Later Work For Academic Freedom
After her release from prison, Horn continued to speak out on issues of academic and intellectual freedom. At first, the American Library Association's Executive Board refused publicly to support Horn’s stand against the government’s attempts to intimidate and silence Vietnam War protesters. Later, after questioning Horn for hours, the Board reversed its stance and officially commended Horn for her "commitment...in defense of intellectual freedom." Eventually she was given assistance by the association's Social Responsibilities Round Table, as well as the Leroy Merritt Humanitarian Fund and the Freedom to Read Foundation. Judith Krug, longtime director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom, has called Horn "the first librarian who spent time in jail for a value of our profession."
In 1995, Horn published her memoirs, titled ZOIA! Memoirs of Zoia Horn, Battler for the People’s Right to Know. In its review of Horn's memoirs, the Library Journal called Horn "a courageous crusader." Horn has continued to speak out on issues of intellectual freedom, including writing an article on a small-city Oklahoma librarian who was dismissed by the City Commission after being accused of supplying "subversive" materials (including subscriptions to The Nation, The New Republic and Soviet Russia Today) at the library. She has also defended a gay librarian in Oakland, California who was "attacked for creating a display of gay library materials," and speaking out against the Patriot Act. She has also spoken in opposition to libraries' proposals to charge fees, arguing that the "payment of any fee in a public library" resembles censorship in creating "barriers to information access." In 2002, she was awarded the Jackie Eubanks Memorial Award and the Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award.
Read more about this topic: Zoia Horn
Famous quotes containing the words work, academic and/or freedom:
“In some withdrawn, unpublic mead
Let me sigh upon a reed,
Or in the woods, with leafy din,
Whisper the still evening in:
Some still work give me to do,—
Only—be it near to you!
For I’d rather be thy child
And pupil, in the forest wild,
Than be the king of men elsewhere,
And most sovereign slave of care:
To have one moment of thy dawn,
Than share the city’s year forlorn.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“An academic dialect is perfected when its terms are hard to understand and refer only to one another.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The American adolescent, then, is faced, as are the adolescents of all countries who have entered or are entering the machine age, with the question: freedom from what and at what price? The American feels so rich in his opportunities for free expression that he often no longer knows what it is he is free from. Neither does he know where he is not free; he does not recognize his native autocrats when he sees them.”
—Erik H. Erikson (1904–1994)