 I'm Regina Meneudry, I'm the Acting City Librarian. Thank you for joining us today. Today's reading marks the 16th annual anniversary observation of Band Books Week. The freedom to read is a fundamental First Amendment right and a core issue for libraries. Every year there are hundreds of formal challenges to materials in schools, school libraries, and public libraries. These challenges are not just someone expressing their point of view regarding these materials. The challenges are asking that the material be removed from the curriculum or the library, thus restricting the access of others. Today you will hear excerpts of several dozen books that have been challenged or banned. Books are often challenged with the intention of protecting someone, frequently children. Sex, profanity, violence, and racism are the primary targets of recent censorship efforts. While individuals may restrict what they or their children read, when they call on government or public agencies to prevent others from reading or seeing that material, they are opposing a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment. That is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds that idea itself offensive or disagreeable. We mark Band Books Week to stress the importance of ensuring the availability of unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them. And I'm going to start off today by reading from one of my favorite Band Books, Maya Angelou's book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. And this, the part I'm going to read today, occurs just before a very disturbing event in Maya's young life. She has moved to St. Louis to live with her mother and her stepfather. I had decided that St. Louis was a foreign country. I would never get used to the scurrying sounds of flushing toilets or the packaged foods or doorbells or the nores of cars and trains and buses that crashed through the walls or slipped under the doors. In my mind, I only stayed in St. Louis for a few weeks. As quickly as I understood that I had not reached my home, I sneaked away to Robin Hood's forest in the caves of Alioop, where all reality was unreal. And even that changed every day. I carried the same shield that I had used in stamps. Quote, I didn't come to stay, unquote. Mother was competent in providing for us, even if that meant getting someone else to furnish the provisions. Although she was a nurse, she never worked at her profession while we were with her. Mr. Freeman brought in the necessities and she earned extra money cutting poker games and gambling parlors. The straight eight to five world simply didn't have enough glamour for her. And it was 20 years later that I first saw her in a nurse's uniform. Mr. Freeman was a foreman in the Southern Pacific yards and came home late sometimes after mother had gone out. He took his dinner off the stove where she had carefully covered it and what she had admonished us not to bother. He ate quietly in the kitchen while Bailey and I read separately and greedily our own Sheik Street and Smith pulp magazine. Now that we had spending money, we bought the illustrated paperbacks with their gaudy pictures. When mother was away, we were put on an honor system. We had to finish our homework, eat dinner, and wash the dishes before we could read or listen to the lone ranger, crime busters or the shadow. Mr. Freeman moved gracefully like a big brown bear and seldom spoke to us. He simply waited for mother and put his whole self into the waiting. He never read the paper or patted his foot to radio. He waited. That was all. If she came home before we went to bed, we saw the man come alive. He would start out of the big chair like a man coming out of sleep smiling. I remember then that would mean that a few seconds before I'd heard a car slam and then mother's footsteps would signal from the concrete walk. When her key rattled the door, Mr. Freeman would have already asked his habitual question, hey, baby, have a good time. His query would hang in the air while she sprang over to peck him on the lips. Then he turned to Bailey and me with the lipstick kisses. Haven't you finished your homework? If we had and we're just reading, okay, say your prayers and go to bed. If we hadn't, then go to your room and finish whatever it was and say your prayers and go to bed. Mr. Freeman's smile never grew. It stayed at the same intensity. Sometimes mother would go over and sit in his lap and the grin in his face looked as if it would stay there forever.