of national book banning is not common relative to the censorship and control of book availability in communities and schools.
“You can filter it down to the local level, so not only within the schools, but public libraries also become kind of battlefields for book banning and fighting book banning,” he said.
He said often the challenging of books taught in schools and available in public libraries comes from parental concern for the content their kids may have access to through certain pieces of literature.
“It happens more locally, because you have parents involved, you have everyday citizens involved in this effort to work out what readers should have access to,” he said. “A lot of times it’s children; it is a question of what should children have access to in the public library system?”
Atkinson said sometimes people attempt to get a book banned without even having read it.
“You often have people who aren’t familiar with it, trying to ban it,” he said. “They’re familiar with it only as a kind of phenomenon or something that they’ve heard other people talk about.”
When asked his opinion, Atkinson said book banning should be handled case by case and in consideration of the local community.
“I don’t like the term banned I guess,” he said. “I think that whoever is running the library whether in a school or a local library system, they have to involve as many people in the decision making as possible in terms of what’s accessible to people.”
He said he believes books should be readable by whomever wishes to read them and the practice of attempting to ban a book often does not stop this from happening.
Atkinson said when a person or group sets out to ban a book, they often end up encouraging others to read said book and therefore fall short of achieving their goal of keeping people from reading it. 
 ”It is a democracy – people should have access to whatever they want to read,” he said. “So I just think for our society as a whole it is counterproductive, for those who are against it or for it.”