The year 2023 was another record-breaker for book bans. The American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) documented 1,247 attempts to censor library books and other materials—most of which were works by or about people of color, members of the LGBTQ community, or both. Since these attempts often target multiple items, OIF recorded 4,240 unique titles at risk, a 65% increase from the previous year.
OIF, which began collecting data about censorship attempts in US libraries in 1990—and started observing Banned Books Week in 1982—was formed in 1967 to provide tangible support to library workers as they sought to uphold the intellectual freedom tenets of the Library Bill of Rights and ALA’s Freedom to Read Statement.
As high-profile battles with lawmakers and courts over allegedly obscene materials took over the first half of the decade, OIF arose at a turning point for the profession as well as the country at large. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration brought support for the civil rights movement, the War on Poverty, and funding for libraries and higher education, representing a society-wide “change in moral standards” that spread to publishing, writes Louise S. Robbins in Censorship and the American Library: The American Library Association’s Response to Threats to Intellectual Freedom, 1939–1969 (Greenwood Press, 1996).
Robbins writes of the turbulent events of this period:
“These were but some of the tremors in the earthquake of the 1960s. By 1967, the escalating war in Vietnam was devouring funding for domestic priorities and bringing a more urgent and strident tone to antiwar protests. McCarthy-era elders, reared on a fear of communism, ran the insidious terrors of the early Cold War. The much-heralded ‘generation gap’ spelled trouble for librarians…. As ‘an institution of education for democratic living,’ the library had to find ways to carry out its chosen social role in a new and different and, very tumultuous, world.”
But even then, threats to intellectual freedom were far from new. Attempts to limit access to literature in the US are as old as our nation itself.
American Libraries travels through time to outline our country’s history of censorship—and the library workers, authors, and advocates who have defended the right to read.
1600s
1637 Thomas Morton, an Anglican lawyer and early colonist, published the New English Canaan, the first book banned in what is now the US. Morton’s work mostly described the Massachusetts area, its resources, and the Native Americans who lived there. He also wrote critically about Puritans, their government, and their treatment of Native Americans. The Puritan government, which did not take kindly to the criticism, outlawed the book in its New England colonies.
1700s
1740 The colony of South Carolina passed the first antiliteracy law, which prohibited teaching enslaved people to write or using them as scribes. The punishment was a £100 fine for each offense. Other states introduced similar laws, with punishments such as fines, imprisonment, and flogging. These laws were designed to hobble access to information, limit the circulation of antislavery materials, and silence the voices of enslaved people and abolitionists.
1775 To avoid prosecution, American printer Isaiah Thomas smuggled his printing press out of Boston to Worcester, Massachusetts. Thomas—publisher of The Massachusetts Spy, a political newspaper critical of British rule—absconded just days before the Battle of Concord, and the property he left behind in Boston was ransacked and destroyed by the British in his absence.
1800s
1829 While living in Boston, abolitionist and freeman David Walker published Walker’s Appeal, a pamphlet that openly encouraged enslaved people to rebel against their oppressors. Frightened Southern states moved to repress the pamphlet, even as smuggled copies reached the region. In 1830, Virginia Gov. William Giles wrote to Boston Mayor Harrison Gray Otis, saying that Walker should be punished. Otis spoke against Walker’s writings but declined to take action, admitting that he had done nothing illegal in Massachusetts.
1873 Congress passed the Comstock laws, which prohibited using the US Post Office to send “obscene, lewd, or lascivious, and filthy book[s] …. or other mail matter containing any filthy, vile, or indecent thing.” Under the laws, women’s rights activist Mary Ware Dennett was charged for distributing a sex education booklet, while birth control advocate Margaret Sanger left the country to avoid charges related to writing and disseminating The Woman Rebel, a newsletter that focused on contraception. While portions of the Comstock laws were gutted through legal challenges, they remain on the books—with present-day consequences because of their potential ability to criminalize abortion providers’ supply chains.
1900s
1918 During World War I, ALA’s Library War Service sent banned-book lists to military camp libraries on behalf of the War Department. The list included books that were considered too pacifist, pro-German, or pro-socialist, such as England or Germany by Frank Harris, The Bolsheviki and World Peace by Leon Trotsky, and The Last Weapon by Theodora Wilson Wilson. Camp librarians, many of them ALA volunteers, received orders to remove and destroy such books. One letter from ALA directed librarians to keep vigilant against objectionable materials, including publications from faith groups promoting pacifism and “so-called philanthropic societies.” It also warned that such publications might be placed on library shelves without camp librarians’ knowledge, making “constant watch necessary.”
