National Library Week in the US comes amid a period of turmoil for libraries, as efforts to censor books intensify.
Visual storyteller Ariel Aberg-Riger explores the threats libraries face, their historical context and how activists are mobilizing to protect a diversity of thought.
Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer was the most challenged book in 2022, according to the American Library Association. Chris Sweda / Chicago Tribune / Tribune News Service via Getty Images
Maia Kobabe’s graphic novel Gender Queer: A Memoir documents Kobabe’s coming out as nonbinary and asexual.
Since the book’s publication in 2019, readers have been regularly reaching out to Kobabe to express their appreciation for Gender Queer’s heartfelt writing and exploration of gender and sexuality.
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All Boys Aren’t Blue, a memoir for teens and young adults about growing up Black and queer, appeared on many “best books” lists when published in 2020. It’s being challenged in some U.S. counties.
From religious texts and anti-slavery novels to modern works removed from school libraries, here’s how the targets of censorship have changed over the years.
By Erin Blakemore, Published September 6, 2022
Book banning is more common than ever. Stories featuring LGBTQ+ issues are often targets today—including these five books that recently survived an attempt to remove them from the shelves of the library at North Hunterdon Regional High School in Annandale, N.J. Photograph by Bryan Anselm, Redux
Mark Twain. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Judy Blume. William Shakespeare. These names share something more than a legacy of classic literature and a place on school curriculums: They’re just some of the many authors whose work has been banned from classrooms over the years for content deemed controversial, obscene, or otherwise objectionable by authorities.
Book banning is once again in the headlines. Earlier this year, Utah approved a state law suppressing “sensitive material” in classrooms. Meanwhile, a group of Georgia moms have gotten attention for attending school board meetings and reading passages out loud from books they find objectionable, such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, claiming they are “pornographic materials.” (Did Ovid’s erotic poetry lead to his exile from Rome?)
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Visitors look at a globe in the map division at the main branch of the New York Public Library in New York. The library announced an effort this week to make commonly banned books available through their app. Seth Wenig/AP
In response to the more than 1,500 books challenged to be removed from libraries in the last year, the New York Public Library launched an effort to make some banned books available for everyone — for free.
The initiative is called Books for All and allows any reader aged 13 and older to access commonly banned books through the library’s app until the end of May. There are no wait times to access the books and no fines, the library said. Typically, access to books at the New York Public Library are only available to New Yorkers with a library card.
“The recent instances of both attempted and successful book banning —primarily on titles that explore race, LGBTQ+ issues, religion, and history — are extremely disturbing and amount to an all-out attack on the very foundation of our democracy,” said Tony Marx, president of the New York Public Library.
“Knowledge is power; ignorance is dangerous, breeding hate and division … Since their inception, public libraries have worked to combat these forces simply by making all perspectives and ideas accessible to all,” Marx said.
The New York Public Library’s efforts launched on April 13. The books currently available are Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, King and the Dragonflies by Kacen Callender, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi, and The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.
Throughout history, certain books have come under fire for content deemed inappropriate or controversial — often, that content is by and about people of color, the LGBTQ community, and other marginalized groups.
As a spate of classroom censorship bills aim to erase discussions about race and gender in schools across the country, books about the same issues are being banned and challenged across public schools and libraries at an alarming rate.
In 2021, the American Library Association recorded 729 book challenges, compared to 156 challenges received the year prior.
–from article…
Read about some of the books that have most recently been banned or challenged for removal across public schools and libraries in our ‘ACLU Banned Book Club Reading List’ below.
NOTE: The following list includes books that have been formally removed or were recently challenged for removal from public schools or libraries.
1. “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison
Published in 1970, “The Bluest Eye” was Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winning author Toni Morrison’s first novel. Its 11-year-old protagonist, Pecola Breedlove, copes with racism and sexual abuse as she comes of age in 1940s Ohio. Despite its status as a seminal work by one of the foremost authors in American history, the book has been a frequent target of bans for content described as “sexually explicit material,” “disturbing language,” and an “underlying socialist-communist agenda.”
“The Bluest Eye” is one of the books at the center of a lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Missouri in February against Wentzville R-IV School District. The school district reversed its decision to ban the book shortly after the lawsuit filing, but litigation continues. Other recent challenges to the book have occurred in Mississippi, where Mayor Gene McGee of Ridgeland attempted to withhold over $100,000 in public funds from the Madison County Library System unless it purged it and other specific books, and in Virginia, where a school board in Virginia Beach removed the book from circulation, only to return it to shelves shortly after due to public outcry.
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