Two reports released Monday offer a mixed but compelling perspective on the wave of book removals and protests as “Banned Books Week” begins for schools, stores and libraries across the United States.
The American Library Association (ALA) has so far seen a substantial decline in 2024 in complaints about books held in public, school and university libraries, and in the number of books subject to objections.
Meanwhile, PEN America is documenting an explosion in the number of books removed from school shelves in 2023 and 2024, tripling to more than 10,000 from the previous year. More than 8,000 were removed in Florida and Iowa alone, where laws restricting the content of books were passed.
The two surveys do not necessarily contradict each other.
The ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom recorded 414 challenges in the first eight months of 2024, involving 1,128 different titles criticized. During the same period last year, it recorded 695 cases, involving 1,915 books.
The ALA relies on media reports and librarian data, and has long recognized that many challenges may go unaddressed, in part because librarians preemptively hold a book that may be controversial or refuse to acquire it at all.
Protests have reached record highs in recent years, and the 2024 total so far still exceeds the ALA’s pre-2020 numbers.
Deborah Caldwell-Stone, who directs the ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, also noted that the numbers aren’t yet available by the time the fall school year begins, when the laws that had been suspended in Iowa will go back into effect.
“The data from Iowa continues to flow in,” she said. “And we expect that to continue through the end of the year.”
Data varies by organization
The ALA defines a “protest” as “a formal written complaint filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of their content or appropriateness.” It does not keep specific figures on the number of books removed.
According to PEN America, the bans are tallied from local media reports, “school district websites and school board minutes, as well as organizational partners” such as the Florida Freedom to Read Project and Let Utah Read.
The Library Association relies primarily on local media and testimony from public librarians. And the two organizations have different definitions of the term “ban,” which is a big reason their numbers vary so much. The ALA defines a ban as the permanent removal of a book from a library’s collection. If hundreds of books are removed from a library for review and then returned, they are not counted as banned, but listed as a single “protest.”
For PEN, withdrawals, regardless of their duration, are considered bans.
“If access to a book is restricted, even for a short period of time, that constitutes a restriction on freedom of speech and expression,” said Kasey Meehan, who directs PEN’s Freedom to Read program.
Books on racial or LGBTQIA+ themes targeted
Both the ALA and PEN say that most of the books in question have racial or LGBTQIA+ themes, whether Gender Queer (Queer gender) by Maia Kobabe, Beloved And The Bluest Eye (The bluest eye) by Toni Morrison or Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison.
While some complaints have come from progressives who objected to the novel’s racist language, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) and other older works, the vast majority come from curators and organizations such as Moms for Liberty.
Iowa’s law, passed last year by the Republican-controlled state House, prohibits school libraries from owning books that depict sexual acts.
The law also requires schools to post their collections online and provide instructions to parents on how to request removal of books or other materials. Many districts already had such systems in place.
After LGBTQIA+ youth, teachers and prominent publishers filed legal challenges, a federal judge temporarily stayed key parts of the law in December, but that stay was lifted by a federal appeals court last month.
Banned Books Week, which runs through Sunday, was founded in 1982 and features readings and exhibits of banned books. It is supported by the ALA, PEN, the Authors Guild, the National Book Foundation and more than a dozen other organizations.
Filmmaker Ava Duvernay was named honorary chair, and student activist Julia Garnett, who opposed bans in her native Tennessee, is the honorary youth chair.me Garnett was among 15 “Girls Leading Change” honored last fall by first lady Jill Biden at a White House ceremony.