A prisoner in an Alabama jail has claimed in a lawsuit that his jailers prevented him from reading a Pulitzer prize-winning book about America's racial history, thereby violating his civil rights.

Kilby Correctional Facility inmate Mark Melvin says he was sent Douglas Blackmon's award-winning history book Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II in September 2010, but was told he was not allowed it, according to a civil rights lawsuit filed by the Equal Justice Initiative in the US district court for the middle district of Alabama. The news comes as the US marks Banned Books Week, an annual nationwide celebration of the right to read.

The complaint claims Melvin, serving a life sentence after being charged at 14 with helping his older brother commit two murders, was denied access to the book because of regulations which allow officials to withhold mail if it could be "an attempt to incite violence based on race, religion, sex, creed or nationality". Based on original documents and personal narratives, Slavery By Another Name tells of the tens of thousands of "free" black Americans who were bought and sold as forced labourers decades after the official abolition of slavery.

"[The book] is a Pulitzer prize-winning historical account of racial oppression and racial bias in the Southern United States [which] does not advocate violence or a violent ideology, nor does it attempt to incite violence based on race," writes Equal Justice Initiative director and lawyer Bryan Stevenson in the complaint.

Stevenson said in a statement that banning an award-winning book about racial history in the South was "not only misguided, but … injurious to anyone who is trying to advance our society on issues of race".

"The era of racial violence, lynching, and convict leasing in the South following Reconstruction is a deeply disturbing part of our country's racial history that is important and must be understood if we are to make progress overcoming the legacy of slavery and racial subordination. We can't cope with the racial history of this country by banning books or preventing people from reading about it – even incarcerated people, who retain basic rights and protections that were violated in this case," he said. "The need for more informed thinking about race and discrimination is especially critical in prisons, which are disproportionately filled with people of colour."

The book's author Blackmon, a Wall Street Journal correspondent, told the New York Times that "the idea that a book like mine is somehow incendiary or a call to violence is so absurd". A spokesman for the Alabama Department of Corrections told the paper that officials had not seen the suit on Monday and could not comment.