Teen Gianna Goodman-Bhyat knew that if she wanted to get her peers’ attention about book bans in their community, she needed to do something drastic. She recruited a group of fellow teen activists to wrap caution tape around their backpacks and wear them to school as a symbol for the censorship that was occurring locally and nationwide.
When people asked about the caution tape, she and the other campaign participants had a flier handy with information about their cause.
“By the end of the week, there were at least 100 kids at my school who had participated in the caution tape campaign,” she shared. “That’s what allowed us to expand.”
Goodman-Bhyat, co-president of Golden State Readers (GSR) and high school student from Manhattan Beach, California, was one of the six youth activists at the Young Adult Library Services Association’s President’s Program, held July 1 at the American Library Association’s (ALA) 2024 Annual Conference and Exhibition in San Diego. She was joined by Da’Taeveyon Daniels, director of partnerships for Students Engaged in Advancing Texas and high school student from Fort Worth, Texas; Elizabeth Goldman, media team member at Golden State Readers (GSR) and student at University of California, Berkeley; sisters Anais Lee, head of media at GSR and Mirabelle Lee, head of education and workshops at GSR, both Los Angeles high school students; and Meghana Nakkanti, cofounder of Nixa Students Against Book Restrictions and student at Davidson (N.C.) College. They shared their experiences fighting book bans and what librarians can do to support the work of teen activists.
Mirabelle Lee said she first heard about this issue when she saw a social media post about poet Amanda Gorman’s book, The Hill We Climb, being banned. “Immediately, I texted my friends, and we were seeing what we could do to solve this problem in our communities,” she said. Prefacing that she attends a predominantly white school, she added, “The people at our school, to put it very plainly, simply don’t care that books were being banned.”
Anais Lee spoke to the impact that frequently challenged books have on youth, especially when it comes to representation and offering kids characters and themes they can relate to. “I can speak firsthand how important these books are,” she said, noting that one of her favorite books, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, was a book she’d read during class. She later learned that it is widely banned. “I was honestly shocked that so many of my classmates just had no idea of some of the issues around race.”
For his Student Advocates for Speech club, Daniels invited friends to discuss the matter over pizza. Offering snacks, especially to a group of young students, is simple but effective, he noted. After showing them an infographic of ALA’s Top 10 Most Challenged Books, there was a “moment of realization for them.”
“Once we had that little hook, I was like, ‘Who wants to start organizing around this?’” Daniels said.
Nakkanti recounted how she and her student group attended public meetings where they witnessed the behavior of book challengers, who were calling them names and displaying aggression. “We knew we couldn’t force these parents to be quieter, so we forced them to be more civil,” she said. Instead of engaging, the students remained polite. “Anybody who took any videos there saw a bunch of [teens] being infinitely more mature.”
“That’s one of the biggest things that you can do,” Nakkanti added, “is delegitimize the power that these movements have.”
