Local Film Censorship's Last Stand: The Memphis Board of Review, 1967 to 1976

The last major American city with legal authority to continue the practice of censoring films was Memphis, Tennessee. The practice ended when a federal judge in 1976 ruled that the authority that governed the city's Board of Review was unconstitutional. Memphis held on to the practice of censoring films into the 1970s while almost all other US cities had stopped the practice in the mid-1960s. Memphis held on so long because of the city's legacy of censorship and its goal of retaining old-world values in the changing era of the 1960s and 1970s. This paper gives a history of the Board of Review in Memphis to demonstrate how censorship was used as an attempt to hold onto outdated values in changing times.