Program Description
Central Illinois Reads
The Freedom to Read is essential to our democracy, but also under attack.
Central Illinois libraries are joining together to encourage you to exercise your intellectual freedom.
- Get a library card.
- Read outside your comfort zone.
- Unite against book bans.
Central Illinois Reads: Freedom to Read is a community partnership of libraries, organizations, and institutions committed to preserving everyone's Freedom to Read.
- Bradley University
- Chillicothe Public Library
- Dunlap Public Library District
- Fondulac Library District
- Illinois Prairie District Public Library
- Methodist College
- Morton Public Library
- Neighborhood House.
- Pekin Public Library
- Peoria Public Library
Event Details
To Kill a Mockinbird
The Central Illinois Reads: Freedom to Read partnership will be screening films based on banned or challenged books from April to October.
Join us for a free screening of the classic 1962 film, "To Kill A Mockingbird," starring Gregory Peck and based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same title by author Harper Lee.
Winner of three Academy Awards, this film was also chosen in 1995 by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
Still, the book is "one of the most frequently challenged books in the U.S. due to its themes of rape and use of profanity and racial slurs," according to The Banned Books Project at Carnegie Mellon University.
To Kill a Mockingbird is both a young girl’s coming-of-age story and a darker drama about the roots and consequences of racism and prejudice, probing how good and evil can coexist within a single community or individual.
Please note: This program is being hosted at the Peoria Public Library's downtown Main Library in the auditorium.