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as their guides, undertook a life-changing, eye-opening, spirit-raising odyssey against intolerance and misunderstanding. They learned to see the parallels between these books and their own lives, recording their thoughts and feelings in diaries and dubbing themselves the "Freedom
Writers" in homage
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As an idealistic 23-year-old
English teacher at Wilson High School in Long Beach, California, Erin Gruwell confronted a room of "unteachable, at-risk" students. One day she intercepted a note with a racial caricature, and angrily declared that this was precisely the sort of thing that led to
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The
Freedom Writers Diary was made up of journals that Erin Gruwell told her students to write in about the troubles of their past, present and future. The Freedom Writers name pays homage to the name of the 1960s civil rights group
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called the book pornographic and said that high schools are committing the felony of “accessory to the distribution of pornography to minors” if they have the book available to students.
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continued with exercises and philosophies similar to those used in the original class, and tracks the progress of the original and continuing classes.
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in her classroom against the wishes of the school board. Administrators objected to racial slurs and sexual content in portions of the book.
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The
Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them
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After intercepting a racist drawing from one of her students, Gruwell compared the drawings to Nazi
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With funds raised by a "Read-a-thon for
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In March, 2023, the book was removed from public school libraries in
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185:(written between 1942 and 1944) and the 1992–93 non-fiction book by
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book written by The
Freedom Writers, a group of students from
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to the civil rights activists "The
Freedom Riders".
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