Casting shadows over both public and school libraries, book bans have hit record numbers and continue to trend upward. But education experts say that despite these “bleak” realities, the power to preserve literary freedom still remains in the hands of concerned parents, kids and educators.
On July 10, children marched across the campus of South Carolina State University in a protest against book bans. A part of the “Why Not Young Lives” summer program, the children joined the chorus of voices from citizens across the nation pushing back against literary suppression. Research and legal experts say this community resistance, along with legislative initiatives in states like Illinois and Minnesota to ban book bans, illustrate the rocky state of literary rights.
In 2022, Sabrina Baêta was hired to track budding book bans for a three-month study at PEN America, a nonprofit organization focused on free expression and literary and human rights. Now, two years later, the project has turned into a department, and Baêta is a program manager on its Free Expression and Education team. What started out as the independent removal and restriction of books by local and state officials across the country has turned into the “coordinated” efforts of groups advocating for censorship, Baêta told The 19th. District-level restrictions influence politicians and state legislation and “supercharge” this movement, Baêta said, which has led to an increase of book bans in blue and red states alike.
PEN recorded 5,894 instances of book bans over the course of the last two school years. The number of these bans not only increased by 33 percent each school year but spread across 41 states and 247 public school districts. Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Tennessee had the highest number of book bans according to “Banned In The USA: Narrating The Crisis,” a report released by PEN America in April.
Florida, which led the pack, became a model for how intimidation from advocacy groups and fear from school districts fast-tracked removals and bans in 2024. In an article released in January, PEN America reported that more than 1,600 books had been banned in Escambia County, Florida. The list of titles included five dictionaries and eight encyclopedias. PEN America cites “fears” of violating “the state’s new laws banning materials with ‘sexual conduct’ from schools” as the motivation for their removal.
“The reason a Florida becomes a Florida is because of [the] combination of advocacy groups, and then legislation that causes book bans either directly, but also indirectly, through the fear and intimidation that it stokes. When there’s vague terminology used on what kind of books or what kind of content is no longer allowed, and there’s no guidelines provided — that causes a lot of self-censorship on the districts’ parts,” Baêta said. “What we’re seeing going forward is that it’s happening all over the country.”
In 2023, the Fort Worth Independent School District pulled 118 titles from shelves for review on grounds of “age/grade level appropriateness.” While 90 titles are returning to shelves this year, the district’s efforts showed a trend in targeting marginalized stories and authors. While state book bans range in the topics they forbid, data collected by PEN shows an increased focus on books pertaining to race and racism, LGBTQ+ communities, and transgender identities. Books concerning sexual violence also remain amongst those being banned. To Baêta, the books can be challenging, but students ask for materials on these difficult topics, and deserve access to them.
Common book-challenging tactics such as highlighting controversial passages out of context serve as means to further the public’s fear. Education experts say that these strategies not only undermine the work of media specialists and librarians who create school shelves, but the ability of students to find literature suited for them.
“Media specialists [and] librarians have been the ones selecting and curating these collections. It’s not like random books are being shoveled on shelves. That’s not how a school library works. It was already there because it’s pedagogically appropriate,” Baêta said.
She added, “It’s not [that] every book needs to be for one student, but you want to be able to have a book for every student.”
For organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), book bans not only infringe upon First Amendment rights, but present challenging signs for democracy.
Vera Eidelman, a staff attorney with ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, monitors free speech rights for young people. To Eidelman, book bans have always been “a serious problem,” contradicting First Amendment rights and putting up barriers to free thinking and choice.
Book bans convey the message that the government is saying, “These ideas are bad, and you shouldn’t engage with them. These authors, these voices, these views aren’t worthwhile,’” Eidelman said. “Those are really troubling messages and I think they really restrict the ability of people to think and to make up their own minds.”
She added, “And when we’re talking about libraries, that’s particularly troubling, because the whole point of libraries is to be a place for people to experience the vast array of human thought, to see how people write about, think about, imagine different experiences.”
Through news reports, in interviews, across social media platforms and in policy research, students have echoed Eidelman’s sentiments.
“As a teenager I am still trying to find my way in this world; I want to know as many other viewpoints as possible so that I know my thoughts are my own and not just a product of a limited amount of information,” Jason, a teenager in Maine, wrote in response to a callout from The New York Times. “Even if these books are not required reading they should be allowed in libraries. Families can decide what books are allowed in their homes but trying to force a community to get rid of a book is a way of forcing one’s beliefs on an entire community.”
Ainsley Foster, a sophomore at Indiana University, wrote in a campus paper, the Indiana Daily Student: “What book ban proponents fail to see is that the students they are attempting to ‘save’ by challenging books are living those stories themselves. These aren’t just books; they are the lived experiences of their readers too. The youth of America deserve to see themselves represented in literature, no matter their gender, color of their skin or the people they love.”
Asia Alexander, a rising senior at Howard University, grew up in Florida as book bans there were picking up steam. In an interview with The 19th, she said she found her lack of access to diverse materials stifling to her academic knowledge and sense of self.
“Freshman year was really overwhelming because I felt like my education in Florida was watered down, because I didn’t know that these different types of communities existed. You only see two things in Florida: Black and Hispanic people and White people. You are not going to see different groups of people being represented. And so to come to DC where it’s a melting pot, and to experience all these cultures and talk to other kids at school who had already known about this kind of stuff. I was thinking, ‘Am I stupid? Am I supposed to know who these people are?’” Alexander said.
A study conducted by First Book, a nonprofit working to ensure education equity, measured the impact diverse books have on students and found that students’ reading scores and engagement increased by 7 points and 4.5 points respectively when LGBTQ+ and bilingual titles were added to their classroom libraries. Seventy percent of educators surveyed in the study found that students choose books with characters that “looked like them.”
The efforts of teachers and community members joins the work of state leaders, advocacy groups and legislators who are pushing back against book bans. But while they set the precedent, experts emphasize that educators, parents and students like Alexander have the power to make true change.
“I think those folks have a lot of power,” Eidelman said. “I know that it may not feel that way right now. But I think that’s ultimately historically what has worked. Like, yes court cases have mattered, yes, new legislation has mattered. But I think what really makes the difference is concerned individuals, concerned parents, concerned kids, concerned educators. … Book bans aren’t new. We’ve had to fight these fights before. And we’ve succeeded, whether that’s in the courts, or in school district meetings, or PTAs, or legislatures.”
Baêta agrees. “I’ve had a lot of teachers and librarians who are done — they are done with the censorship. They’re protecting their books, they’re protecting their libraries, they’re protecting their students and they want to be loud about that. And the more people are activated towards this — whether it’s students, civil rights groups, everyone — and become aware of this, the better shot we have towards fighting it.”