speech on book banning

What You Need to Know About the Book Bans Sweeping the US

What you need to know about the book bans sweeping the u.s., as school leaders pull more books off library shelves and curriculum lists amid a fraught culture war, we explore the impact, legal landscape and history of book censorship in schools..

• The American Library Association reported a record-breaking number of attempts to ban books in 2022— up 38 percent from the previous year. Most of the books pulled off shelves are “written by or about members of the LGBTQ+ community and people of color."
• U.S. school boards have broad discretion to control the material disseminated in their classrooms and libraries. Legal precedent as to how the First Amendment should be considered remains vague, with the Supreme Court last ruling on the issue in 1982.
• Battles to censor materials over social justice issues pose numerous implications for education while also mirroring other politically-motivated acts of censorship throughout history. 

Here are all of your questions about book bans answered by TC experts. 

Alex Eble, Assistant Professor of Economics and Education; Sonya Douglass, Professor of Education Leadership; Michael Rebell, Professor of Law and Educational Practice; and Ansley Erickson, Associate Professor of History and Education Policy. (Photos; TC Archives) 

How Do Book Bans Impact Students? 

Prior to the rise in bans, white male youth were already more likely to see themselves depicted in children’s books than their peers, despite research demonstrating how more culturally inclusive material can uplift all children, according to a study, forthcoming in the Quarterly Journal of Economics , from TC’s Alex Eble.  

“Books can change outcomes for students themselves when they see people who look like them represented,” explains the Associate Professor of Economics and Education. “What people see affects who they become, what they believe about themselves and also what they believe about others…Not having equitable representation robs people of seeing the full wealth of the future that we all can inhabit.” 

While books have stood in the crossfire of political battles throughout history, today’s most banned books address issues related to race, gender identity and sexuality — major flashpoints in the ongoing American culture war. But beyond limiting the scope of how students see themselves and their peers, what are the risks of limiting information access? 

The student plaintiffs in Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico (1982) march in protest of the Long Island school district's removal of titles such as Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. While the district would ultimately return the banned books to its shelves, the Supreme Court's ultimate ruling largely allowed school leaders to maintain discretion over information access. (Photo credit: unknown) 

“[Book bans] diminish the quality of education students have access to and restrict their exposure to important perspectives that form the fabric of a culturally pluralist society like the United States,” explains TC’s Sonya Douglas s, Professor of Education Leadership. “It's a battle over the soul of the country in many ways; it's about what we teach young people about our country, what we determine to be the truth, and what we believe should be included in the curriculum they're receiving. There's a lot at stake there.” 

Material stripped from libraries and curriculum include works written by Black authors that discuss police brutality, the history of slavery in the U.S. and other issues. As such, Black students are among those who may be most affected by bans across the country, but — in Douglass’ view — this is simply one of the more recent disappointments in a long history of Black communities being let down by public education — chronicled in her 2020 book, and further supported by a 2021 study from Douglass’ Black Education Research Center that revealed how Black families lost trust in schools following the pandemic response and murder of George Floyd.

In that historical and cultural context — even as scholars like Douglass work to implement Black studies curriculums — the failure of schools to properly integrate Black experiences into the curriculum remains vast. 

“We want to make sure that children learn the truth, and that we give them the capacity to handle truths that may be uncomfortable and difficult,” says Douglass, citing Germany as an example of a nation that has prioritized curriculum that highlights its own injustices, such as the Holocaust. “This moment again requires us to take stock of the fact that racism and bigotry still are a challenging part of American life. When we better understand that history, when we see the patterns, when we recognize the source of those issues, we can then do something about it.” 

Beginning in 1933, members of Hitler Youth regularly burned books written by prominent Jewish, liberal, and leftist writers. (Photo: World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo, dated 1938) 

Why Is Banning Books Legal? 

While legal battles over book censorship in schools consistently unfold at local levels, the wave of book bans across the U.S. surfaces a critical question: why hasn’t the United States had more definitive legal closure on this issue? 

In 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a noncommittal ruling that continues to keep school and library books in the political crosshairs more than 40 years later. In Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico (1982), the Court deemed that “local school boards have broad discretion in the management of school affairs” and that discretion “must be exercised in a manner that comports with the transcendent imperatives of the First Amendment.” 

But what does this mean in practice? In these kinds of cases, the application of the First Amendment hinges on the existence of evidence that books are banned for political reasons and violate freedom of expression. However, without more explicit guidance, school boards often make decisions that prioritize “community values” first and access to information second. 

While today's recent book bans most frequently include topics related to racial justice and gender identity (pictured above), other frequently targeted titles include Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close , The Kite Runner and The Handmaid's Tale . (Cover images courtesy of: Viking Books, Sourcebooks Fire, Balzer + Bray, Oni Press, Random House ‎ and Farrar, Straus and Giroux). 

“America traditionally has prided itself on local control of education — the fact that we have active citizen and parental involvement in school board issues, including curriculum,” explains TC’s Michael Rebell , Professor of Law and Educational Practice. “We have, whether you want to call it a clash or a balancing, of two legal considerations here: the ability of children to freely learn what they need to learn to be able to exercise their constitutional rights, and this traditional right of the school authorities to determine what the curriculum is.” 

So would students benefit from more national and uniform legal guidance on book banning? In this political climate, Rebell attests, the risks very well might outweigh the potential rewards. 

“Your local institutions are —in theory — protecting the values you believe in. And if somebody in Washington were going to say that we couldn't have books that talk about transgender rights and things in New York libraries, we'd go crazy, right?” said Rebell, who leads the Center for Educational Equity . “So I can't imagine that in this polarized environment, people would be in favor of federal law, whatever it said.” 

Why Do Waves of Book Bans Keep Happening?

Historians date censorship back all the way to the earliest appearance of written materials. Ancient Chinese emperor Shih Huang Ti began eliminating historical texts in 259 B.C., and in 35 A.D., Roman emperor Caligula objected to the ideals of Greek freedom depicted in The Odyssey . In numerous waves of censorship since then, book bans have consistently manifested the struggle for political control. 

“We have to think about [the current bans] as part of a longer pattern of fights over what is in curriculum and what is kept out of it,” explains TC’s Ansley Erickson , Associate Professor of History and Education Policy, who regularly prepares local teachers on how to integrate Harlem history into social studies curriculum. 

“The United States’ history, since its inception, is full of uses of curriculum to shape politics, the economy and the culture,” says Erickson. “This is a really dramatic moment, but the curriculum has always been political, and people in power have always been using it to emphasize their power. And historically marginalized groups have always challenged that power.” 

One example: when Latinx students were forbidden from speaking Spanish in their Southwest schools throughout the 20th century, they worked to maintain their traditions and culture at home. 

“These bans really matter, but one of the ways we can imagine a response is by looking back at how people created spaces for what wasn’t given room for in the classroom,” Erickson says. 

What Could Happen Next?

American schools stand at a critical inflection point, and amid this heated debate, Rebell sees civil discourse at school board meetings as a paramount starting point for any sort of resolution. “This mounting crisis can serve as a motivator to bring people together to try to deal with our differences in respectful ways and to see how much common ground can be found on the importance of exposing all of our students to a broad range of ideas and experiences,” says Rebell. “Carve-outs can also be found for allowing parents who feel really strongly that certain content is inconsistent with their religious or other values to exempt their children from certain content without limiting the options for other children.”

But students, families and educators also have the opportunity to speak out, explains Douglass, who expressed concern for how her own daughter is affected by book bans. 

“I’d like to see a groundswell movement to reclaim the nation's commitment to education — to recognize that we're experiencing growing pains and changes in terms of what we stand for; and whether or not we want to live up to the democratic ideal of freedom of speech; different ideas in the marketplace, and a commitment to civics education and political participation,” says Douglass. 

As publishers and librarians file lawsuits to push back, students are also mobilizing to protest bans — from Texas to western New York and elsewhere. But as more local battles unfold, bigger issues remain unsolved. 

“We need to have a conversation as a nation about healing; about being able to confront the past; about receiving an apology and beginning that process of reconciliation,” says Douglass. “Until we tackle that head on, we'll continue to have these types of battles.” 

— Morgan Gilbard

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the speaker to whom they are attributed. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the faculty, administration, staff or Trustees either of Teachers College or of Columbia University.

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The Book-Bans Debate Has Finally Reached a Turning Point

Potentially the most consequential shift has come from the Biden administration.

Across multiple fronts, Democrats and their allies are stiffening their resistance to a surge of Republican-led book bans.

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in the past month have conspicuously escalated their denunciations of the book bans proliferating in schools across the country, explicitly linking them to restrictions on abortion and voting rights to make the case that “MAGA extremists” are threatening Americans’ “personal freedom,” as Biden said in the recent video announcing his campaign for a second term.

Last week, Illinois became the first Democratic-controlled state to pass legislation designed to discourage local school districts from banning books. And a prominent grassroots progressive group today will announce a new national campaign to organize mothers against the conservative drive to remove books and censor curriculum under the banner of protecting “parents’ rights.”

“We are not going to let the mantle of parents’ rights be hijacked by such an extreme minority,” Katie Paris, the founder of the group, Red Wine and Blue, told me.

These efforts are emerging as red states have passed a wave of new laws restricting how classroom teachers can talk about race, gender, and sexual orientation, as well as measures making it easier for critics to pressure schools to remove books from classrooms and libraries. Partly in response to those new statutes, the number of banned books has jumped by about 30 percent in the first half of the current school year as compared with last, according to a recent compilation by PEN America , a free-speech group founded by notable authors.

To the frustration of some local activists opposing these measures in state legislatures or school boards, the Biden administration has largely kept its distance from these fights. Nor did Democrats, while they controlled Congress, mount any sustained resistance to the educational constraints spreading across the red states.

But the events of the past few weeks suggest that this debate has clearly reached a turning point. From grassroots organizers like Paris to political advisers for Biden, more Democrats see book bans as the weak link in the GOP’s claim that it is upholding “parents’ rights” through measures such as restrictions on curriculum or legislation targeting transgender minors. A national CBS poll released on Monday found overwhelming opposition among Americans to banning books that discuss race or criticize U.S. history. “There is something about this idea of book banning that really makes people stop and say, ‘I may be uncomfortable with some of this transitional treatment kids are getting, and I don’t know how I feel about pronouns, but I do not want them banning books,’” says Guy Molyneux, a Democratic pollster.

The conservative call to uphold parents’ rights in education has intensified since Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin in 2021 unexpectedly won the governorship in blue-leaning Virginia partly behind that theme. In the aftermath of long COVID-related shutdowns across many school districts, Youngkin’s victory showed that “Republicans really did tap into an energy there” by talking about ways of “giving parents more of a choice in education,” Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center who specializes in family issues, told me.

But as the parents’-rights crusade moved through Republican-controlled states, it quickly expanded well beyond academic concerns to encompass long-standing conservative complaints that liberal teachers were allegedly indoctrinating kids through “woke” lessons.