1950 In February, two Black women, Mary Ellen Street and Clara Cooke, sat down with a friend—white librarian Ruth Brown of the Bartlesville (Okla.) Public Library (BPL)—at a drugstore counter in the segregated city. The group was refused service. Later that month, local citizens accused Brown, a longtime proponent of civil rights, of stocking “subversive” magazines such as The Nation, New Republic, and Soviet Russia Today at BPL. Brown’s library board stood by her, but city commissioners dismissed and replaced the entire board before firing Brown herself. Regarding her detractors’ sudden interest in BPL’s offerings, Brown commented, “Everyone knows what they are really fighting.”
1952 Consumer advocacy publication Consumer Reports appeared on the US House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee’s list of subversive organizations. In response, a patron of the Carnegie Public Library in Bryan, Texas, confronted a librarian after finding Consumer Reports on the library’s shelves. The patron claimed that the magazine was a communist front and that its subscription revenue was being turned over to the Communist Party. The librarian wrote to ALA, “Nothing could have astonished me more.… In fact, I felt that [the magazine] was doing a great service to the American public.”
1953 Disturbed by a “trend toward the restriction of the free trade in ideas,” ALA’s Intellectual Freedom Committee and the American Book Publishers Council held a conference in Westchester, New York. The conference produced the landmark Freedom to Read Statement. Separately, before the statement was finalized and published, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said in a commencement speech, “Don’t join the book burners…. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book.”
1959 Alabama Sen. Edward Oswell Eddins (D-Demopolis) attacked children’s book The Rabbits’ Wedding as “integration propaganda.” Written and illustrated by Garth Williams, who would go on to illustrate classics such as Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, the book features the marriage of two bunnies—one white and one black. Emily Wheelock Reed, director of Alabama’s Public Library Service Division, removed the book from general circulation but allowed librarians to access it for their institutions by request. In 2015, playwright Kenneth Jones published Alabama Story, a stage drama based on the controversy.
1986 Citing concerns about satanism and witchcraft, a few students and their parents challenged two dozen books at the El Camino (Calif.) High School library. Among the targeted titles: Roald Dahl’s 1983 children’s book The Witches. Complainants stated that the book contained information that “can be easily used to form a coven.” Another complaint took aim at the book The Game of Wizards (1975), which contained a yin-yang symbol that protesters considered an emblem of reincarnation. Despite arguing for the books’ removal, one parent said, “We’re not rabble-rousers or censors.”
1988–1989 Progressive advocacy group People for the American Way reported that during this period, nearly half of 172 challenges to ban or restrict educational materials succeeded. One of the most frequent objections was to content thought to be related to satanism, witchcraft, and the occult. One example: the 1987 picture book Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam and Lane Smith. It was removed from the young children’s section of a school library in Lawrence, Kansas, in response to parent objections.
2000s
2001 The Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA)—which requires schools to install internet-filtering technology on their computers as a condition of receiving certain funding and discounts—took effect. This law applies to computers used by adult patrons and library staff. ALA challenged the law, arguing that it violated the First Amendment rights of library patrons. The case went to the US Supreme Court, which upheld CIPA.
2006 The children’s book And Tango Makes Three, which features two male penguins who form a family, earned the title of ALA’s most banned book of the year. Based on a true story from New York’s Central Park Zoo and written by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, the book was moved from the fiction to the nonfiction children’s section at both branches of the Rolling Hills Consolidated Library in St. Joseph, Missouri, following complaints from parents. The book went on to appear on ALA’s list of Top 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books for 2000–2009 and 2010–2019.
2021 An event with award-winning author Jerry Craft at Roosevelt Alexander Elementary School in Katy, Texas, was canceled because of parent objections to his Newbery Medal–winning graphic novel, New Kid. Critics claimed the book taught critical race theory. One white parent claimed that Craft’s book, which tells the story of a Black 7th-grader attending a predominantly white private school, was inappropriate for instruction and that white children who read it would end up feeling like “oppressors.”
2023 At Bob Graham Education Center, a K–8 school in Miami Lakes, Florida, a single parental complaint resulted in the restriction of The Hill We Climb, a book by National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman. The book comprised the eponymous poem read by Gorman at President Joe Biden’s inauguration; the complaint argued that it is “not educational,” contains “hate messages,” and seeks to “cause confusion and indoctrinate students.” The school retained the book but moved it from shelves for younger readers to those for middle school students.
