*This story was originally published by The 19th.
The number of books banned in public schools over the past year skyrocketed to more than 10,000, with two states — Iowa and Florida — responsible for most of the bans, according to preliminary findings released by PEN America, a nonprofit advocating for the protection of free expression.
The report comes during Banned Books Week, which first began in 1982 to raise awareness about the importance of free and openly accessible information.
The rise in banned books during the 2023-2024 school year — nearly tripling from the 3,362 bans that PEN recorded the previous year — can be attributed partly to the singling out of books about romance, women’s sexual experiences, and rape or sexual abuse, according to PEN America. Books with LGBTQ+ or racial themes or characters from marginalized groups also continue to be targeted.
PEN America’s report does not reflect the banning of unique titles, so if a dozen school districts all banned the same book, it would count as 12 bans, a PEN representative said.
A number of books, many of which are works by women of color, showed up on PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans for the first time over the past year. They include Julia Alvarez’s 1991 novel, “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents,” about four immigrant sisters from the Dominican Republic — a popular pick for readers during Latinx Heritage Month; Amy Tan’s novel about the Chinese-American daughter of an immigrant mother, “The Kitchen God’s Wife” (1991); Terry McMillan’s romance novel “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” (1996); and Ellen Oh’s novel inspired by her mother’s experiences during the Korean War, “Finding Junie Kim” (2021).
Agatha Christie’s “Death on the Nile” (1937), Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (1943), Olive Ann Burns’s “Cold Sassy Tree”(1984), Barbara Kingsolver’s “Prodigal Summer” (2000), and Julie Murphy’s “Puddin’” (2018) also debuted on the index.
The 1953 novel “Go Tell It on the Mountain” by James Baldwin, a champion of civil and gay rights, appeared on the index for the first time, as did books related to slavery, such as Alex Haley’s “Roots: The Saga of An American Family” (1976) and W.E.B. DuBois’s “Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880” (1935), along with Philip K. Dick’s 1968 dystopian novel “Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep).”
More than a dozen new state and local policies contributed to the escalation of book bans over the past year. They include Iowa’s SF 496, which took effect last year and has been interpreted to mean that books with sexual or gender themes should be barred. According to PEN America, the law prompted thousands of book bans during the 2023–2024 school year, compared with just 14 bans in the state during the previous school year.
Florida’s HB 1069, which also took effect last year, mandates that books challenged for “sexual conduct” must be removed as they undergo review. PEN America said the statutory process the law created for book banning and “the state guidance building on it” has led to a spike in statewide book bans. In Florida and Iowa combined, roughly 8,000 book bans were recorded.
In Wisconsin, the Elkhorn Area School District banned more than 300 books for months on end, PEN America found. The books were removed after a single parent challenged them, but after the district reviewed the titles, they were eventually returned to the shelves, albeit with restrictions such as parental permission to check out certain titles. The organization expects newly enacted laws such as Utah’s HB 29, South Carolina’s Regulation 43-170, and Tennessee’s HB 843 to cause more book bans this school year.
The Utah law requires all schools in the state to ban a book once three school districts have found it objectionable. South Carolina’s regulation bans books with sexual subject matter and gives the state Board of Education the ability to censor works statewide. The Tennessee law requires schools to remove books accused of including gratuitous violence or sexual content.
To mark Banned Books Week, the American Library Association (ALA) also released preliminary data related to censorship, focusing on book bans in public, school, and academic libraries between January 1 and August 31. ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom said it identified 414 attempts to censor works and documented challenges to 1,128 unique book titles.
The number of attempts to censor books actually fell this year compared with last year’s 695 cases, the ALA found. The organization attributes this to widespread efforts to stop censorship. Librarians, students, and concerned community members have organized against book banning in recent years, and book banning disputes have gone to court. This includes a federal court’s preliminary injunction on Arkansas’s Act 372, which would open librarians and bookstore owners in the state to criminal prosecution if they failed to remove “unsuitable” works from their shelves.
Censorship is an issue that has drawn attention from the 2024 presidential candidates. Former President Donald Trump’s campaign platform accuses President Joe Biden’s administration of “using the public school system to push their perverse sexual, racial, and political material on our youth.” In July, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, criticized book bans while speaking to the American Federation of Teachers union in Texas.
“While you teach students about our nation’s past, these extremists attack the freedom to learn and acknowledge our nation’s true and full history,” she said. “We want to ban assault weapons, and they want to ban books. Can you imagine?”
The theme of this year’s Banned Books Week theme is “Freed Between the Lines,” to draw attention to how liberating reading can be. The week wraps up on Saturday with Let Freedom Read Day to urge communities to fight censorship. Film director Ava DuVernay is the 2024 honorary chair of the day, while activist Julia Garnett, who fought book bans in Tennessee, is the youth honorary chair.
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Once again, The Amsterdam News continues to push a one-sided story. Continue to glorify Kamala Harris, the hyena with no agenda other than bumbling around through interview after interview, who by the way is worse than Joe Biden. At least Joe Biden is honest about his racist history and you can look up his policies on C-SPAN. Then, you guys publish nothing but negative news about Trump. You might as well compare him to Satan while you are at it. The Democrats have only one line to push and that is of access to abortion. Choose to kill your baby and your future king black and brown people of America. They aren’t talking about crime or the migrant crisis or the border, heck not even the economic depression we are currently in. Nope, only identity politics. All about me, me, me rather than the American people as a whole. Also, why didn’t the article delve into the topic of drag queen story hours all across the USA? How they try to push transgenderism on elementary school children? Where’s the report and outrage about that? Babylonian America will be judged for these perversions. And to all the normal back and brown people that still believe in God and a traditional family unit and being actual good human beings that don’t kill or damage their children, continue the good fight because regardless we win in the end. No matter how much propaganda newspapers and mainstream media push every single day. God bless and please start researching the crap they want young, impressionable minds to read about gays and exposing them to all sorts of degeneracy.