Read: How Democrats avoided a red wave

New red-state laws passed in response to those arguments have moved the fight over book banning from a retail to a wholesale level. Previously, most book bans were initiated by lone parents, even if they were working with national conservative groups such as Moms for Liberty, who objected to administrators or school boards in individual districts. But the new statutes have “supercharged” the book-banning process, in PEN’s phrase, by empowering critics to simultaneously demand the removal of more books in more places. Five red states—Florida, Texas, Missouri, South Carolina, and Utah—have now become the epicenter of book-banning efforts, the study concluded.

Biden and his administration were not entirely silent as these policies proliferated. He was clear and consistent in denouncing the initial “Don’t Say Gay” law that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis passed to bar discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in early grades. But that was the exception. Even during the 2022 campaign, when Biden regularly framed Republicans as a threat to voting and abortion rights, he did not highlight red-state book bans and curriculum censorship. Apart from abortion and voting, his inclination has been to focus his public communications less on culture-war disputes than on delivering kitchen-table benefits to working families. Nor had Education Secretary Miguel Cardona done much to elevate these issues either. “We have not seen a lot of visibility” from the Education Department, says Nadine Farid Johnson, PEN’s managing director for Washington.

The administration’s relative disengagement from the classroom wars, and the limited attention from national progressive groups, left many grassroots activists feeling “isolated,” Paris said. Revida Rahman, a co-founder of One WillCo, an organization that advocates for students of color in affluent and predominantly white Williamson County, south of Nashville, told me that the group has often felt at a disadvantage trying to respond to conservative parents working with national right-leaning groups to demand changes in curriculum or bans on books with racial or LGBTQ themes. “What we are fighting is a well-funded and well-oiled machine,” she told me, “and we don’t have the same capacity.”

Pushback from Democrats and their allies, though, is now coalescing. Earlier this month, the Freedom to Learn initiative, a coalition organized mostly by Black educators, held a series of events , many on college campuses, protesting restrictions on curriculum and books. The Red Wine and Blue group is looking to organize a systematic grassroots response. Founded in 2019, the organization has about 500,000 mostly suburban mothers in its network and paid organizers in five states. The group has already provided training for local activists to oppose curriculum censorship and book bans, and today it is launching the Freedom to Parent 21st Century Kids project , a more sweeping counter to conservative parents’-rights groups. The project will include virtual training sessions for activists, programs in which participants can talk with transgender kids and their parents, and efforts to highlight banned books. “We want to equip parents to talk about this stuff,” Paris told me. “It’s moms learning from moms who already faced this in their community.”

Illinois opened another front in this debate with its first-in-the-nation bill to discourage book banning. The legislation will withhold state grants from school districts unless they adopt explicit policies to prohibit banning books in response to partisan or ideological pressure. Democratic Governor J. B. Pritzker has indicated that he will sign the bill.

Read: The contradictions of Ron DeSantis

Potentially the most consequential shift has come from the Biden administration. The president signaled a new approach in his late-April announcement video, when he cited book bans as evidence for his accusation that Republicans in the Donald Trump era are targeting Americans’ “personal freedom.” That was, “by far, the most we have seen on” book bans from Biden, Farid Johnson told me.

One senior adviser close to Biden told me that the connection of book bans to those more frequent presidential targets of abortion and democracy was no accident. “There is a basic American pushback when people are told what they can and cannot do,” said the adviser, who asked for anonymity while discussing campaign strategy. “Voters,” the adviser said, “don’t like to be told, ‘You can’t make a decision about your own life when it comes to your health care; you can’t make a decision about what book to read.’ I think book bans fit in that broader context.”

Biden may sharpen that attack as soon as Saturday, when he delivers the commencement address at Howard University. Meanwhile, Vice President Harris has already previewed how the administration may flesh out this argument. In her own speech at Howard last month, she cited book bans and curriculum censorship as components of a red-state social regime that the GOP will try to impose nationwide if it wins the White House in 2024. In passing these laws, Republicans are not just “impacting the people” of Florida or Texas, she said. “What we are witnessing—and be clear about this—is there is a national agenda that’s at play … Don’t think it’s not a national agenda when they start banning books.”

The Education Department has also edged into the fray. When the recent release of national test scores showed a decline in students’ performance on history, Cardona, the education secretary, issued a statement declaring that “banning history books and censoring educators … does our students a disservice and will move America in the wrong direction.”

His statement came months after the department’s Office of Civil Rights launched an investigation that could shape the next stages of this struggle. The office is probing whether a Texas school district that sweepingly removed LGBTQ-themed books from its shelves has violated federal civil-rights laws. The department has not revealed anything about the investigation’s status, but PEN’s Farid Johnson said if it concludes that the removals violated federal law, other districts might be deterred from banning books.

The politics of the parents’-rights debate are complex. Republicans are confident that their interconnected initiatives related to education and young people can win back suburban voters, especially mothers, who have rejected the party in the Trump era. Polling, including surveys done by Democratic pollsters last year for the American Federation of Teachers , has consistently found majority national support for some individual planks in the GOP agenda, including the prohibitions on discussing sexual orientation in early grades.

Brown said he believes that at the national level, the battle over book bans is likely to end in a “stalemate.” That’s not only, he argued, because each side can point to examples of extreme behavior by the other in defending or removing individual books, but also because views on what’s acceptable for kids vary so much from place to place. “We shouldn’t expect a national consensus on what book is appropriate for a 13-year-old to be reading, because that’s going to be different among different parents in different communities,” Brown told me.

Yet as the awakening Democratic resistance suggests, many in the party are confident that voters will find the whole of the GOP agenda less attractive than the sum of its parts. In that 2022 polling for the teachers’ union, a significant majority of adults said they worry less that kids are being taught values their parents don’t like than that culture-war fights are diverting schools from their real mission of educating students . Paris said the most common complaint she hears from women drawn to her group is that the conservative activists proclaiming parents’ rights are curtailing the freedoms of other parents by trying to dictate what materials all students can access. “What you’ll have women in our communities say all the time is ‘If you don’t want your kid to read a book, that’s fine, but you don’t get to decide for me and my family,’” she told me.

The White House, the senior official told me, believes that after the Supreme Court last year rescinded the right to abortion, many voters are uncertain and uneasy about what rights or liberties Republicans may target next. “There is a fear about Where does it stop? ,” the official said, and book bans powerfully crystallize that concern. Trump and DeSantis, who’s expected to join the GOP race, have both indicated that they intend to aggressively advance the conservative parents’-rights agenda of attacks on instruction they deem “woke” and books they consider indecent. Biden and other Democrats, after months of hesitation, are stepping onto the field against them. The library looms as the next big confrontation in the culture war.

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Who’s Behind the Escalating Push to Ban Books? A New Report Has Answers

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Updated : This article has been updated to reflect MassResistance’s opposition to its characterization by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

As book bans in schools across the country escalate, a handful of right-wing activist organizations and Republican lawmakers are behind them, putting pressure on districts to ban books about and by LGBTQ people and people of color.

That’s according to a new report by PEN America , a free speech advocacy organization. The groups pushing for books to be taken off library shelves and removed from the curriculum in school districts range from national advocacy groups with several branches across the country, including Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education, and MassResistance, to local-level Facebook groups. Together they are responsible for at least half of all bans, PEN America found.

The report identifies at least 50 different groups involved in local and state-level efforts to ban books, some with hundreds of chapters. Most of these groups have sprung up since 2021, when the current wave of objecting to books about LGBTQ people and people of color first started.

During the 2021-22 school year, nearly 140 school districts in 32 states banned more than 2,500 books, PEN America found. The latest report is an update to the one the organization released in April , and not only shows the escalating numbers of bans, but the organized efforts behind them.

The book bans represent an immense increase in the number of books banned compared with any previous years and are part of the larger movement to restrict classroom conversations and lessons about race, racism, gender identity, and sexual orientation that has been led by Republican lawmakers and conservative parent groups since 2021.

Twenty percent of all book bans over the past year were directly linked to the actions of these groups, with many more likely influenced by them, according to PEN America. That percentage is based on an analysis of news and publicly available information, such as statements at school board meetings or lists of books parents want banned.

In many of these cases, the advocacy groups also publicized their role in pushing for book removals. In an additional 30 percent of bans, there is some other evidence of the groups’ likely influence, including the use of common language or tactics, such as circulating a list of books that have been banned in other districts for parents to raise objections against.

“These groups probably do not necessarily represent a range of beliefs from our democracy,” said Jonathan Friedman, the director of free expression and education programs at PEN America and author of the report. “So they’re having an outsized impact in a lot of places on what it is that everybody gets to read. And that, I think, is what’s most concerning.”

For his part, Brian Camenker, Executive Director of one of those groups, MassResistance, said he thinks free speech groups such as PEN America are “on the wrong side of history.”

He said that most books parents are complaining about and trying to get banned contain inappropriate sexual material, and that no one should be advocating for pornography in school libraries.

The pornography descriptor has been used across the country to describe books with LGBTQ themes and characters, and many librarians have refuted that claim.

“The LGBT issues, this is not necessarily a healthy behavior for libraries to be promoting on kids. And, and all of them, every one that I see involves sexuality,” he said. “The question isn’t really, who would want to ban these books, but the question is, who would want them?”

MassResistance was classified as an anti-LGBTQ+ “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center , but the organization refutes that characterization.

PEN America also estimated that at least 40 percent of the bans are linked to political pressure exerted by state officials or elected lawmakers.

For example, South Carolina’s Republican Gov. Henry McMaster wrote a letter last year asking the state department of education to investigate Gender Queer: A Memoir, by Maia Kobabe, a graphic novel on queer identity being available at a school’s library, calling it “sexually explicit” and “pornographic.”

“What we started to see was a picture of not just book banning, but a movement behind it,” Friedman said. “In a huge number of cases, these were not individuals who were responding to just a book their own child brought home, but they were people who had lists of books they had gotten online.”

From July 2021 to June 2022, PEN America found 2,532 instances of individual books being banned from schools, affecting 1,648 different book titles. Forty-one percent of banned books—or 674 titles—explicitly address LGBTQ themes or have protagonists or prominent secondary characters who are LGBTQ, the report says. Forty percent feature protagonists or secondary characters of color, and 21 percent of all banned titles directly address race and racism.

In the 2022-23 school year, book bans don’t seem to be slowing down. PEN America found at least 139 additional book bans that have taken effect since July 2022.

The most frequently banned books are Kobabe’s Gender Queer, which has been banned in 41 districts, All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson, banned in 29 districts, and Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Pérez, banned in 24 districts.

Once a book is challenged, administrators often don’t ask if the book has been read or support the discretion of their professional librarians, they just remove the book to avoid further controversy, Friedman said his reading of the research showed.

Camenker from MassResistance disagreed, saying it is very hard in his experience for parents to get books removed from libraries if they raise objections to them, even after reading excerpts from these books at public meetings, because of the policies districts have in place.

Districts often have policies in place if a parent wants to challenge a book or keep their child from reading it, but this is not the system most of the advocacy groups or politicians have been following, according to Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.

“What’s truly needed right now is for individuals to step up and support their libraries, both in schools and in public libraries,” she said.

“We need to counter this vocal minority that seems to have an outsized place on the stage and push back on the idea that having the government tell you what to think or what to read or limit what you think or read to a particular agenda imposed by an advocacy group,” Caldwell-Stone said.

