Headache Inducer of the Day: The Texas Board of Education

Link to Eric Robinson's February 9 guest blogpost at Blogging Censorship, "Political opinions: “A good enough reason” to ban books?"

Excerpt: At the Jan. 14 meeting of the Board of Education, Hardy moved to remove the children’s book author from the list (in this video discussion, Hardy’s motion begins during minute 27.) “Bill Martin is an author,” Hardy said in explaining her amendment. “He wrote some children’s books: Brown Bear, Black Bear, something like that. I haven’t got it on my reading list. But he also has written some very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system, etcetera, etcetera, as adult books.”

But the books were written by different Bill Martins.

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, published in 1964, was just one of 300 children’s books written by Bill Martin, Jr, who died in 2004 and spent the last 11 years of his life living near Commerce, Tex., working with the faculty at Texas A&M University-Commerce, which now houses his papers and sponsors the annual Bill Martin Jr Memorial Symposium for literacy teachers.

The author of Ethical Marxism, meanwhile, is another Bill Martin — no junior – who is alive and is a professor of philosophy at DePaul University.