How groups like Moms for Liberty are turning school libraries on their heads.
The banning of “controversial” books is certainly not new, but it’s been consistently in the headlines lately — and the strategists behind this maneuvering are getting more creative about how to censor the titles they deem inappropriate for children in schools.
It’s not just book banning: Some groups are taking the attacks from individual books to libraries as a whole (more on that in a moment). But with thousands of titles being called out as allegedly dangerous each year, it’s time for a closer look at how this is unfolding around the country. We’ll begin with a recent example, centering around a historical figure who’s been taught in schools for years: Anne Frank.
Why was an Anne Frank novel banned from a school in Florida?
In Vero Beach, Fla., a book about the famous German-born Jewish girl who died during the Holocaust is no longer available to be checked out at the student library. The novel, Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation, is an illustrated take on her life — and notably, it’s written by a child of Holocaust survivors.
But according to some, it features two “sexually explicit” scenes. In the first, Frank walks along a series of nude statues, and in another, she asks a friend if they want to show each other their breasts.
Concerns about those scenes were raised by the advocacy group Moms for Liberty. Jennifer Pippin, who chairs the organization’s Indian River County chapter, said that history like the Holocaust “absolutely needs to be taught,” but it was ultimately determined by the school district — after Moms for Liberty spoke up — that parts of this book in particular don’t contribute to the mission of Holocaust education.
In addition to the Frank novel, the same chapter of Moms for Liberty also successfully objected to the removal of three more books. All of them came from a series called Assassination Classroom, which covers the adventures of a group of students who get placed with “a smiley-faced, octopus-tentacled schoolteacher with bizarre superpowers,” per the Amazon summary.
Who are Moms for Liberty?
This conservative activist group was founded in Florida, and it’s been grabbing attention for a few months now as members spread their influence through school boards around the country. The aim of the nonprofit, according to its mission statement, is to “fight for the survival of America by unifying, educating, and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.”
Per their website, Moms for Liberty claims to pursue this aim by “promoting liberty,” “engaging on key issues,” “spreading awareness,” and more — but in practice, their work looks a bit more incendiary than those key phrases might imply.
For example: In Lancaster County, Penn., members of a local Moms for Liberty chapter have repeatedly attended school board meetings to ask questions such as, “Will reading a book about rape inspire a student to become a rapist?” and “Would the school district allow a student to identify as a tomato?”
That local chapter has also focused much of their ire at the public school system around a memoir called Gender Queer. This book was written by nonbinary author Maia Kobabe as an attempt to explain to their family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual. According to local newspaper Lancaster Online, the book has been checked out at the student library a total of two times in two years — but that low circulation hasn’t stopped Moms for Library from using the book as a rallying cry.
While the organization hasn’t yet succeeded in getting that book yanked from the library, the success of pulling Anne Frank’s Diary off the shelves shows the group’s effectiveness in this arena.
The long, repetitive, painfully predictable history of book banning
According to the American Library Association, there were more than 1,200 requests to ban library books in 2022, the highest number on record since the association began 20 years ago.
This statistic is certainly connected to the increasingly popular and controversial effort by conservative groups and parents alike to censor what children learn in school. But it would be inaccurate to say anything about these efforts is “new.” Quite the opposite: For as long as books have been distributed, groups of people have fought to censor or ban them from public access.
In 1637, for example, the first recorded book ban in the United States took place, when Thomas Morton published New English Canaan, a three-volume work of nonfiction that was deemed to be too critical of Puritan values and history. The book was swiftly banned from circulation.
In other words, book bans have been taking place in this country before it even became an official country. What’s more, some of the most famous novels in the world (many of which are considered completely uncontroversial in 2023) were banned at some point in time. Some of these banned books include: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; Ulysses by James Joyce; The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou; and The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, to name a few.
In fact, when Katie Couric Media spoke to author Jonathan Evison, whose novel Lawn Boy has faced significant efforts to ban it, he told us the idea that high quality work is often what gets targeted is well understood in the literary community. “There’s a certain amount of street cred that comes with being a banned book,” he said. “If you look at the list, it includes some of my favorite books.”
Why book banning never actually works
Take five minutes to read about the history of book bans and you’ll learn something pretty quickly: They tend not to last long, and they tend to arise as the result of one individual or group’s discomfort with topics that feel too “modern” or “progressive” for the given time period.
In 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was such a controversial book that a bookseller in Mobile, Ala., was driven out of town for selling it. In the 1960s, To Kill a Mockingbird first came under attack for being “immoral” and “improper for children.” Oh, and not to mention the Harry Potter series, which continues to be one of the most challenged set of books year after year, thanks to its “witchcraft, occult, and anti-family themes.”
If you’re looking for a lesson from history, it might be this: Book bans don’t tend to stick, and they certainly don’t succeed in burying any given book. If anything, they often highlight a book well beyond its notoriety prior to the controversy. Gender Queer, for example, has seen a “skyrocketing” of sales following the efforts by certain groups to ban the book, NBC reports.
What comes after book banning? Defunding libraries
It seems that certain Republican politicians have noticed how ineffective book banning is, because they’ve moved on with a much bigger and more effective strategy of censorship: the defunding of libraries altogether.
In one rural county of Texas, for example, a federal judge recently overturned an order to ban a number of books at the three public libraries under his jurisdiction — and now, the Commissioners Court of this county is considering shutting down those three libraries completely.
Similarly, the Republican-controlled Missouri State House recently passed a budget that doesn’t include any funding for its public libraries. This decisive measure came after the Missouri Association of School Librarians and the Missouri Library Association chose to challenge a law passed last year that aimed to remove “sexually explicit” material from libraries.
The future of Missouri’s public libraries still has a fighting chance, however. Missouri state Sen. Lincoln Hough recently told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that “there is no way” the Senate won’t restore funding for libraries in the final budget.
Still, these recent attacks on libraries are a chilling reminder that the defunding of public libraries and of the public school system are a far more dangerous way to take the ideas behind book banning even further.
