Free People Read Freely: Growing Resistance to Book Banning ( www.projectcensored.org )

Across the nation, local residents have waged successful campaigns to resist censorship, with students, authors, and librarians fighting back in creative and powerful ways. For example, students in York, Pennsylvania, led fights to overturn school boards sanctioning censorship. Freedom to read advocates have run and secured school board appointments. Hundreds rallied on behalf of Martha Hickson, New Jersey’s 2023 Librarian of the Year, after she was targeted by a small but vocal group of parents over award-winning books such as Kebab’s Gender Queer and Jonathan Evison’s Lawn Boy. Those teens denied access to titles in their own schools have borrowed them electronically through the Brooklyn Public Library’s Books Unbanned initiative, now joined by other major libraries nationwide.

Recognizing that libraries cannot beat book bans alone, ALA formed Unite Against Book Bans (UBB), a broad coalition of publishers, authors, parents, and other advocacy groups that guides supporters to “let freedom read.” UBB recently added “Book Résumés” to its growing list of resources as a one-stop source for background about challenged titles. Joining the ALA and its Freedom to Read Foundation, PEN America, EveryLibrary, and the National Coalition Against Censorship have documented developments and offered local mobilization and legal support.

Nationally, new advocacy groups have formed, including Book Ban Busters, Grandparents for Truth, and Moms for Libros, bolstering the work of local groups such as the North Hunterdon-Voorhees Intellectual Freedom Fighters in New Jersey, the Galveston County Library Alliance in Texas, and both the Louisiana Citizens Against Censorship and the St. Tammany Library Alliance in Louisiana.

On the legal front, citizens from Llano County, Texas, obtained a preliminary injunction ordering the return of some sixty books to the public library’s shelves. In Arkansas, a judge prohibited enforcement of a book ban law likely to infringe on First and Fourteenth Amendment rights, declaring, “[T]he public library is not to be mistaken for simply an arm of the state. By virtue of its mission to provide the citizenry with access to a wide array of information, viewpoints, and content, the public library is decidedly not the state’s creature; it is the people’s.” Citizens in Florida, California, Iowa, and elsewhere have brought similar lawsuits that are now pending in the courts.

The Chicago Public Library initiated a nationwide campaign to declare libraries and their communities Book Sanctuaries to keep books safe. In New Jersey, the Hoboken Library has led a similar campaign, with more than twenty other New Jersey libraries joining it. In a state that named a service area on the Garden State Parkway after its most challenged author, Judy Blume, library champions now stand with the banned.