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In addition to EveryLibrary’s report on the more than 130 bills that affect libraries, this week we’re looking at how a Florida county became the county with the most banned books by vote, how some religious leaders in Baton Rouge clashed with the library board over the use of pronouns, and we even get a tidbit of the long history of Black librarians fighting for the rights of all Americans in a new content series.
EveryLibrary’s latest report—”Codifying Censorship or Reclaiming Rights: The State-by-State 2025 Legislative Landscape for Libraries”—looks at the more than 130 bills across the country that directly affect libraries, library workers, and the right to read. During the first half of this year, these bills have attempted to do everything from criminalizing school librarians to cutting funding, enforcing anti-DEI mandates and content restrictions, and more.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though. The report also looks at the nine states that have written in new laws that protect librarians from harassment and prosecution, help maintain access to digital content, and reinforce public policy around library services.
To read the report, click here.
By adopting a list of books to ban that it acquired from the state of Florida last week, the Escambia County school board continued a new policy started last month that allows books to be removed without committee review or appeals to the board.
Adopting “the Florida Department of Education’s book removal list,” means Escambia County has decided to remove more than 409 titles, making it the county with the most books banned by board vote.
Among the books to be removed are 253 books that have never “been challenged or removed from school library shelves.” Among them are Antiracist Baby by Ibram Kendi, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, and 47 titles by Stephen King.
Last Thursday, the East Baton Rouge Parish Library Board had a meeting that involved local pastors protesting the firing of a former library employee who they claim was fired for refusing to use a coworker’s pronouns correctly.
Pastor Luke Ash claims that he was fired because of a library policy that states that employees are to be addressed by their preferred pronouns, a practice he claimed was against his religious beliefs, despite the separation between church and state and this taking place in a public library.
The library board has not commented on Ash’s termination because of personnel policy.
In this episode of The Book Riot Podcast, Jeff and Rebecca talk about a bunch of mid-year lists, and I come in at the end with an interview with Rodney Freeman, former librarian and producer of the documentary Are You a Librarian, about the radical history of Black librarianship in the US.
It’s the first podcast component of our Reading and Resistance content series.
Our friends over at the Brooklyn Public Library have started a new podcast series that is in conversation with library workers, authors, and readers about the books that have shaped America.
The first episode looks at “What Parable of the Sower Taught Us About the Future,” the second speaks to “N.K. Jemisin on Truth, Education, and Speculation,” and the third is “On Reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X in Prison.”
Each episode can be listened to on your podcast streamer of choice.
As regular readers of Literary Activism, you may well know the importance of also becoming active in the fight against book banning, but Kelly nicely ties it to our reading challenge in one of her latest articles.
“Reading banned books is important for myriad reasons. You want to know what is so offensive as to create a moral panic, both historically and in our contemporary climate…But reading banned books alone is not enough to stop censorship. It’s not an action in and of itself that moves the needle in what is an attack on the very people these books represent. To effectively work toward ending book bans requires not only familiarity and passion for the books being removed. It also requires doing something that moves the needle, even if just a tiny bit.”
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