An ALA report from last week also documents an increase in book bans and the larger role of right-wing advocacy groups in organizing parents to challenge books that contain characters or references to LGBTQ people and people of color.

That organization identified 681 challenges to books through the first eight months of this year, involving 1,651 titles.

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When are book bans unconstitutional? A First Amendment scholar explains

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The United States has become a nation divided over important issues in K-12 education, including which books students should be able to read in public school.

Efforts to ban books from school curricula , remove books from libraries and keep lists of books that some find inappropriate for students are increasing as Americans become more polarized in their views.

These types of actions are being called “book banning.” They are also often labeled “censorship.”

But the concept of censorship, as well as legal protections against it, are often highly misunderstood.

Book banning by the political right and left

On the right side of the political spectrum, where much of the book banning is happening, bans are taking the form of school boards’ removing books from class curricula.

Politicians have also proposed legislation banning books that are what some legislators and parents consider too mature for school-age readers, such as “ All Boys Aren’t Blue ,” which explores queer themes and topics of consent. Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison’s classic “ The Bluest Eye ,” which includes themes of rape and incest, is also a frequent target.

In some cases, politicians have proposed criminal prosecutions of librarians in public schools and libraries for keeping such books in circulation.

Most books targeted for banning in 2021, says the American Library Association, “ were by or about Black or LGBTQIA+ persons .” State legislators have also targeted books that they believe make students feel guilt or anguish based on their race or imply that students of any race or gender are inherently bigoted .

There are also some attempts on the political left to engage in book banning as well as removal from school curricula of books that marginalize minorities or use racially insensitive language, like the popular “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Defining censorship

Whether any of these efforts are unconstitutional censorship is a complex question.

The First Amendment protects individuals against the government’s “ abridging the freedom of speech .” However, government actions that some may deem censorship – especially as related to schools – are not always neatly classified as constitutional or unconstitutional, because “censorship” is a colloquial term, not a legal term.

Some principles can illuminate whether and when book banning is unconstitutional.

Censorship does not violate the Constitution unless the government does it .

For example, if the government tries to forbid certain types of protests solely based on the viewpoint of the protesters, that is an unconstitutional restriction on speech. The government cannot create laws or allow lawsuits that keep you from having particular books on your bookshelf, unless the substance of those books fits into a narrowly defined unprotected category of speech such as obscenity or libel. And even these unprotected categories are defined in precise ways that are still very protective of speech.

The government, however, may enact reasonable regulations that restrict the “ time, place or manner ” of your speech, but generally it has to do so in ways that are content- and viewpoint-neutral. The government thus cannot restrict an individual’s ability to produce or listen to speech based on the topic of the speech or the ultimate opinions expressed.

And if the government does try to restrict speech in these ways, it likely constitutes unconstitutional censorship.

What’s not unconstitutional

In contrast, when private individuals, companies and organizations create policies or engage in activities that suppress people’s ability to speak, these private actions don’t violate the Constitution .

The Constitution’s general theory of liberty considers freedom in the context of government restraint or prohibition. Only the government has a monopoly on the use of force that compels citizens to act in one way or another. In contrast, if private companies or organizations chill speech, other private companies can experiment with different policies that allow people more choices to speak or act freely.

Still, private action can have a major impact on a person’s ability to speak freely and the production and dissemination of ideas. For example, book burning or the actions of private universities in punishing faculty for sharing unpopular ideas thwarts free discussion and unfettered creation of ideas and knowledge.

When schools can ‘ban’ books

It’s hard to definitively say whether the current incidents of book banning in schools are constitutional – or not. The reason: Decisions made in public schools are analyzed by the courts differently than censorship in nongovernment contexts.

Control over public education, in the words of the Supreme Court, is for the most part given to “ state and local authorities .” The government has the power to determine what is appropriate for students and thus the curriculum at their school.

However, students retain some First Amendment rights: Public schools may not censor students’ speech, either on or off campus, unless it is causing a “ substantial disruption .”

But officials may exercise control over the curriculum of a school without trampling on students’ or K-12 educators’ free speech rights.

There are exceptions to government’s power over school curriculum: The Supreme Court ruled, for example, that a state law banning a teacher from covering the topic of evolution was unconstitutional because it violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits the state from endorsing a particular religion.

School boards and state legislators generally have the final say over what curriculum schools teach. Unless states’ policies violate some other provision of the Constitution – perhaps the protection against certain kinds of discrimination – they are generally constitutionally permissible.

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Schools, with finite resources, also have discretion to determine which books to add to their libraries. However, several members of the Supreme Court have written that removal is constitutionally permitted only if it is done based on the educational appropriateness of the book, but not because it was intended to deny students access to books with which school officials disagree.

Book banning is not a new problem in this country – nor is vigorous public criticism of such moves . And even though the government has discretion to control what’s taught in school, the First Amendment ensures the right of free speech to those who want to protest what’s happening in schools.

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Authors Of Banned Books Are Fed Up – and Fighting Back

Florida teacher Adam Tritt and his group, Foundation 451, led the launch of a "Banned Book Nook" at a Ben & Jerry's ice cream store in Melbourne, Fla. Mikey Holland hide caption

Florida teacher Adam Tritt and his group, Foundation 451, led the launch of a "Banned Book Nook" at a Ben & Jerry's ice cream store in Melbourne, Fla.

2023 is on track to beat last year's record when it comes to book bans. The free speech group PEN America counted 2,500 instances of book bans in U.S. schools during the 2021-22 academic year. Author Judy Blume has had a number of her books banned. She spoke to NPR ahead of the release of a documentary about her life, "Judy Blume Forever," streaming on Amazon Prime April 21. And NPR's Tovia Smith spoke to other authors of banned books about how the scrutiny has negatively impacted their sales - and about alternative ways they've found to get their stories to readers, outside of schools. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community. Email us at [email protected] .

This episode was produced by Elena Burnett and Erika Ryan. It was edited by Catherine Laidlaw and William Troop. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.

Banned Books

The ACLU works in courts, legislatures, and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and the laws of the United States guarantee everyone in this country.

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Since its founding in 1920, the ACLU has opposed censorship in all its forms. From books and radio to film, television, and the internet, we have consistently fought to make sure Americans have the right to say, think, read, and write whatever they want without fear of government reprisal.

In 1926, we defended H. L. Mencken when he was charged with distributing copies of his banned magazine, American Mercury. In 1952, we won  Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson  (aka the “Miracle Decision”), in which the Supreme Court finally struck down film censorship laws. In 1978, we filed a Supreme Court friend-of-the-court brief challenging the government’s power to suppress radio broadcasts of George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can’t Say On Television.” And in 1997, we won  Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union , which held that internet speech is entitled to full First Amendment protection.

Those are just a few examples. The ACLU has also been instrumental in challenging bans on dozens of books, including “Ulysses,” “Howl,” “The Joy of Sex,” the “Harry Potter” series, “Sophie’s Choice,” and more.

Every year, the ACLU marks Banned Books Week, an annual event that celebrates the freedom to read and calls attention to the wealth of creative expression that is stifled when books can be forbidden from library shelves. The ACLU has always vigilantly defended the First Amendment and the right to free speech. We believe in an educated citizenry and a society where ideas are openly disseminated, discussed, and debated. And throughout our history, we have worked to protect the right to access information and the right to make up your own mind.

Book Bans Don’t Surprise Me. That’s Why They Must Stop.

By Logan Richman ’25

In late July 2022, police kicked several people out of a monthly school board meeting.

Halfway through the marathon six-hour meeting , the vice chair of Florida’s Miami-Dade County School Board, Steve Gallon III, had raised his voice from the dais, straining to get a word in as members of the public audience shouted at the nine-person board. Board member Luisa Santos reached for her mic to ask if a sergeant-at-arms could defuse the situation. The attendees were not upset over budget proposals, disciplinary issues, or coronavirus policies. 

They were upset over a book.

In an unparalleled, rapidly growing trend sweeping the United States, books are facing scrutiny at a pace not seen in decades. Throughout small towns, cities, and states, parents, lawmakers, activists, and school board members alike are taking aim at books they find unfavorable or undesirable, targeting the shelves of public libraries and classrooms.

An April 2022 report from PEN America , a Free Speech advocacy nonprofit, indexed over 1,000 unique books that have been banned since July 1, 2021, spanning 86 school districts across 26 states. PEN America and the American Library Association found that a large number of the challenged or banned titles are either by, or about, people of color and LBGTQ+ people. Equally alarming is how partisan the issue has become. And as if the situation could not become any worse, book burnings, a barbaric relic of the past, have risen across the country.

Why have book bans spread with such fervor and intensity? After taking a critical look at the trend, the answer to this question may seem clear — book bannings, like countless other policy issues, are fueled by the cultural disputes ravaging the United States. But in reality, the answer is much more complex, and equally unsurprising.

It’s Okay to Say Gay

Comprehensive Health Skills , the sexual health textbook that came under fire in Miami-Dade County, contains lessons on gender identity and sexual orientation, topics that certain parents argued were inappropriate for middle and high school students. After an extensive public hearing, the board voted 5-4 to reject the book, leaving Miami-Dade schools without a comprehensive health education curriculum for the 2022-23 academic year.

Board members had dealt with not only vocal pressure from community members, but also legal pressure from the Parental Rights in Education law , dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by critics. Signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in March 2022, the law bans sexual orientation and gender identity education in public classrooms for students in kindergarten through third grade. While the bill outlawed these aspects of health education for younger elementary school students, parents and Florida lawmakers have used its precedent to reject curriculum proposals and specific books for older students as well. Notably, opponents of the law said that its broad language could open the door for parents to sue if they believed inappropriate instruction was being given, even if their child was beyond third grade.

Of the 42 students and parents who spoke at the July 20 Miami-Dade school board meeting, 38 were adamant that the textbook should be approved for class. Many were high school students — teenagers for whom the educational content in question was directly relevant. A week later, the school board reversed its decision in another 5-4 vote. Unfortunately, not every book meets this same fate. 

One book that has faced national criticism, legal action, and media attention is the graphic novel Gender Queer: a Memoir , written and illustrated by Maia Kobabe. Gender Queer details Kobabe’s experience from adolesence to adulthood, exploring sexuality and gender identity. After winning an Alex Award from the American Library Association in 2020, the book was increasingly added to public middle and high school libraries, and has thus faced an onslaught of attention. 

Parents and lawmakers opposed to titles like Gender Queer channel their ire into arguments that are neither blatantly homophobic nor transphobic. When the memoir was removed from libraries and schools in Texas, Iowa, and Pennsylvania, its alleged “sexually explicit” nature was the primary reason. South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster (R) cited “obscene and pornographic” scenes. Two illustrations that critics have latched onto depict Kobabe and a romantic partner experimenting with a strap-on sex toy, and Kobabe fantasizing about two men having sex. 

However, context, as always, is essential.

