Mississippi School District Pulls ‘to Kill a Mockingbird’ from Curriculum for ‘Making People Uncomfortable’

A Mississippi school district removed Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird from its curriculum because people felt uncomfortable with the book’s language.

Biloxi School District administrators announced this week that they would remove the novel from the 8th-grade curriculum after receiving complaints from parents that the book’s language “makes people uncomfortable,” AL.com reports.

The Sun Herald reported that administrators pulled the book from the lesson plan because passages in the novel contained “the N-word.”

A message on the school’s website describing the learning objectives for the text said that To Kill a Mockingbird teaches students about “respect for cultural differences.”

School board vice president Kenny Holloway said teachers could use other books to achieve the same learning objectives.

The book will still be available in Biloxi school libraries.

The novel, published in 1960, gives insight into the racial inequality in a small Alabama town.

So many educational institutions and libraries have deemed the novel controversial that the American Library Association listed To Kill a Mockingbird as No. 21 on their most “banned or challenged books list in the last decade.”