BY BETH VELLIQUETTE

bvelliquette@heraldsun.com; 918-1042

CHAPEL HILL -- UNC Chancellor Holden Thorp stood at the podium in The Pit reading aloud from the book "Catcher in the Rye."

The passage he read included the words "God damn" several times.

Who ever would have thought Thorp would stand in The Pit saying those provocative words, but the chancellor was participating in First Amendment Day at UNC and was reading a passage from the 1951 book by J.D. Salinger that has been challenged repeatedly and at times banned because of its use of profanity and sexuality.

Thorp said he chose the book because he shares the same first name as the book's main character, Holden Caulfield.

Nearby Thorp was a table containing about 30 or 40 banned books, or at least books that had been challenged as being inappropriate to be in a school or a library or community.

One of the books was "To Kill a Mockingbird." The label under it said that it had been challenged at Stanford Middle School in Durham in 2004 because the 1961 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel uses the word "nigger."

Actually, it was challenged at Stanford Middle School in Hillsborough in Orange County when a black student said he was uncomfortable hearing a book read aloud that repeatedly used the racial slur. He staged his own protest at the school by wearing a T-shirt that had the N-word written on it, and when he did he was taken to the school office and told he was banned from wearing the T-shirt at school.

A number of UNC students stopped by the table to look at the books.

"Oh my god." "That's absurd." "Why would anyone ban that book?" a couple of people said when they saw that their favorite books were on the table.

"I've read a lot of these books," said Serena Witzke, a graduate student. "I'm personally offended, and I think it's kind of wrong to have someone make that value judgment for someone else, especially in a library where you're supposed to make your own choices."

Some of the books have drawn community ire, such as J.R.R. Tolkien's "Fellowship of the Ring," which was burned outside a Christ Community Church in New Mexico because it was supposedly satanic.

"Tolkien is a major Christian," one person exclaimed upon seeing the book on the table. "That's just major ignorance."

"Most of our students have no idea that this goes on," said Cathy Packer, a journalism professor and director of the UNC Center for Media Law & Policy. She helped organize First Amendment Day.

"I think it's a real eye-opener that "Harry Potter" is a subject of great controversy," Packer said.

Along with the books, the a cappella group Cadence, wearing black T-shirts and pink sunglasses, sang the Madonna song, "Like a Prayer," a controversial song and video from 1989 because of the sexual and religious content.

Near the Campus Y, people could write on blank cubes to express themselves. By early afternoon, only a few people had written on the cubes. One person had written "Jesus is the only way," and next to it someone else had written, "I don't believe in God."

One woman wrote, "Going to College @50 is hard. Stay & enjoy your time here."