Photo courtesy of the San Jose Public Library via Flickr. Libraries and schools have achieved some victories in fighting book bans, but continue to struggle.
By Amelia Potter ’26
Staff Writer
Book banning is no new concept; for several centuries it has remained a galvanizing issue within U.S. politics. According to the Harvard Library, the first recorded instance of book banning in the U.S. occurred in Quincy, Massachusetts, back in 1637. Recently, The New York Times has reported a drastic increase in book-banning efforts in schools within the United States.
This movement does not reflect the independent actions of individual parents, but rather “deep-pocketed organizations whose actions can change long-standing policies in a matter of months.” Since the beginning of the pandemic, the powerful scope of these conservative organizations has only risen. Their influence ranges from possessing local sway all the way to having a broad national impact. The Times reports that “over the past two years, they have become vastly more organized, well funded, effective — and criticized.” Within this recent explosion of censorship efforts, a report by the free speech organization PEN America reveals that a significant portion of these groups was formed after 2020.
School libraries have taken the brunt of this wave of censorship. The New York Times cited a report done by the American Library Association which found that in 2022, “some 60 percent of complaints that the association tracked were directed at books and materials in school libraries and classrooms.” Comparatively, public libraries received just 40 percent of challenges.
In previous years, controversies over which book titles were inappropriate for public school libraries mainly occurred on an individual level, between “a concerned parent and a librarian” and “resulted in a single title or a few books” being reassessed and possibly pulled. Now the wider pattern of book banning, as reported by The Times, results from an “influential constellation of conservative groups.” These Republican organizations, whose efforts have outpaced their liberal counterparts, work at all levels of the political spectrum. They portray their motivation as an attempt to protect the “innocence of children” against “indoctrination” and cite the “inappropriate” and even “pornographic” nature of the books in question as grounds for removal. The American Library Association reported via the New York Times that the targets of the bans are predominantly books “by or about Black or LGBTQ people,”
These conservative organizations are quick to denounce targeted books as “indecent or offensive,” and stretch this boundary to encompass books with no explicit indecency or pornography. Indeed, voices in fiction portraying the perspectives of POC and LGBTQ+ narratives are often unfairly antagonized. An instance of this, as reported by The New York Times, was the inclusion of the children’s story “And Tango Makes Three” — a book about “two male penguins who adopt a baby penguin” — by the Florida Citizens Alliance in their “Porn in Schools Report.” In response, advocacy groups argue that the premature banning of books based on such profiling results creates “a pervasively hostile atmosphere for LGBTQ+ students.”
Critics argue that book banning “infringe[s] on students’ right to access a broad range of material without political censorship,” The Times reports. Certain librarians point out the unjust reach of book censorship: The problem is not with individual parental concerns, but instead with “advocacy groups who rise up and demand that everybody read the books that they approve of and not read any other books, and deny that choice to other families.”
Amidst the flood of bans, there have been moments of victory for those that oppose them. In Texas, for instance, The Guardian reports that the “Round Rock Black Parents Association'' campaigned and succeeded against a ban effort, thus allowing the book “Stamped (For Kids): Racism, Anti Racism, and You” to stay on the library shelf. Parents also succeeded in New Jersey in banding together with anti-censorship advocates to keep various LGBTQ+-themed books on the shelves. Nevertheless, The Guardian warns, these progressive parent groups and activists are up against “formidable foes” — deep-pocketed conservative agendas with “links to prominent, wealthy Republicans.” These high rates of politically-motivated bannings are unlikely to simply peter out soon. As Amedeo DeCara, a researcher in the MHC library, points out, “legislation like this is poisonous,” and despite the “insulation” of Mount Holyoke, and more broadly Massachusetts, the College is “protected from book bannings and similar attacks only so long as the government is unwilling or unable to pass legislation allowing them.” DeCara puts forth the sobering reality that “Mount Holyoke is not an island. All of this impacts us” and that “increasingly, it feels like we’re teetering on the edge, one election away from disaster.”