When staunch critics of Gender Queer spread images of those scenes or videos of performative public comments condemning the book, the illustrations are stripped of their context, tone, and intent. People who describe the book as “pornographic” fail to recognize that Gender Queer lacks pornography’s chief goal of stimulating erotic, rather than emotional, aesthetic, or artistic, feelings within the viewer. 

While public schools should prohibit the circulation of gratuitous pornography, Gender Queer is unequivocally neither gratuitous nor pornographic. And Kobabe — an artist trying to share an emotional story about a personal journey with sexuality, gender identity, and relationships — is facing a major Free Speech restriction.

The memoir’s first few pages clearly show that Kobabe is telling an educational story, one that resonates for young people exploring or questioning their own sexual and gender identity. A story that says it is okay not to identify as heterosexual and cisgender. A story with virtue.

In a sense, critics of Gender Queer have done something worse than silence Kobabe: they have distorted and demonized the author’s words, fearful that children’s exposure to content that normalizes and celebrates the LGBTQ+ community is inherently corrupt and depraved, insisting on labeling it pornographic. These one-dimensional arguments deprive Kobabe of any artistic legitimacy and jump to extreme conclusions. Stripped of its platform and target audience, Gender Queer is having its impact sharply curtailed by those who are threatened by or fearful of its lessons being shared.

Dangerously Politicized

Beyond content concerns, book bans have been pursued as a political weapon to bolster the platform of elected officials. In campaigns across the country, candidates have capitalized on parents’ worries to ultimately win votes.

In late October 2021, in the midst of a heated Virginia gubernatorial race between former Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) and Virginia’s current Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), the Youngkin campaign circulated an ad featuring a mother in Fairfax County denouncing Beloved by Toni Morrison. The mother, Laura Murphy, said her “heart sunk” when her son showed her his homework drawn from the book, as it was “some of the most explicit material you can imagine.” 

But Murphy’s story predates the Youngkin campaign. Her crusade against Beloved began in the spring of 2012 .

Beloved is told from the perspective of a mother who, enslaved in the 19th century American South, is haunted by the death of her baby, a two-year-old girl she kills to protect from a lifetime in slavery. A complex, powerful, and haunting story based on true events , it reflects raw, accurate realities of life for enslaved people in the United States who suffered for generations. A Pulitzer-prize winner , regarded by many as a masterpiece, the book is integral to a number of mainstream high school English curricula, including the Advanced Placement English Literature course. 

While it has been challenged repeatedly since its publication , the current spate of book banning has only exacerbated public scrutiny of the novel. With intensely brutal and sexually violent passages, Beloved has alarmed many parents across the country, including Murphy, who independently tried to ban the book, first with the Fairfax County school board, and then with the Virginia Board of Education. This episode became only uglier when the Youngkin campaign shamelessly used Murphy’s story for political ammunition.

In the Youngkin ad, viewed over 1.3 million times on Twitter, there is no intellectual analysis of Beloved’s content and whether or not it is appropriate for public schools. There is no mention of established state policies that let students opt out of assigned materials. Instead, the ad stresses how McAuliffe vetoed a bill twice that required teachers to notify parents when their children were assigned books that contained sexually explicit content.

The ad capitalizes on a McAuliffe gubernatorial debate gaffe , accusing him of not believing parents should have a say in curricula, arguing that Youngkin “listens” and understands that “parents matter.” This kind of rhetoric fuels book bans across the country. The danger in this? Politicization encourages blame, conflict, and hyperbole. The desire to ban is not founded upon specific, contextual, intellectual knowledge about the work in question — it is founded upon winning and keeping power.

A Fine Line

At what point does a book deserve to be banned? 

Are bans purely subjective? Or are there objective, near-universal, accepted standards for what constitutes art and should be protected as such? What makes a book so derided that it is burned, as seen in Georgia in 2019 and Tennessee in 2022?

When content is gratuitously sexual or violent, designed to stir up hate or dehumanize and abuse individuals or groups, it loses credibility or meaning, and becomes more widely regarded as bannable by public institutions. There is a fine line, though, and a seemingly subjective one at that, between what is gratuitous and what is art; what is debased and what is profound.

That fine line raises a question: what is the intention of an author or creative? What are they seeking to evoke? Understanding this is necessary in deciding whether or not to ban, and is the key to protecting people from harm, while upholding meritorious content and preserving education and Free Speech.

Disagreements about this intention are at the heart of book ban hysteria and demonstrate how this trend is a manifestation of broader cultural debates taking place across the nation. Further, the fact that book bans have become so politicized indicates that those pushing for bans generally seek some type of control, some type of actionable policy that would theoretically fashion safer educational environments.

As the country grapples with the growing pains of the information age, where knowledge is immediately available and social media noise is constant, public schools and libraries are a sort of sanctuary. They are local, reachable institutions: physical — not digital — incubators of knowledge where those who feel they lack a voice and political power can effect change. 

In this respect, the book-banning fervor does not surprise me. People across the political spectrum who seek to ban books may believe they are well-intentioned, protecting their communities or even seeking to right historical wrongs through censorship. But ultimately, while restricting a book may seem like an achievement in the short-term, extinguishing free expression and exposure to ideas on such a small scale will never shift culture at large, and only gives banned works more popularity. In reality, it is the free exchange of ideas that has the greatest capacity to shift culture. Censors fear such an exchange above all else.

Increasingly common concerns about our changing culture, becoming more accepting of not only individuals’ identities but also the ugly histories of our societies, institutions, and prejudices, have many feeling anxious that we are moving too quickly down an unstoppable path, where the ways of old will be rejected and forgotten. But we must continue down this path, not forgetting the past but instead learning from its lessons and preserving its good while confronting — and righting — centuries of missteps and abuses.

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Home » Articles » Topic » Issues » Issues Related to Speech, Press, Assembly, or Petition » Book Banning

Book Banning

Susan L. Webb

Book banning, the most widespread form of censorship, occurs when private individuals, government officials or organizations remove books from libraries, school reading lists or bookstore shelves because they object to their content, ideas or themes. In this photo, Gail Sheehy, author of "Passages," reads during the "First Banned Books Read Out" in New York, April 1, 1982. The rally protested censorship by school and public libraries of certain books under pressure from right wing religious groups. (AP Photo/Carlos Rene Perez)

Book banning, a form of  censorship , occurs when private individuals, government officials or organizations remove books from libraries , school reading lists or bookstore shelves because they object to their content, ideas or themes. Those advocating a ban complain typically that the book in question contains graphic violence, expresses disrespect for parents and family, is sexually explicit, exalts evil, lacks literary merit, is unsuitable for a particular age group, or includes offensive language. Other complaints have been that the book is written by or deals with sexual orientation or gay issues or brings up topics like slavery that might make individuals uncomfortable.

Children's literature is top target of book bans

Book banning is the most widespread form of censorship in the United States, with children’s literature being the primary target. Advocates for banning a book or certain books fear that children will be swayed by its contents, which they regard as potentially dangerous. They commonly fear that these publications will present ideas, raise questions and incite critical inquiry among children that parents, political groups, or religious organizations are not ready to address or that they find inappropriate.

Most challenges and bans prior to the 1970s focused primarily on  obscenity and explicit sexuality. Common targets included D. H. Lawrence’s "Lady Chatterly’s Lover "  and James Joyce’s " Ulysses ." In the late 1970s, attacks were launched on ideologies expressed in books.

Surge to remove books from school libraries arises again in 2020s

To counter charges of censorship, opponents of publications sometimes use the tactic of restricting access rather than calling for the physical removal of books. Opponents of bans argue that by restricting information and discouraging freedom of thought, censors undermine one of the primary functions of education: teaching students how to think for themselves. In this photo, author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. speaks to reporters on a federal court ruling calling for a trial to determine if a Long Island school board can ban a number of books, including his “Slaughterhouse Five." (AP Photo)

In September 1990, the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression  declared the First Amendment to be “in perilous condition across the nation” based on the results of a comprehensive survey on free expression. Even literary classics, including Mark Twain’s  " Adventures of Huckleberry Finn " and Maya Angelou’s "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," were targeted. Often, the complaints arose from individual parents or school board members. At other times, however, the pressure to censor came from such public interest groups as the Moral Majority.

A new surge in book banning have arisen in recent years, with 4,349 recorded instances of book bans from July through December of 2023 (Blair 2024). Most book challenges have come from the ideological right, with Moms for Liberty being particularly active in challenging books (Alter 2024). Often such organizations challenge multiple books at a time. Depending on the state, librarians might have to read and respond to challenges to each book, although some might decide that it is simply easier to remove books. When such books are challenged in public meetings, those opposed to a book may cite isolated lurid passages that may or not be representative of the content of the book as a whole. 

Although challenges have occurred throughout the nation, a large majority of such challenges have been concentrated in Texas and Florida. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, gained political notoriety with his “Don’t Say Gay Bill” restricting teaching about sexual orientation or gender identity in certain grades. He also is known for his challenge to accepting advanced credit for African American history absent certain changes in the offering, and by his attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts. 

Similarly, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas supported and signed a bill in 2023 that banned books that were sexually explicit. One historian has identified laws that seek to suppress information about slavery as being based on the notion (often attributed to liberals) of “fragilism,” or the fear of “extreme sensitivity among the children they aim to protect” (Holton 2024, 202).

Censorship — the suppression of ideas and information — can occur at any stage or level of publication, distribution, or institutional control. Some pressure groups claim that the public funding of most schools and libraries makes community censorship of their holdings legitimate.

To counter charges of censorship, opponents of publications sometimes use the tactic of restricting access rather than calling for the physical removal of books. Opponents of bans argue that by restricting information and discouraging freedom of thought, censors undermine one of the primary functions of education: teaching students how to think for themselves. Such actions, assert free speech proponents, endanger tolerance, free expression, and democracy.

Community standards may be taken into account in book banning

Although censorship violates the First Amendment right to freedom of speech, some limitations are constitutionally permissible. The courts have told public officials at all levels that they may take  community standards  into account when deciding whether materials are obscene or pornographic and thus subject to censor.

They cannot, however, censor publications by generally accepted authors — such as Mark Twain, for example, J. K. Rowling, R. L. Stine, Judy Blume, or Robert Cormier — in order to placate a small segment of the community. Cormier’s  "Chocolate War " was one of the American Library Association’s Top 10 Banned Books for 2005 and 2006.

Those who oppose book banning emphasize that the First Amendment protects rights of students to receive ideas. The Supreme Court in Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico (1982) ruled 5-4 that public schools can bar books that are “pervasively vulgar” or not right for the curriculum, but they cannot remove books “simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books.” In this 2007 photo, Makenzie Hatfield, a student at George Washington high school in West Virginia, holds books by author Pat Conroy that were removed English classes after parents of two students complained about their depictions of violence, suicide and sexual assault. (AP Photo/Jeff Gentner)

Opponents of removing books from schools emphasize student rights

Those who advocate removing books from school libraries often focus on parental rights. This becomes problematic, however, when parents of one child seek to prescribe what is appropriate for other children or when public library patrons who do not care to check out a book seeks to deny access to those who do. 

Those who oppose book banning emphasize that the First Amendment protects  student rights to receive information and express ideas, an idea that was highlighted in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969), when the Supreme Court recognized the right of students to wear black armbands in protest of the Vietnam War. 

