Everett T. Moore; Ex-UCLA Librarian Defeated Censors

Everett T. Moore, a retired UCLA librarian who successfully sued the state of California to force the exemption of librarians from distributing “harmful matter” to minors, has died in St. John’s Medical Center in Santa Monica. He died Jan. 5 at age 78 of the complications of a stroke, the university announced Thursday.

In 1976 the California Court of Appeal ruled against the state and for Moore in an action he brought against former Atty. Gen. Evelle J. Younger, who had claimed that individual librarians could be prosecuted for giving juveniles access to reading materials of questionable taste.

The suit, funded by the Freedom to Read Foundation, which Moore helped organize in 1969, proved a landmark in censorship cases and succeeded in removing the Harmful Matter Statute from state codes.

Moore was a native of Highland Park who attended college at nearby Occidental and then went to Harvard for a master’s degree.

He was encouraged to enter library science by the noted librarian Lawrence Clark Powell and by Ward Ritchie, who became Powell’s publisher.

He joined the UCLA library staff in 1946 and was made head of the reference department before becoming associate university librarian. His “Issues of Freedom in American Libraries” was published in 1964, and in 1974 he received the American Library Assn.’s Robert B. Downs Award for outstanding contributions to intellectual freedom in libraries.

He also was a past president of the California Library Assn.

Moore is survived by his wife, Jean, who retired in 1974 as UCLA’s art librarian. When Everett retired in 1976 colleagues collected money so the couple could travel, but instead they took the funds and established the Everett and Jean Moore Endowed Fund to purchase reference works for UCLA libraries. Contributions may be made to that fund in Moore’s name.