Book Banning in the U.S. at an All-Time High
The American Library Association’s list of the Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2023 includes “All Boys Aren’t Blue”, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” and “The Bluest Eye.” (Source)
January 6, 2025 ~ By Brooke Pland
Since 2021, a rapidly increasing number of states, schools, and school districts have pulled books off library shelves to censor specific themes, including racial justice and LGBTQ+ issues
Prior to 2020, the phrase, “book banning,” didn’t have much of a place in the day-to-day American lexicon, nor did the battle against censorship come to mind as a hot-button political issue. Over the last few years, though, the U.S. has seen a modern resurgence in book banning as an all-time high number of schools, parents, and legislatures across the country pull titles off shelves over content controversies, namely for political reasons. Today, more than 4,000 books have been banned in the U.S. across 247 school districts and 41 states, with many titles under deliberate attack for their content about race, racism, and LGBTQ+ experiences.
A Brief History of Book Banning in the U.S.
Now, book censorship in the U.S. is not new. The removal of books from public access in order to protect, contain, or control specific ideologies dates back to America’s origins: Thomas Morton’s critique of Puritanism, New English Canaan, became the first banned book in 1637, in what is now Quincy, MA. Soon after, disagreements over the Puritan Calvinists’ belief in predestination led to the widespread banning and burning of Massachusetts Bay colonist William Pynchon’s writings.
Published in 1637, Thomas Morton’s “New English Canaan” denounced Puritanism and viewed Native Americans as equal or better than white colonists. The work is considered the first banned book in the United States. (Source)
In the 1850s, the history of book banning took a racial turn as several states forbade all forms of public expression against slavery; as a result, works such as Harriot Beecher Stowe’s prolific novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, faced the same burning and banning from Southern slaveholders that its colonial predecessors did from the Puritans.
In 1873, the introduction of the Comstock Act criminalized the possession or mailing of “indecent” or “immoral” texts in an effort to restrict information about sexuality and the sale of contraceptives. Around the same time, state-sanctioned book banning in Boston, overseen by the hyper-moralist New England Watch & Ward Society, was so common that many authors deliberately printed their work there knowing its imminent ban would make headlines.
Until the mid-20th century, the Jim Crow South also posed enormous challenges for public access to literature, with widespread restrictions of reading materials on Black historical figures, interracial marriage, and even certain perspectives on the Confederacy’s loss in the Civil War. Across the South, academic textbooks were censored and whitewashed by segregationist parents, teachers, and legislators.
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By the 1950s, the spread of communism throughout the world and the onset of the Cold War had serious implications for literature in the U.S. At the hands of McCarthyism and the “Red Scare,” literature – and authors – sharing ideas deemed communist or socialist (or even sympathetic to those ideologies) faced intense scrutiny in the name of weeding out “un-American activities.”
U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy (right) at the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations’ McCarthy-Army hearings on June 9, 1954. (Source)
The most recent surge in America’s history of book banning originated in the early 1980s with Baptist minister Jerry Falwell and his right-wing, fundamentalist Christian political action group, The Moral Majority. The group opposed women’s liberation, gender equality, abortion, and gay rights, among other issues, and encouraged parents to demand the removal of books discussing such topics from schools and public libraries.
In every era of American history, a hyper-political subset of the population has targeted the free expression of ideas via literature. Unfortunately, this remains true today.
Book Banning Faces a Resurgence in the 2020s
The modern book banning crisis as we see it today began in 2021. The first Trump administration ushered in a notable shift in political climate across the country, with many far-right groups and politicians escalating the so-called “culture war” to a fever pitch. Legislation began to spring up all over the country to get more books banned in schools that targeted minority groups – specifically people of color and the LGBTQ+ community.
January of 2021 marked the release of “The 1776 Report,” a project commissioned by the Trump administration to “summarize the principles of the American founding,” naming progressivism, identity politics, and the recognition of the founding fathers’ participation in slavery as “challenges to America’s principles.” Completed in only one month without any consultation of historians, the project has been widely denounced, with 47 national organizations – including the American Historical Association, American Library Association, and Southern Historical Association – signing a statement condemning the report shortly after its release.
The 1776 Report, released by the Trump administration in January 2021, whitewashes U.S. history, criticizes the civil rights movement, and likens progressivism to fascism and slavery. It does not include citations or footnotes, and even fails to identify its main authors. (Source)
Though the Biden administration took office that month and prevented the report from receiving any executive enforcement, it triggered a wave of legislative efforts in conservative states and an onslaught of censorship efforts in schools across the country to restrict the ways history is taught in classrooms.
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Since then, a total of 19 states have passed “anti-critical race theory” laws or regulations restricting how teachers may teach or speak about race and racism in their classrooms. Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas were the first, passing laws in May of 2021.
By the end of 2021, the American Library Association recorded the highest number of book challenges and removals since it began tracking measures of book bannings in 1990. The jump was drastic between 2020 and 2021, increasing from challenges of 231 unique titles to challenges of a whopping 1,858 titles.
Graphics shared by the American Library Association (ALA) demonstrate the onslaught of book bans and censorship attempts in libraries across the U.S. in 2024 alone. (Source)
And it’s not just the discussion of race and racism getting books banned in schools; the LGBTQ+ community has seen its stories targeted, too. While 44% of challenged or pulled titles, according to free expression advocacy group PEN America, feature themes of racism or characters of color, 39% of titles included LGBTQ+ characters or themes.
The attacks on queer stories have made their way to the legislative level as well. In April of 2023, the Florida Board of Education approved a statewide ban on the teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity across all grades. The bill – nicknamed “Don’t Say Gay” by critics and activists – caused book banning in Florida to skyrocket even higher: the state banned more titles than any other during the 2023-2024 school year.
Beyond BIPOC and LGBTQ+ stories, still more books are being banned in schools for topics of sex, violence, grief, death, substance use, and mental health issues, despite many of them being designated “young adult” literature, according to PEN America.
A number of hyper-conservative political action groups, including Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education, Citizens Defending Freedom, and Parents’ Rights in Education, are some of the most active in the battle to get more books banned in the U.S. and increase censorship in public schools.
Book Banning Continues to Rise Year After Year
Since 2021, the number of books banned in the U.S. has continued to rise annually. 2021’s historic number of censorship attempts nearly doubled in 2022, increasing from 602 to over 1,000. In 2023, the ALA recorded an additional 65% increase in book challenges as compared to 2022’s numbers. And over the course of the 2023-2024 school year, PEN America recorded more than 10,000 instances of book bans and the banning of more than 4,000 individual titles – unprecedented data for books banned in the U.S.
In an effort to combat these censorship attempts, countless libraries, universities, bookstores, and non-profit organizations across the country have collaborated to celebrate Banned Books Week – an annual event created in 1982 in response to the waves of book banning sweeping the U.S. Next year, Banned Books Week will take place October 5-11, 2025.
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