Book Ban Boom
New state laws are fueling a record-high spike in book-banning nationwide
As America approaches its 250th birthday, book bans are at an all-time high, from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games. Even Anne Frank’s diary isn’t spared. It’s a battle over who controls the stories we tell and who gets to read them. Who’s winning?
NEW YORK—All the recent talk about book-banning by those on the right—and 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 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 written by Americans they suspected of being Communists.
[For those of you not 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 spontaneously combusts at 451 degrees Fahrenheit; the title of the book is a metaphor for the methodical destruction of intellectual liberty. The protagonist, Guy Montag, is 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 451—a book about an autocratic government censoring books—is being challenged by some far-right conservatives and banned by some local libraries this election year.
Art again imitates life? According to a report released this week by PEN America—a free speech group which 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 during the 2023-24 school year.
That’s nearly three times the number removed from library shelves the previous year, when 3,362 books—some of them classics— were rendered inaccessible.
So what’s up?
Book bans aren’t new—nor are complaints about censorship. Ever since the printing press was invented in the 1440s, those holding 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 whose residents have strongly opposed some books about race, gender roles and even democracy, itself. 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 post-Civil War classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), about a white teenager 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 mostly focus on race, family values, gender roles—and more recently on 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 are fueling this year’s big 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.”
One to Many
Traditionally, debates over which books are appropriate for schools and 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.
Some blame the pandemic. Most of the new networks of conservatives driving the ban movement, including Moms for Liberty, were organized during COVID lockdowns to both identify titles found to be objectionable and to push for new state and local laws to ban them.
This year, three years on, those efforts have morphed into a well-organized political movement that is having some impact—and triggering heavy opposition from librarians across the nation. And now, some books children choose to read on their own, outside of school— not just some of the works they have been assigned in schools—are also being contested.
Pro-ban organizations frequently describe themselves as defending parental rights. Some work at the school 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,” says Keith Flaugh, one of the founders of Florida Citizens Alliance. 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.”
Digital Caveats
In reality, though, many of the books being challenged or banned by parents are still accessible to all kids and adults— online, and for free through friend networks, social media platforms, TikTok influencers, and many other sources. Amazon book lists offer banned books for sale to anyone with little more than $20 to spend. And increasingly, banned books are being discussed in open forums by the people who wrote them—just in case your understanding of a particular book you hadn’t fully read yet is actually what some people think it’s about and want banned.
And like many other issues this election year, the book-ban movement is being amplified by Republican campaign strategists to build support for Donald Trump and down ballot candidates in close contests.
Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director for the American Library Association (ALA)’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, agrees that some of the controversy over popular books has been fanned by those on the far right citing waning trust in our nation’s institutions and in democracy, itself. “Some activists are trying to characterize libraries, one of the most trusted institutions in America, as being political, when in truth, we’re not here to limit access to ideas and wide-ranging perspectives; we’re here to ensure access to all kinds of them.”
Speaking on a panel this week organized for Banned Book Week observances, Caldwell-Stone said “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. But we’re now seeing policies and advocacy to stigmatize a whole range of previously beloved classics 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. “Some of these book ban advocates disagree with democracy.”
The Data
Here are some of the numbers released this week by PEN America and the American Library Association (ALA) to describe this year’s surge in book bans. Data excerpts were shared as part of this week’s 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 most recent challenges to books 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 now happening nationwide in public libraries and in school districts everywhere.”
This year’s book bans and challenges are mostly targeting books by and about women and girls, chiefly those which include depictions of rape or sexual abuse.
There were attempts to censor more than 100 titles in each of these 17 states: Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin, according to the ALA.
Books about race or racism are also being especially targeted this year, 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 work Baldwin set in Harlem, New York.
South Carolina's Regulations 43-170, passed this summer, prohibit books with sex-related content and gives the state Board of Education power to ban books statewide.
Tennessee’s HB 843 expands the Age-Appropriate Materials Act of 2022 to require 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 some pro-ban groups are targeting individual librarians, and chiefly librarians and educators who are speaking out against book-banning. Cindy Dudenhoffer, a former president of the Missouri Library Association, told Atlantic writer Xochitl Gonzalez 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 both protesters and library officials. Publishers, including Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, say the law violates First Amendment rights to free speech, and last month sued the State of Florida to overturn it. The suit names several books that have been removed from many school libraries under that law, including works by renowned authors Maya Angelou and Ernest Hemingway.
Utah has one of the most extreme book banning bills, PEN America says. HB29 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 “objectively sensitive material” as “instructional material that constitutes pornographic or indecent material” which citizens may wish to challenge. It doesn’t provide a definition of “indecent.”
A lot of the bans also are continuing to seek to remove school books citing the factual history of slavery and racial discrimination in America.
Some efforts to fight back have been successful. 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.
What now?
Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns maybe says it the best. “American democracy is fragile. We must be vigilant and respect, defend and improve the institutions that define who we are. …We need to make sure all Americans are being taught a complete history of this country so we can keep in touch with who we are as a nation—and at the same time, learn more about others and ourselves within that context, so as to understand how to work with others, together, to build a more perfect union.”
“…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 everyone more vulnerable to those who want to win or maintain power by diminishing individual freedoms.”
Stay tuned.
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.