In the one case to reach the Supreme Court over removing books from school libraries, Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico  (1982) the court ruled 5-4 that public schools can bar books that are “pervasively vulgar” or not right for the curriculum. But consistent with other rulings related to content discrimination , they cannot remove books “simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books.” The Supreme Court's decision was, however, narrow, applying only to the removal of books from school library shelves.

Courts more likely to allow limits on age-appropriate material

It is important to recognize that courts are more likely to accept rules limiting school libraries to age-appropriate materials than they are to accept broad bans in public libraries that serve adults. As a practical matter, it might also be worth noting that both children and adults likely have far greater access to controversial materials through online sources than they do through public libraries. 

The American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom documents censorship incidents around the country and suggests strategies for dealing with them. Each September, the  American Library Association , the American Booksellers Association, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the Association of American Publishers, and the National Association of College Stores sponsor  Banned Books Week  — Celebrating the Freedom to Read.

Designed to “emphasize that imposing information restraints on a free people is far more dangerous than any ideas that may be expressed in that information,” the week highlights banned works, encourages citizens to explore new ideas, and provides a variety of materials to promote free speech events.

The American Library Association publishes the bimonthly  Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom,  which provides information on censorship, as well as an annual annotated list of books and other materials that have been censored.

Current laws on removing books may be challenged as too vague

In some cases, movements to ban books have stimulated counter movements to preserve access to them. Many of the current laws outlining procedures for banning books are subject to challenge for being overly vague — many, for example, use the term “obscenity” in a much broader fashion than the Supreme Court has recognized in Miller v. California (1973) — or for being overly broad or for having a chilling effect on other publications. Some proposed laws, for example, could be interpreted as allowing for the removal of medical books, or even dictionaries, that might contain depictions, definitions, or descriptions of sexual organs or conditions.

In other cases, like licensing laws that have been struck down, book banning laws may vest undue discretion in public officials. Still other laws, especially those seeking to restrain exposure to discussions of slavery or other historical issues, will likely fail the test of content neutrality . Librarians who face criminal penalties or loss of jobs for failing to remove books, might further be able to raise issues of fair notice and due process.

This article was originally published in 2009 and updated in April 2024 by John R. Vile, a professor of political science and dean of the Honors College at Middle Tennessee State University. Susan Webb was an adjunct librarian at Southeastern Oklahoma State University.

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Education, Business, & Law

On book bans and free speech

Sigal ben-porath of the graduate school of education says book bans and challenges affect free speech and expression. .

Bans and challenges of books in schools and libraries are increasing and gaining traction in America, especially those that feature race and racism and gender identification and sexual orientation.

A recent report by PEN America shows an unprecedented rise in book bans and challenges, echoed by a special report by the American Library Association . News accounts chronicle campaigns against books, and counterefforts to stop or reverse them, creating tensions in cities and towns across the nation.

Penn Graduate School of Education Professor Sigal Ben-Porath says these efforts, part of the growing national cultural and political polarization, have a direct effect on free speech and expression, and can help form young peoples’ views of themselves and their place in their communities.

With expertise in the philosophy of education, Ben-Porath studies the ways institutions like schools and colleges can sustain and advance democracy. She is the author of six books, including “ Free Speech on Campus ” in 2017 and “ Making Up Our Mind: What School Choice is Really About ” in 2019. Her latest book, “ Cancel Wars: How Universities Can Foster Free Speech, Promote Inclusion, and Renew Democracy ” will be published in 2023.

Penn Today spoke with Ben-Porath about the implications of book bans and challenges in America, and how institutions of higher education can be involved in solutions.

How are book bans connected to free speech?

Those who are banning or limiting access to books often try to ensure that people don’t think in certain ways, and that they don’t speak in certain ways, or about certain topics. Banning books is an effort to make sure that difficult topics don’t come up, especially in schools. This is an aspect of a broader political and cultural struggle over who belongs, or what values prevail in American society.

In your view, why are book bans and challenges increasing now?

The issue of book banning within the context of the broader culture wars has two different dimensions. One is the electoral, partisan, political-power-play aspect: It’s a way to get people’s attention, to get people riled up and angry, to get them to pay more attention to politics and come out to vote. Books, curricula, teachers, schools, these are everywhere in every community. Close to 90% of American kids go to public school. So, if you find something in school that really angers people, is upsetting, it’s easy to get attention. The other aspect is more substantive, and that is the struggle to define the boundaries of the political community in America. In other words, who belongs? Whose voices should be heard? And today again the two most salient aspects of this are race, along with gender and sexuality; these are the main topics of books that are being questioned or pulled out of the libraries in different ways, being censored, being cancelled.

The struggle over race is a really a response, or a push back, to the racial justice wave that we have seen after the murder of George Floyd two years ago. I think the growing perception around the country is that a broad coalition of people who were very angry, who were awakened to aspects of racial injustice that maybe they were unaware of, or just didn’t pay attention to, or previously didn’t care too much about, especially non-Black people, this broad coalition joined with Black Americans and was looking to schools and to cultural artifacts like books to sustain this attention and commitment to preventing these injustices from happening. Curricula and books and schools and teachers were a way to sustain this effort, to say: We can’t go on like this, we have to change the way that certain institutions, like the police, are treating Black people, but also more broadly the racial injustice seen for a very long time in this country. An effort to say, ‘Let’s use this moment to train teachers, to expose children to these issues, to make sure that we are making a difference here.’ Book banning is a backlash to that movement.

And the backlash is similar regarding sexuality and gender expression. We have seen the legal recognition of marriage equality. We are seeing the proliferation of books and materials in classrooms and libraries in celebration of Pride Month, and the greater visibility and cultural acceptance of transgender, and nonbinary, and diverse-gender-expression individuals in books and movies and society. We are seeing more recognition of equal rights, or the demand for equal rights and equal representation, of individuals with diverse forms of gender expression and diverse identities in the domain of gender and sexuality.

Book banning is a pushback against these efforts to expand our vision of our community, to try to entrench and limit again the scope of what is appropriate and what is desirable.

What is next?

I assume this struggle will continue at the local and national levels, especially in schools. Books in schools and in libraries are just easier to regulate. It’s harder to regulate which characters you have on a Netflix show, but it’s pretty easy, relatively speaking, to elect people to state and local government, to school boards, who say, for example, ‘These books are corruptive,’ or ‘These are not age-appropriate,’ or ‘We are reviewing these books,’ and creating processes for approving books that end up impoverishing libraries and curricular material in the presentation of diverse people. Which obviously is a disconcerting, because people have diverse identities, and they’re here, in our neighborhoods and classrooms, they’re not going anywhere, so trying to erase them from our cultural materials, from a book, from our teaching materials, does nothing to make them disappear. In reality, it makes them hide. It makes them shameful and uncomfortable and feel rejected. The book bans are telling them that they are not accepted as equal members of our community. I am encouraged by the efforts at the local and national levels to organize and to push back against book bans.

What is the effect of these book bans?

My worry is that at least in the areas where these efforts gain ground, you will see people who are not aligned with this conservative vision of ‘appropriate behavior,’ of being ‘proper and respectable people,’ just not finding room for themselves. You will see people from diverse racial and ethnic groups, gay and trans people, recognize that some prominent members of their community would prefer that they not be there. I think that’s a terrible message to send to anyone, and definitely to young children.

This is not new to LGBTQ folks, who are being pushed back into the closet through the mechanism of erasing their presence in the public domain with the message: ‘You shouldn’t be out as an individual,’ and ‘We shouldn’t encourage you to be out by representing you positively in a book, or a TV show, or a film.’

Regarding the racial issue, it’s a little different. Those who are seeking to ban books about racial history and relations, about injustice or inequality, are trying to minimize both the history of slavery and discussion on injustices today. It’s an effort to represent history since the Civil Rights movement as having fixed any issues Black Americans face. It is an effort to cleanse the public discourse from references to unpleasant, uncomfortable truths, about American history and current reality, a discussion that is deemed uncomfortable for white people, and in particular white children. This effort, which is represented by banning books, for example about Martin Luther King Junior or Ruby Bridges, is really at the heart of book banning. I don’t think that’s a good goal for educators. Complex, complicated, age-appropriate conversations are hard, but the fact that it’s hard does not means that it needs to be scrubbed away. Teachers need to be supported in having these conversations, and books are a great aid for that.

Do book bans really make much of a difference, with access to just about anything via cell phone or computer?

What you read at school is very nice and good and important, but it’s definitely not the main avenue through which you get your information, and your understanding of your society. Of course, a lot of the same people who are banning books are also trying to regulate social media and the Internet. So, while the effort to censor is not focused only on books, I am very concerned about the limitations on books, I think about children and young people who live in less-affluent areas, or where there’s less diversity, and where you don't always have broadband, and not every kid has an iPhone in their pocket. What do you do if you’re the one Muslim kid in your school? What do you do if you are 13 and think that you are gay?

I also worry culturally about the message that we’re sending, because even if you can get information through your phone, the book ban lets you know that those in your community—maybe your own teachers or elected officials—see these aspects of your reality and identity as something to be ashamed of, to be embarrassed about, to be silent about, something that doesn’t belong. Kids get this message, which is both personally difficult and socially chilling.

How can higher education be involved?

Truth and inclusion should, in my view, serve as the guiding principles for organizing the public discourse around difficult topics.

We need tools for assessing the effort to cancel or silence different forms of expression, through banning books and other means. What is a reasonable argument about a book being inappropriate for a classroom? Can we agree about criteria for selecting books and teaching materials? Truth and inclusion are the two main dimensions of assessing the arguments. One, we need to refer to evidence, as accepted by relevant studies, to assess what should or should not be a part of our teaching materials. The second is a question of inclusion: We need to ensure that people who are within our community can properly see themselves as belonging, as positively represented. How do you create equal standing for everyone who lives here, and ensure that they have their voices heard?

Institutions of higher education are important for developing evidenced-based tools for assessment. They can also help advocate for using truth and inclusion as the guiding principles for learning in K-12 schools. Similar struggles are taking place on college campuses, and the culture wars over the boundaries of speech are familiar to us. Higher education is already setting the expectations for what children should learn in school, through our admissions policies and what we expect high school graduates to know. We should support schools by calling for inclusive learning environments, reliance on evidence-based decisions about teaching materials, and above all, free thought and free inquiry.

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Hundreds of undergraduates take classes in the fine arts each semester, among them painting and drawing, ceramics and sculpture, printmaking and animation, photography and videography. The courses, through the School of Arts & Sciences and the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, give students the opportunity to immerse themselves in an art form in a collaborative way.

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Solar production has begun at the Great Cove I and II facilities in central Pennsylvania, the equivalent of powering 70% of the electricity demand from Penn’s academic campus and health system in the Philadelphia area.

How conservative and liberal book bans differ amid rise in literary restrictions

Anti-censorship groups say conservatives are behind the rise in book challenges.

The country saw a growing effort to ban books in schools and libraries nationwide in 2022, and researchers expect to see more efforts to challenge books in 2023 as some Republican-backed laws across the country aim to restrict LGBTQ and racial content in school books.

