Book Ban Boom
New state laws are supercharging efforts by the right to ban thousands of books nationwide
This week is Banned Book Week, observed by librarians nationwide to fight censorship and support intellectual freedom. But this Fall, two years before America’s 250th birthday as a democracy, book bans are on the rise nationally. Harry Potter, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn remain on the hit list in some schools and libraries, and so does Anne Frank and Katniss Everdeen and her Hunger Games exploits. What’s next?
NEW YORK—All the recent talk about book-banning sought by those on the right—and on the left—makes me recall the day some years ago when I finally got the meaning of the phrase, “back to the future.”
I had just boarded a private Staten Island-bound ferry with some fellow creatives, media executives and technologists invited to attend the annual, star-studded Future of Storytelling Summit. Just before disembarking at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center, each of us were handed a copy of Fahrenheit 451, the dystopian novel written by the late sci-fi author and screenwriter Ray Bradbury in 1953—during another time when America was facing a socially fraught, uncertain future. In a 1956 interview, Bradbury said he wrote the book because of his concerns during America’s McCarthy era, about the threat by far-right conservatives to start burning books in the United States.
(For those of you not yet familiar, the book is set in a future American society in which books are outlawed and “firemen” are ordered by the government to burn any that are discovered. Paper burns at 415 degrees Fahrenheit; the story follows the protagonist, Guy Montag, a fireman who begins to question his duty to the state. Ultimately, he has to choose between his personal beliefs against censorship and his loyalty to a government seeking to maintain power and control by limiting facts and free thinking.)
Ironically, Fahrenheit 415—a book about an autocratic government censoring books— is now being banned by many local libraries across the country this election year.
Art again imitates life? According to a report released this week by PEN America—a free speech group that gathers data on book bans from school board meetings, school districts, local media reports, public libraries and other sources across America—more than 10,000 books were banned in U.S. libraries and public schools during the 2023-24 school year, nearly tripling the number nationwide from the previous year, when 3,362 recorded bans were reported.
That’s almost three times as many removals as were reported last year.
So what’s up?
Book bans aren’t new in real life, nor are complaints about censorship. Ever since the printing press was invented in the 1440s, those holding the most power and influence in society have sought to ban books they found to be objectionable.
Around the world, and for decades in America, books have been challenged and removed from schools and public libraries, especially in local communities which strongly oppose them. For years, the American classic, To Kill A Mockingbird, published in 1962 about a white lawyer in a small town in Alabama who defends a Black man falsely accused of rape, remains banned in dozens of public libraries in America’s conservative South. So is Mark Twain’s classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), about a teen who fakes his own death to escape his abusive father, encounters a runaway slave named Jim and embarks with him on a raft journey down the Mississippi River.
Today’s bans still focus on race, family values and more recently, gender and sexual orientation issues and stories about sexual abuse. But what’s different this year, says Los Angeles Public Library’s chief librarian, John Szabo, is that this year’s bans, in number and scale, are “reaching McCarthy-level proportions.” According to PEN officials, new state laws being pushed by far-right conservatives seeking to limit the distribution of books they abhor and remove them from public schools and libraries are fueling the spike in book-banning. “State legislation has been particularly critical in accelerating book bans,” the organization wrote in a memo released this week, “and it is making it easier (for people) to remove books from schools without due process, or in some cases, without any formal process whatsoever.”
The Far Right Gets Organized
Ever since the pandemic began to wane in 2021, the number of book bans and challenges to titles by the right has become very well-organized, pushed by new networks of conservatives, many of which were started, like Moms for Liberty, during COVID school lockdowns to both identify titles found to be objectionable and inappropriate for their children to read, catalyzing a new movement to advocate for new state and local laws to ban them.
This year, three years later, the conservative book ban movement is having some impact—and is also receiving heavy opposition this election year from librarians across the nation, as the right’s new ban movement is also targeting some books children choose to read, not just some of the works they have been assigned in schools.
Traditionally, debates over which books are appropriate for school libraries have taken place between a concerned parent and a librarian or administrator, and have resulted in a single title or a few books being re-evaluated, and either removed or returned to shelves. But now, the issue is being supercharged by a rapidly growing and increasingly influential constellation of conservative groups. The organizations frequently describe themselves as defending parental rights. Some are new and others are longstanding, but with a recent focus on books. Some work at the district and state level, others have national reach. And over the past few years, these groups have grown vastly more organized, interconnected, well funded — and effective.
“This is not about banning books, it’s about protecting the innocence of our children,” Keith Flaugh, one of the founders of Florida Citizens Alliance said. The organization is a conservative group focused on education “and letting the parents decide what the child gets rather than having government schools indoctrinate our kids.”
In reality, though, many of the books being challenged or banned by parents are still available to students—and even young kids— online, accessible through their networks, social media platforms and bookstore book lists accessible to anyone with at least $20, and in seconds. But like many other issues this election year, the book ban issue is becoming a political power struggle and an expansion of the culture wars which have been organized for months to gather increasing support for the Republican Party in this year’s presidential election.
For Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director for the American Library Association (ALA)’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, it’s about that, but more importantly, it’s also about the far-right’s waning trust in our nation’s institutions and in democracy, itself.
