Book Bans Targeted More Than 1,100 Titles Since July

(Bloomberg) -- More than 1,100 books have been banned in schools across 86 districts and 26 states over the past nine months, with most challenges coming from in Texas, Pennsylvania and Florida.

A mix of local challenges and broader movements across the country resulted in bans, removals, or restrictions for 1,145 titles, including children’s biographies of Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and Malala Yousafzai, according to a report from PEN America published on Thursday.

Over 40% of those books focused on protagonists of color, and 33% centered on LGBTQ identities. Texas saw 713 bans in the nine-months from July 1 through March 31, the most of any state. Pennsylvania and Florida followed with 456 and 204 bans.

Book banning efforts have surged over the past year, with most of the targeted titles about race and LGBTQ identities. The data follow a report released Monday by the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom that found around 1,600 books were challenged or removed from libraries, schools and universities last year. It was the highest number of challenges seen in the group’s 20-year history of tracking such challenges.

Both reports featured overlaps of the most-challenged books, including Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer” and George M. Johnson’s “All Boys Aren’t Blue.”

“Where the books are being banned, the most consistent factor is that it involves school administrators and districts basically deciding or feeling pressure not to follow what I would call best practices for how those processes should be pursued,” said Jonathan Friedman, PEN America’s director of free expression and education programs.

According to the PEN America report, many of the bans result in the books’ immediate removal from schools, either flouting established review processes or in accordance with newer, more reactive laws.

The Georgia legislature in March passed a bill codifying how school principals should respond to complaints that a book or other material was obscene or “harmful to minors,” and how long they have to respond after a complaint is filed. Critics of the bill say there were already processes in place to address individual parent complaints, and that the bill can be used to target books by minority and marginalized authors.

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