While activists across the political spectrum have sought to restrict or protest some forms of literature, the vast majority of book challenges are from conservative-leaning groups, researchers say. Only a handful of efforts have also come from liberal sources, mainly targeting books with racist or offensive language.

"If you get five people and they walk through a library and they are allowed to remove anything they think might get someone in trouble for it being there -- Well, they're going to start pulling all kinds of stuff, a conservative person and progressive person," Jonathan Friedman, the director of free expression and education programs at PEN America, told ABC News. "We all have different issues that we think shouldn't be in books -- historic representations of racism, for example, something like Mark Twain is just as likely to [be seen as potentially controversial] as is 'Gender Queer,'" a coming-of-age memoir about the author's LGBTQ identity.

There were at least 2,532 book challenges from July 2021 to June 2022, affecting 1,648 book titles, according to a report by the free expression protection group PEN America.

"We're in danger of removing from libraries, all kinds of materials, some of which are seen as classic forms of literature and some of which are now in danger of not becoming classic works of literature for the future because they're being censored in this way," Friedman said.

According to the American Library Association, most book challenges fail to remove books from classroom or library shelves completely. However, any book that is challenged is considered to be a "banned book."

What content is being targeted?

Books targeted by conservative groups were overwhelmingly written by or about people of color and LGBTQ people , according to anti-censorship researchers. According to PEN American and the ALA, many of the challenges reference the sexual content or inherent messaging in the books.

Banned Books Lists from the ALA show that these groups have challenged young adult books such as "The Hate U Give" and "The Bluest Eye," which discuss racism in the United States, as well as book titles like "Gender Queer" and "All Boys Aren't Blue" which discuss LGBTQ identities, sexuality and gender.

MORE: Authors of color speak out against efforts to ban books on race

Meanwhile, liberal efforts criticized or restricted books in the name of anti-racism or progressive ideals.

Books like “Of Mice and Men;” “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” and several Dr. Seuss titles have been challenged in some schools and libraries due to racist language or imagery throughout the years , including the use of the n-word or insensitive imagery of racial stereotypes, according to the ALA.

Where are book-banning efforts coming from?

The conservative effort is coming from some legislators and conservative political groups like Moms For Liberty and No Left Turn in Education, PEN America found. These organizations say they aim to give parents more of a say about what children read in the classroom or preserve “principles" of "liberty" or "freedom," according to their websites.

Legislative efforts in states like Florida , Utah, Missouri, Texas and more have also aimed to restrict the lessons and content educators could teach that include certain perspectives on race, gender and sexual orientation in the classroom.

Florida's Parental Rights in Education law, and others like it nationwide, is aimed at removing LGBTQ content and identities from being discussed in some classrooms, while laws like New Hampshire's prohibit "divisive concepts" on race and gender in the classroom.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and state lawmaker Rep. Matt Krause campaigned in 2021 to investigate a list of around 850 books that "might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex," in a letter first reported by Texas Tribune.

Free expression and anti-censorship advocates said these ongoing efforts have sounded alarm bells. They say these laws punish or threaten the livelihoods of educators who break the vague restrictions on classroom curriculum.

"It's shifting from parents and citizens giving lists to school boards, to laws," Friedman said. "And that's a really significant shift because there's a huge difference between a school board responding to parental ire and a school board responding to threat of punishment from the government."

Experts said liberal or progressive efforts are typically individualized and localized, unlike conservative groups that have expanded into a nationwide movement against certain books.

Several progressive literary groups, including We Need Diverse Books, have denounced book bans or restrictions and instead focused on diversifying literature.

Amid the U.S. racial reckoning in 2020, the Burbank Unified School District in California removed several titles from required reading lists in several schools for their use of the n-word after complaints from local parents and a review by administrators. However, the books were allowed to be read in school, carried in school libraries or read in small groups.

Several other schools have faced similar changes to their reading lists, according to the free expression advocacy group PEN America's Index of School Book Bans.

“We believe professional educators are well-equipped to guide students in reading books that may contain challenging or potentially distressing content, and that reckoning with books that depict the complexities of history and modern society is part of the purpose of an education,” PEN America stated in a letter to the Burbank Unified School District for prohibiting instructional materials with the “n-word” from mandatory reading lists.

MORE: Battle over books rages in North Texas school district amid outcry over new policy

In response, teachers and administrators established criteria for creating core reading lists, established professional development opportunities to learn how to talk about race and racism, and continued diversity, equity and inclusion work.

"Throughout this process, everyone has agreed that our current curriculum does not represent Black students and families in a positive and uplifting manner," read a letter from Burbank Superintendent Matt Hill to BUSD families and employees about the restrictions. "What is worse, many have acknowledged that these books contribute to perpetuating generational trauma."

He continued, "This is not about censorship or banning books outright, this is about determining which books are mandatory and which books are optional,"

The BUSD administration has not responded to ABC News' request for comment.

Organizations against censorship, including PEN America and the American Library Association Office of Intellectual Freedom, have fought against all efforts to ban books, calling it censorship.

However, organizations who’ve long tracked book bans nationwide said complaints by liberal groups are not comparable to the large wave of conservative book challenges being seen across the country.

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Does Banning Books Violate the First Amendment?

Feb 15, 2023 | The Respect Rundown

At the start of every school year, there are renewed efforts to ban books in school libraries and public libraries. According to the American Library Association (ALA), the 2021-2022 school year had a record number of book ban requests and the present school year is on track to break that record.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom told the Associated Press. “It’s both the number of challenges and the kinds of challenges. It used to be a parent had learned about a given book and had an issue with it. Now we see campaigns where organizations are compiling lists of books, without necessarily reading or even looking at them.”

According to the ALA, in 2022, there were attempts to ban, challenge, or restrict access to 1,651 different book titles in the United States—the highest number of complaints since the group began documenting book challenges more than 20 years ago. The Index of School Book Bans, compiled by PEN America, a nonprofit organization that advocates for free speech, goes even deeper. In its account, published in September 2022, PEN reported that from July 2021 through June 2022 there were 2,532 instances of individual book ban requests, which affected 1,648 unique titles by 1,261 authors. Those bans, according to PEN, occurred in 138 school districts in 32 states, representing more than 5,000 schools that have a combined enrollment of nearly four million students.

“Book bans violate the First Amendment because they deprive children or students of the right to receive information and ideas,” explained David L. Hudson Jr., a professor at Belmont University College of Law and a First Amendment law expert.

Both the ALA and PEN agree that the majority of the books being banned are in the young adult category and contain storylines featuring LGBTQ+ issues (674 titles), protagonists or secondary characters of color (659 titles), or directly address issues of race or racism (338 titles).

History of banning books

Book banning has been around as long as there have been books. In colonial America, for example, religious groups often led the charge to ban written content they deemed immoral. In the 1800s, many states in the South had outlawed anti-slavery sentiments, including anti-slavery books. So, the anti-slavery book Uncle Tom’s Cabin , by Harriet Beecher Stowe, started an uproar. Historian and American History professor Claire Parfait told National Geographic that Stowe’s book was publicly burned. Parfait also shared a story about a free Black minister who was sentenced to 10 years for owning a copy of the book.

According to the ALA and PEN, the most banned book of the past year was Gender Queer: A Memoir , by Maia Kobabe, which chronicles the author’s journey of self-identity and the adolescent confusion of coming out to her family and friends.

So, what is the difference between a book challenge and a ban? According to the ALA, a challenge “is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group. A banning is the removal of those materials.” The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) and the ALA have outlined a best practice process for the removal of a book from library bookshelves. Challenges, they say, should follow these steps:  filing a written, formal challenge by parents or local residents; forming a review committee, comprised of librarians, teachers, administrators, and community members; and keeping books in circulation during the reconsideration process until a final decision is made. PEN found that 98% of the bans outlined in its report did not follow the best practice guidelines for removal as outlined by the NCAC and the ALA.

U.S. Supreme Court weighs in

The U.S. Supreme Court has only weighed in on the subject of banning books once and the ruling wasn’t definitive because no opinion commanded a majority.

“The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Island Trees School District v. Pico (1982) that books may not be removed from library shelves just because school officials find ideas in the books offensive,” says Professor Hudson, who is also the author of The Constitution Explained . “However, the ruling is quite narrow and technically only applies to the removal of books from library shelves.” In other words, the ruling did not address banning books in school curriculum.

The Court’s ruling came in 1982, but the case began in 1975 when a community group in Levittown, NY wanted to remove nine books from library shelves in the Island Trees School District, including Kurt Vonnegut’s Sl aughterhouse-Five  and Langston Hughes’s  Best Short Stories by Negro Writers. Their justification for removal was that the books were “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and just plain filthy.” The school district removed the books.

Steven Pico, a high school senior, and four other students challenged the decision claiming the books were removed because “passages in the books offended [the group’s] social, political, and moral tastes and not because the books, taken as a whole, were lacking in educational value.” The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the students’ favor, but the decision is complicated.

Writing for a three-justice plurality of the Court and not a majority, Justice William J. Brennan said, “We hold that local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.”

Two other justices concurred with Justice Brennan in varying degrees in favor of the students; however, it was not a clearcut decision and many legal scholars still argue about the degree of legal guidance the decision provides.

In one of four dissents in the case, Justice Warren E. Burger wrote, “If the school can set curriculum, select teachers, and determine what books to purchase for the school library, it surely can decide which books to discontinue or remove from the school library.”

Banning books in the Garden State

New Jersey is no stranger to banning books. There have been recent efforts to ban books in Wayne, Ramsey, Westfield, as well as the North Hunterdon-Voorhees School District. Martha Hickson, librarian for North Hunterdon-Voorhees Regional High School, pushed back on efforts to remove five LGBTQ+-themed books from library shelves. Those titles included Gender Queer  by Maia Kobabe,  Lawn Boy  by Jonathan Evison,  All Boys Aren’t Blue  by George M. Johnson,  Fun Home  by Alison Bechdel, and  This Book Is Gay  by Juno Dawson. Hickson was determined not to let the books be removed.

“These were highly reviewed books, had won awards, and there was no basis for them to be banned,” Hickson says. “I had worked for 17 years to make this a safe space, fighting for First Amendment rights, for the rights of students to have a safe space.”

Hickson contacted the ALA and other organizations. As a result, a community of alumni, parents, students, and other supporters came to the school board meetings to speak against banning the books. Even as they were subjected to taunts by adults, the students played a critical role in citing the importance of keeping the titles available, says Hickson.

“Their voices were the most powerful,” she says.

Ultimately, the decision was made to keep the five books on the school’s library shelves. Hickson says when parents push to remove books from school libraries, they trample on the rights of other parents and supporters who want the books to be available.

“Students have a right to access a diverse range of stories and perspectives,” Hickson says, and a decision to ban or restrict access to a book can hurt young people who see themselves reflected in those books.

Banning books can also have a harmful impact on educators and librarians who are under constant surveillance, which can negatively affect teaching and learning. The ALA cited 27 instances of police reports filed against library staff. In her case, Hickson says she felt ambushed when she was trolled on social media, received hate mail and physical threats, and her tenure at the school was at risk.