Speaking on a panel this week organized for Banned Book Week observances, Caldwell-Stone said: “While the ALA fully acknowledges that a parent has the right to guide their student’s reading and the right to have that conversation and perhaps ask that their student not be given that book, we’re now seeing policies and advocacy to ban non-controversial books kids and young adults want to read, and to stigmatize a whole range of materials under the rubric that they’re illegal or pornographic — when they are none of those things.”
“…We want folks to understand that public libraries are a shared public resource in this democracy and that they have to serve everyone in the community.”
The Los Angeles Public Library’s Szabo says the book ban movement is escalating at the same time that efforts are being made by school and public libraries “to have collections which better represent the diversifying communities we now serve."
“ …We librarians don’t want to push any particular point of view,” Szabo says, “but we do want and need to be more inclusive of the communities we serve. Public libraries have always been pillars of democracy. Some of these book ban movements and advocates are starting to disagree with what we have stood for as a nation.”
The Data
Here are some of the preliminary highlights released this week by PEN America and the American Library Association (ALA) about this year’s surge in book bans. Excerpts of that data were shared as part of this week’s annual Banned Book Week observance and reveals the following:
Republican-led efforts to pass legislation restricting certain types of books in public schools were initiated this year in Arizona, Idaho, Nebraska, Utah and Tennessee. Most of the challenges and bans—more than 8,000 of them—have emerged in Florida and Iowa but PEN America’s Freedom to Read program director Kasey Meehan says “book bans are happening nationwide in public libraries and in school districts everywhere.”
This year’s book bans are increasingly targeting books by and about women and girls, chiefly those which include depictions of rape or sexual abuse.
The stark increase in this year’s bans mostly target books featuring romance as well as books about race or racism, PEN America says. At least 13 titles were banned for the first time this year, including Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family, which describes the journey of an enslaved person from Africa to the U.S., and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and Go Tell It On the Mountain, the acclaimed semi-autobiographical works set in Harlem, New York.
South Carolina's Regulations 43-170, passed this summer, prohibits books with sex-related content and gives the state Board of Education power to ban books statewide.
Tennessee’s HB 843, which expands the Age-Appropriate Materials Act of 2022 and now requires schools to remove books that contain nudity, “excess violence,” or sex-related content, and empowers a state commission to review and ban books statewide.
Protests by pro-ban groups against schools and libraries are becoming increasing challenging for librarians, and librarians and educators are speaking out in response to recent and increasing book bans. Cindy Dudenhoffer, a former president of the Missouri Library Association, told Atlantic writer Xochitl Gonzalez recently that she has been harassed by protesters who have called her “a pedophile, a groomer and a Communist pornographer” for working at libraries which include books about diverse topics, issues “and some of the American classics previously beloved by most Americans.”
A book ban law in Iowa, which went into effect last year, prohibits any material that depicts sexual acts from all K-12 schools, with the exception of religious texts. Iowa’s SF 496, which took effect July 2023, also prohibits “Don’t Say Gay” copycat provisions censoring discussions of LGBTQ+ identities in the classroom. It also limits instruction about gender and sexual orientation until the seventh grade.
In Florida, a law that took effect before the 2023-24 school year said any book challenged for “sexual conduct” must be removed while it is being reviewed by protesters and library officials. Publishers including Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, argue that the law violates First Amendment rights to free speech, and sued the State of Florida over the law in August. the suit names several books that hav ebeen removed from school libraries under that law, including works by renowned authors Maya Angelou and Ernest Hemingway.
Utah has one of the most extreme bills, PEN America said, referring to the law, HB29, which says a book must be pulled from all schools in the state if at least three school districts have found the title to be “objectively sensitive material.” It defines “objective sensitive material” as “instructional material that constitutes pornographic or indecent material” which citizens may wish to challenge. It doesn’t provide more specificity.
A lot of the bans also are continuing to seek to remove school books citing the history of slavery and racial discrimination in America.
Last month, a northeast Florida school district agreed to restore 36 books challenged and previously pulled from campus libraries in a settlement of a federal lawsuit fighting how local officials carried out the state’s policies for shielding students from what was considered to be “obscene content.” Under the agreement, books including The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean Auel will once again be available to students after being removed last year.
“A ban isn’t a plan,” says American historian Ken Burns: “What’s really going on here is that the culture wars in the U.S. have become highly politicized this election year, and some bans are now sideshows to attract new voters to the GOP.”
“…We need to start focusing on building movements that can beat American fascism … to make sure all Americans are being taught a complete history and are being exposed to multiple perspectives, whether they or their parents or siblings agree with them or not. If you don’t offer people a choice about what they can read and think about, you not only risk sanitizing reality, you risk making people ignorant of who we all are and vulnerable to bad actors who wish to diminish our individual freedoms.”
For the most current list publicly available of school book bans, here’s PEN America’s most recent index and its preliminary memo about those bans for the 2023-2024 school year. The American Library Association compiles a list of the Top 10 Most Frequently Challenged Books based on reports from the field and media coverage. A more complete list for 2024 will be released by the organization later this year, along with updates of public library bans issued by state.
Let us know your thoughts, and stay tuned for further coverage.