The complaints raised against “The Color Purple” in Oakland in 1984 have set the timbre of complaints ever since. Per the American Library Association, Oakland’s ban was followed by one in Hayward, California the following year on account of the novel’s “explicit sex scenes.” Schools across the Midwest and the South followed suit throughout the 1980s, always pointing to the book’s graphic sexual material. One Pennsylvania school district went so far as to call it “smut” when instituting a ban in 1992.
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The reasons for banning or attempting to ban the work’s depiction of sex have varied by case. More conservative school districts, like Morganton, North Carolina, were pressured by parents who objected to the book’s depiction of homosexual acts. For others, the novel’s scenes of rape and incest were too unsettling to allow in a school setting. School board member Bernard King of Jackson County, West Virginia, worried that exposure to such material could encourage young readers to imitate the sex acts in the book (per The Washington Post).