Still, Hickson believes fighting censorship is worth it so other librarians and students know they’re not alone. In recognition of her efforts to fight against banning books, Hickson received the Lemony Snicket Prize for Noble Librarians Faced with Adversity from the ALA in June 2022.

In another school district, the South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education has made significant changes to its policies regarding banning books. The new policy states that only a student or parent/guardian of a student in the school district can lodge a book challenge.

Elissa Malespina, a board member, as well as a librarian, told nj.com, “We don’t want some random community member that doesn’t have a kid in the school…We want a stakeholder.”

The school district’s new policy also stipulate that anyone challenging a book must prove that it violates the state’s education standards. In addition, challenged books will not be removed while being reviewed.

A new strategy

In Texas, a new legal argument has emerged. While most book bans are challenged on First Amendment grounds, the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas has filed a complaint with the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, claiming that a Texas school district violated Title IX’s prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sex when it removed 130 books from library shelves—at least three-quarters of which featured LGBTQ themes or characters. The Biden Administration has interpreted Title IX to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

ACLU attorney Chloe Kempf told The Washington Post that the removals “send a message to the entire community that LGBTQ identities are inherently obscene, worthy of stigmatization, and uniquely deprive LGBTQ students of the opportunity to read books that reflect their own experiences.”

Professor Hudson is not sure the strategy will be successful even though he says it’s a tangible argument. “There does appear to be continuing discrimination against books with LGBTQ themes and topics,” he says.

What students can do

Censorship silences voices and erases life experiences, but Hickson says students can be vigilant to protect their right to read books of their choice. She suggests joining school clubs that protect the right to read; volunteering to attend library, school board, and First Amendment events; and contacting local, state, and federal representatives to urge them to stand against book banning.

Discussion Questions

• To what degree should parents have a say in what books their children have access to? Should a parent, community or school board member be allowed to make those decisions for all students in a district? Does the age of the student make a difference? Explain your answer.
• What do you think of the new policy passed by the South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education? Is it a valid expectation that whoever challenges a book is a “stakeholder?” Why or why not?

Glossary Words plurality — having a greater number (as in votes), but not a majority.

This article originally appeared in the winter 2023 edition of Respect , NJSBF’s diversity newsletter.

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Banning Books is an Act of Censorship and it Can Take Many Forms – Here's How to Spot it.

As calls for book bans continue to ripple across the country, it’s more important than ever to be informed of how to spot similar waves in your town. The ACLU has defeated censorship attempts throughout the nation for over 100 years , take us at our word: the first step to dismantling any effort to limit access to books – and protecting the themes and experiences they feature – is being able to identify it. 

Censorship is the suppression of content or ideas – and it happens when one group imposes their beliefs on another. Banning books is a type of censorship, but the act can take many forms. Removing a book from the shelf isn’t the only method that amounts to censorship – requiring parental permission to read it or moving it to a less accessible section are both examples of soft censorship. 

The United States has some of the strongest artistic freedom protections in the world. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that those protections are broad under the First Amendment, and necessary for self-expression. But attempts to ban or restrict access to books, which are often driven by an agenda to divide communities and isolate viewpoints, undermines artistic freedom. 

Being able to learn about and engage with new ideas, especially those we may disagree with, is foundational to any healthy democracy. The recent call by some to limit access to books does more than suppress the subject matter – it also disregards the lived experiences and identities of authors and readers. It is not a coincidence that 30 percent of the unique titles banned across the country last school year were books about race, racism, or featured characters of color and 26 percent featured LGBTQ+ characters or themes. 

The ability to freely express oneself – and the ability to freely engage with that artistic expression – should not be restricted, especially at the urging of groups who don’t understand the product or claim it to be dangerous. If community members don’t want to engage with certain ideas, they don’t have to, but they don’t have the right to impose their beliefs on others.  

It is this foundational freedom that must be prioritized and protected by all of us, including library and school administrators, community stakeholders, and government leaders. Though New Jersey has demonstrated its ability to be a national leader on civil rights, our state has not been immune to censorship attempts. 

In February, an attempt to remove books that educate young people on gender and sexuality from the Glen Ridge Public Library drew hundreds, including the ACLU-NJ, to a library board meeting to speak out against censorship efforts . And in July, some community members in Cedar Grove urged library officials to remove Gender Queer, an award-winning LGBT+ memoir, from the public library’s book display. We sent a letter to library leadership urging them to resist all attempts to restrict access to any books in their town and recognize these calls for what they are: censorship.  

We know that when schools and libraries give in to undemocratic calls for book bans, that any action they take to restrict access to a particular title – whether on a shelf or in a curriculum – can spread quickly from town to town, magnifying the harmful chilling effect that censorship can have on diverse viewpoints. Neighboring towns may feel pressured to follow suit, and in the instances when access to books is limited by consortium libraries, which have wider geographical membership, the impact may be even greater.  

It’s important that we all know how to recognize censorship attempts in their many forms, because identifying them is the first step to defeating them. We can’t let regressive calls for book bans undermine democratic values or the lived experiences of marginalized communities. 

The ACLU-NJ is interested in learning more about how censorship attempts are showing up in your communities. We have been partnering with advocates who are fighting back against book bans, and we are keeping track of all censorship attempts across the state. If you know of censorship attempts in your local public library or school district, we want to hear from you – tell us where censorship is happening in New Jersey.

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Are You Seeing Book Bans in Your Community? Tell us.

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Banned Authors to Meet with Student Advocates for Speech

NEW YORK – The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) and the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) Impact and Legacy Fund, its newly formed charitable/social action division, are co-sponsoring a discussion of book banning with bestselling authors whose works have been challenged and members of Student Advocates for Speech (SAS), NCAC’s new initiative to build a national network of high school free speech clubs. The virtual event, Are You Free to Read What You Want?, will be held on November 30, 2022, at 8 p.m. ET. The public can register for the event at  ncac.org/sas .

Authors Ellen Hopkins, whose books include  Tricks ,  Impulse and Burned , Lesléa Newman,  Heather Has Two Mommies ,  Mike Curato,  Flamer,  and possibly a fourth author, will join the teenagers who are organizing SAS clubs in eight states, including censorship hotspots like Texas, Florida, and Missouri. The clubs will discuss book banning and the importance of free speech and organize events to show other students how to defend their First Amendment rights. Club members receive training and mentorship from free speech experts, educators, and authors. SAS is a project of NCAC’s Youth Free Expression Program.

The participants will address the increasingly dire book banning crisis. The latest data from the American Library Association (ALA) shows that the number of attempts to ban or restrict resources in school, academic, and public libraries, is on track to exceed record counts for the second year. In the first eight months of the year, ALA received reports of 681 challenges to 1,651 books.

About the National Coalition Against Censorship Since its inception in 1974, the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) has been a first responder in protecting freedom of expression, a fundamental human right and a keystone of democracy. Representing 59 trusted education, publishing, and arts organizations, NCAC works with people fighting censorship at the local level.  It encourages and facilitates dialogue between diverse voices and perspectives, including those that have historically been silenced.

About The SCBWI Impact and Legacy Fund The SCBWI Impact and Legacy Fund, launched in 2022, is a division of SCBWI created to support the charitable activities and community purposes of SCBWI. The mission of the SCBWI Impact and Legacy Fund is to provide and administer specific endowments, grants, awards, and programs that enhance the effectiveness and reach of the children’s book community. Specifically, these projects highlight the important role of children’s books and their creators, support quality children’s literature for all communities and audiences, and provide education, financial support, and public information for children’s book creators, their programs, and good works.

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A New Era for Banned Books Week: Book Censorship News, August 2, 2024

Kelly Jensen

Kelly is a former librarian and a long-time blogger at STACKED. She's the editor/author of (DON'T) CALL ME CRAZY: 33 VOICES START THE CONVERSATION ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH and the editor/author of HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD. Her next book, BODY TALK, will publish in Fall 2020. Follow her on Instagram @heykellyjensen .

View All posts by Kelly Jensen

This week, we’ve got a guest post from Maggie Tokuda-Hall, cofounder and national team leader for Authors Against Book Bans . In addition to the call to action around next month’s annual Banned Books Week offered below, here’s your reminder of how you can fight book bans and censorship . Remember to check your voter registration or get registered to vote if you aren’t, and spend time with your down-ballot candidates. Here’s a handy list of candidates who have pledged to support the mission of groups like Moms for Liberty to help you weed out those most dangerous to intellectual freedom and individual autonomy (current as of July 25) .

The fight against book bans has changed dramatically since Banned Books Week was started by the American Library Association in 1982. Book bans have always ebbed and flowed along with moral panics in the United States. But gone are the comparatively quaint days of banning Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark for being too, you guessed it, scary .

Now, bans don’t just seek to pull purportedly “offensive” content from the shelves. It’s to defund the shelves they sit on, in any institution of public learning that was funded enough to have shelves. The dark money, far-right extremists that favor bans have learned to capitalize on easily inflamed bigotries against LGBTQ+ and BIPOC creators who have only just been allowed entrance to the literary world. But, perhaps most infuriatingly of all, this has been accomplished through a contagious and pernicious lie: that there is pornography in the kids’ section. And that teachers and librarians are pedophiles, bent on grooming our children for sexual abuse. 

A horrifying prospect! If it were true. 

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It’s not. But that doesn’t seem to matter. That these are life-ruining accusations has not slowed down anyone bent on banning books. Nationwide our fellow citizens spring up, deputized by their fear and resentment, and lob these bombs onto educators just doing their jobs. It’s a neat bit of psychological warfare. Because as soon as you have to say “I’m not a pedophile!” you sound, unfortunately, just like a pedophile. And so institutions scramble to respond, wasting massive amounts of time and energy in institutions already short on funding and staff, fear spreads, and whole communities of educators are brought to heel and quietly start to censor themselves. 

The argument is, of course, that they are just protecting the children. That’s why Huntington Beach, California’s public library is having every single one of their children’s books— from board books to young adult— relocated out of the children’s section until they are audited for pornography. That’s why the public library in Donnelly, Idaho will be “adults only” starting this July. That’s why, apparently, it could soon be illegal to be a member of the American Librarian Association in Louisiana. This is why Project 2025 calls for all teachers and librarians who grant access to books about queer lives to be registered as sex offenders, and for all schools that teach “critical race theory” to be stripped of federal funding. To protect the children? 

This is a lie, too. No child is safe in a classroom stripped of its books when someone with an unregulated AR-15 comes to school. Never mind that pornography is easily sought on the internet, with just a couple key words, and that most children spend more time with their devices than they do in the public library. Ignore the very real accusations of grooming that come from various religious organizations. Because this was never about the children. 

I loathe to admit it, but it’s a genius bit of long-term strategy. Make a career in public education and learning toxic? Make the dissemination of information and narrative a criminal offense? You’ve just destroyed the most effective path to any progress in equality, sure, but that’s just a side effect of all the money you’re going to make from charter schools and vouchers and privatized libraries that charge outsized fees for consultation on the very work librarians have been quietly accomplishing for decades. 

