Alabama prisoner Mark Melvin has filed a lawsuit against prison officials and the state commissioner of corrections, claiming that they have unfairly kept him from reading a book.
In the suit, Melvin alleges prison officials prevented him from reading Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon.
The New York Times has more: “[It] is a Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Southern history, an investigation of the systematically heinous treatment of black prisoners in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Mr. Melvin, 33, alleges in his suit that prison officials deemed it ‘a security threat.’”
The news comes during Banned Books Week, a push from the American Library Association that celebrates the freedom to read.