Not even to mention that you’ve also just decimated the opportunity for cross-group solidarity. Education and narrative are the most powerful tools for liberation. That is precisely why they’re not just expendable, but targeted. That these bans also create a framework for doing physical harm to marginalized people (including children) is just a welcome bonus.

So what do we do?

Firstly, we stop kidding ourselves. This is a fight we’re losing. 

But it’s a fight that requires intimidation for success. And where communities stand against bans, the bans—and the politicians who exploit them for expedience and power—recede.

So. Secondly, we act.

Every year in September, libraries, independent bookstores, and schools all over the country celebrate Banned Books Week. Often, there’s a display put up with a hand-lettered sign featuring beloved and historically banned books like To Kill a Mockingbird , and Captain Underpants . But the time to quietly erect a display has come and gone. We are fighting a new fight now, one that depends on our fear. It is time to fight accordingly. It’s time to be brave.

After all—what have we been learning in the library for our whole lives? GK Chesterton knew: “Fairy tales do not tell children dragons exist. Children already know dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.”

As a founding member and national leadership team member of Authors Against Book Bans, I am so proud to suggest a list of action-oriented events we are suggesting to our membership, but also the literary community at large. Whether you’re a school, a book club, or an indie bookstore, or just a group of people who care a lot. Each of these events will put the focus on communities in need, the city hall, school board, and state legislatures where the decisions around book bans are made, and the down-ballot voting that is our most effective tool at winning this fight long-term. 

Make being a book banner an unelectable offense, and we still stop seeing candidates use bans as a springboard for their own political relevance. Show book banners that we are not afraid of them, and they too will scurry back to the shadows of irrelevance where they belong.

This year, Banned Books Week will take place from September 22-September 29 and we are hoping it will be the most impactful Banned Books Week yet. It’s an invitation to all of us to put a spotlight on this issue and use it as a galvanizing force to protect our children. Not from the books like Everyone Poops (which was banned for being pornographic in Huntington Beach. Yes, seriously) but from the forces that would see our children cheated of a wiser, bigger, more resilient version of themselves. That we should lose this fight and cede public education to far-right extremists is not a foregone conclusion. The vast majority of Americans disagree with book banning. But similarly, the vast majority of Americans aren’t paying attention to book banning.

So. Panels are helpful for raising awareness. Displays can move titles that often get forgotten. By all means, do those, too. But this year, Authors Against Book Bans suggest that we focus on concrete actions like these:

• Statehouse, Town Hall, or Public Library Read-In : This kind of event is great to build community around this issue, and to protest bad legislation or decisions that have been made, or to call attention to the issue where there is legislation coming to the floor (such as OH or CA). It builds community around the issue and can also be a venue for a banned book drive if a local indie bookstore is willing. You can either have the event at one of these public places or you can have the event at a bookstore and then lead a banned-book march to the public place.
• Postcard/Letter writing party to support librarians/school leaders/legislators : Host a party to write and send postcards to the librarians at each school and local branch in your district telling them you are in their corner and that librarians are not alone to celebrate their hard work for leading the fight for the freedom to read.
• Banned book sale/drive to ship to a community in need : Raise funds or physically sell books to be shipped or taken to a community in need. You can also do this in places where book bans are a problem. This can be done in front of a city hall or statehouse to draw attention, or at an independent bookstore. 
• Voter registration event : For these events, you are just collecting and encouraging voter registration with the goal of increasing turnout and communicating the necessity of “down ballot” voting, ie: voting on things other than the presidential campaign, which is considered the top of the ticket.

Lastly, no matter who you are, or how isolated you may be in your community on this issue right now, please know: you are not alone. None of us are alone in this fight. There’s a proud tradition of those who have fought for the freedom to read, and now we are all a part of that tradition. The literary community is, absolutely for the better, in this together. We are a powerful, passionate, smart group of people. We know more, because we’ve taken the care to actually read . And, most importantly, there are more of us than there are of them.

This is a fight we can win. 

Book Censorship News: August 2, 2024

This might be the quietest book censorship news roundup in a while, but don’t take it for granted. There’s plenty of news right now on school board candidates in districts which will be voting, so if you’re in one of those states, get to know your local slate this week. Likewise, school will be amping up in the next few weeks, and we know that the book banners have used this time to plan their next moves.

• There’s a new lawsuit against book banning. This time, it’s against the new Idaho law .
• A proposal to ban books in Knox County, Tennessee, schools, has failed .
• A professor believes book challenges in Catawba County schools (NC)—which have been going on for 2+ years at this point—can lead to economic disaster for the area and that professor is not wrong. Who wants to move where their rights are limited or challenged ?
• Since 2021, Florida has seen a 148% increase in book bans (that we know of).
• Mission Independent School District (TX), which agreed to remove nearly 700 books after a pastor complained, is now saying they actually won’t remove them. It’s kind of hard to believe that .
• There’s a new trustee on the Lincoln City Public Library (NE) board and she doesn’t sound like she’s pro-book banning. But the story itself mentions that the public library has dealt with several challenges …all to the books you’d expect them to be about.
• “A group challenging restrictive policies at the Autauga-Prattville Public Library [AL] last week renewed its call for a federal court to block those policies, arguing recent changes by the library do not address their concerns.” The ‘changes’ made by the board were not any less terrible .
• Crook County Public Library (OR) is dealing with an onslaught of challenges to LGBTQ+ material . Check the quote here from the woman whose bigotry is so blatant she refuses to be on camera for fear of being recognized. The library director here is firm in not wanting to create a separate LGBTQ+ shelf—as she should be. A decision on the future of these books could come Thursday evening [post-publication of this roundup].
• Hampton University (VA) received a bomb threat to its library . This is the fourth university library bomb threat in two weeks. I wonder when someone else will be covering this because that’s not normal.
• This is the kind of journalism I want to see so much more of: how students in the Houston area (TX) are taking on school boards .
• Last week, the Alpena County Board of Commissioners (MI) dissolved the public library board because they were unhappy the board wouldn’t remove LGBTQ+ books. Now, residents are organizing to get the board back and protect their library .
• Huntsville-Madison County Public Library  (AL) is trying to decide where and how to comply with the state’s new requirements to get financial aid. This is a really good piece and conversation they have about the position the state has put them in. The public library also dealt with a challenge to All Boys Aren’t Blue this week, and the board elected to keep it in the YA section where it belongs.
• Jeannette Public Library (PA) received a bomb threat this week .
• Thunder Bay Public Library (Ontario, Canada) received a bomb threat this past weekend related to a story time with drag queens event.
• Could the new state law in South Carolina undo the work done in Beaufort Public Schools , where most of the almost 100 books challenged were retained?
• Several books in Citrus County Public Library (FL) were moved from the young adult area to the adult area . One book— Jack of Hearts (and Other Parts) —was banned, while three that were challenged are “missing.” Still others will remain where they belong. Again, this is a public library.

Also In This Story Stream

• The Ongoing Censorship of High School Advanced Placement Courses: Book Censorship News, July 26, 2024
• The Quiet Censorship of Pride 2024: Book Censorship News, July 19, 2024
• Survey: What Happened During Pride Month? Book Censorship News for July 5, 2024
• The First American Union Understood The Necessity of Public Libraries and Education: Book Censorship News for June 28, 2024
• Here Come The Public School Closures: Book Censorship News, June 21, 2024
• States That Have Banned Book Bans: Book Censorship News, June 14, 2024
• How Alabama Library Supporters Took Action and You Can, Too: Book Censorship News, June 7, 2024
• Chilling Editorial Cartoons About Book Banning: Book Censorship News, May 31, 2024
• Here’s Where Library Workers are Prohibited From Their Own Professional Organization: Book Censorship News, May 24, 2024

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JD Vance, an Unlikely Friendship and Why It Ended

His political views differed from a transgender classmate’s, but they forged a bond that lasted a decade — until Mr. Vance seemed to pivot, politically and personally.

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By Stephanie Saul

Stephanie Saul, who covers education, reviewed about 90 emails and text messages spanning between 2014 and 2017.

When his book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” was published in 2016, JD Vance sent an email apologizing to a close friend from his Yale Law School days. The friend identified as transgender, but Mr. Vance referred to them in the book as a lesbian.

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“Hey Sofes, here’s an excerpt from my book,” Mr. Vance wrote to his friend, Sofia Nelson. “I send this to you not just to brag, but because I’m sure if you read it you’ll notice reference to ‘an extremely progressive lesbian.’”

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Nelson wrote back the same day, calling Mr. Vance “buddy” and thanking him for “being sweet,” adding, “If you had written gender queer radical pragmatist, nobody would know what you mean.” Nelson asked for an autographed copy, then signed off with, “Love, Sofia.”

That exchange is from a series of emails between two friends, part of a close-knit group of 16 students who remained together throughout their first law school semester in the fall of 2010. As now-Senator Vance seeks the vice presidency, Nelson has shared about 90 of their emails and text messages, primarily from 2014 through 2017, with The New York Times.

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Local no longer: 4 new laws and policies bring book banning to the state level

Laura Benitez contributed research to this post.

A new spate of state laws and policies is giving lie to the idea that banning books is about families making decisions for their own children. In Utah, Tennessee, Idaho, and South Carolina, state lawmakers have actually moved away from so-called “parental rights” – and into government-mandated book bans. 

The new laws and policies revolve around the idea of age-appropriate materials, which is historically a community determination. The new laws, however, move the decision up to the state: in Utah, for example, HB 29 will require all schools in the state to remove a book that is deemed to be “objective sensitive material” by just a few school districts in the state. In effect, the law will make the objections of just a handful of parents the law of the land.

Tennessee has created a similar framework with the recently-passed HB 843 . Under the law, students, parents, and public school employees can request a review from the State Textbook and Instructional Materials Quality Commission to determine whether a book is “suitable for the age and maturity level” of K-12 students if a local school board doesn’t make a decision within 60 days. The state’s definition of suitability includes a prohibition on sexual conduct, nudity, or excessive violence. If the commission decides to ban a title on those grounds, every public school in the state must remove it, even if a parent at only one school objected to it. In South Carolina, recent regulations do something similar: they allow the state to overturn local decisions and ban any book statewide that they determine is inappropriate.  

And in Idaho, HB 710 will allow the state attorney general to bring a civil suit against any public school, private school, or public library that provides books or materials that are deemed to be “harmful to minors.” Under the law, any person at all can request a review of any book or material that they believe violates the state’s obscenity laws, which include “any act … of homosexuality” within its definition. 

Recent history shows exactly where such state meddling will lead. In Iowa, for example, a 2023 law that prohibits sexual content in schools under the state’s directive to include only “age-appropriate” materials in school resulted in over 400 book bans in one district alone. The ban initially swept up classics like The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger and children’s picture books, like Everywhere Babies by Susan Meyers. Even after the district returned many of those books to the shelf, at least 65 remained banned, including titles by Margaret Atwood, John Green, and Judy Blume.

The trend toward statewide banned book lists conjures the world of George Orwell’s 1984 , but the book banning movement hopes you don’t get the reference: under these new laws, the book will likely be removed from shelves for containing sexual content.  

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