Banned Books Week Demands Our Attention To Protect Our Literary Heritage

The Bluest Eye. Beloved. The Color Purple. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Invisible Man. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. 

All of those titles belong to books written by Black authors and have been challenged or banned across multiple American school districts and public libraries. 

This month, as we enter the annual Banned Books Week, we are reminded that the campaign to restrict titles by Black authors is an effort to deny Black Americans literacy and access to books that reflect and preserve our history and offer fresh perspectives on how to think about and imagine our futures. 

This current movement to dissuade Black people from reading and writing books that capture our unique experiences has deep historical roots. During enslavement, white Americans understood that an educated person would be harder to keep in chains and they passed strict anti-literacy laws that criminalized educating Black people. 

After emancipation, Black communities turned literacy into a major tool for advancement, driving the Black literacy rate from roughly 20% in 1870 to nearly 70% by 1910. Under Jim Crow segregation, which mandated separate and intentionally starved budgets for Black public schools and local Black library branches, Black educators found ways to build thriving sanctuaries of learning that pushed literacy rates past eighty percent by 1930. 

While desegregation forced white school systems to become accessible to the Black community, the process shut down many vital Black schools and libraries. Decades of underfunding of predominantly Black schools followed. This transition also placed Black students under the authority of white-led school boards just as Black literature began entering mainstream classrooms. 

In the decades following desegregation, censorship campaigns surged and targeted these newly integrated spaces, establishing a direct precedent for the contemporary effort to purge books by Black authors from public education. 

The modern onslaught of book bans sweeping across schools and libraries is a highly coordinated, systemic campaign to control information, erase history, and silence communities that fall outside of white heteronormative orthodoxy. Those of us in Black and LGBTQIA+ communities are experiencing this backlash at a higher rate.

In 2012, the Library of Congress curated a list of “Books that Shaped America,” purposely selecting books it believed reflected the definitive pillars of American cultural history. An astounding twenty-six of the eighty-eight titles it included have been challenged or banned at some point since publication. 

Among those targeted are indisputable titans of our literary canon. Books like Richard Wright’s Native Son, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, and Malcolm X and Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which are on the Library of Congress’ curated list, have all been subjected to censorship. 

One of Toni Morrison’s masterpieces, Beloved, which the Library of Congress unabashedly recognized as capturing “an essential aspect of American reality,” remains an ongoing target for right-wing school boards across the country. 

This ongoing intentional targeting amounts to a profound assault on Black and queer authors in particular. Writers like George M. Johnson, whose memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue chronicles his experience growing up Black and queer, have found their work pushed to the front lines of a larger attempt to silence storytelling that offers perspectives and real-life experiences from historically marginalized people. 

Data from PEN America confirms the massive scale of this onslaught, noting that forty-four percent of all banned books feature characters or people of color, while thirty-nine percent feature LGBTQIA+ characters or people. This intense focus on censorship creates a dangerous ripple effect within the publishing industry, where Black authors make up only six percent of published writers and publishing staff remains over seventy-two percent white. 

As right-wing groups successfully pressure schools to remove these books, risk-averse corporate publishers face immense economic pressure to scale back on acquiring or marketing new stories from Black and queer creators. Editors are increasingly rejecting diverse manuscripts and passing on book proposals because they might get banned and are deemed too difficult to place in retail stores. 

This caution has triggered a wave of self-censorship, with mainstream publishing houses quietly scaling back their diverse book titles. Companies are increasingly hiding queer and racial themes behind coded language to avoid political controversy and appease retail buyers. 

Book bans send a chilling message to emerging writers seeking to capture the fullness of their own lives: telling the unvarnished truth about their experiences could result in professional exile and institutional erasure. 

The other immediate casualties of these bans are the children and everyday citizens who rely on public libraries and public school systems to access books. Wealthy families and individuals can easily bypass a school board or public library restriction by purchasing banned titles from independent bookstores or digital retailers. 

Historically, public libraries have served as sacred sanctuaries for intellectual freedom within Black communities, acting as equalizers where information was free and openly accessible to everyone regardless of their bank account balance. 

Censorship intrudes on that promise, transforming public institutions into easy prey for gatekeepers of white, heteronormative orthodoxy intent on limiting reading selections to books that fall in line with their thinking. 

Access to books that offer diverse perspectives and life experiences shapes what present and future generations of kids understand about our past and future. Reading books opens up new worlds that show them what’s possible for their futures. 

While public libraries must comply with bans in their regions, the larger public library system should find ways to help. Public libraries outside areas where bans are in effect can make these books accessible by extending memberships to patrons across state lines. Extending membership access to states affected by the bans would be a good place to start and would let readers still access these books digitally through widely used public library platforms like Libby.  

Literacy remains one of our most powerful weapons against subjugation, and defending the freedom to read books must become a central tenet of our political activism. 

We cannot afford to be passive observers while a vocal minority systematically strips away the books that legitimize our existence and illuminate our array of experiences. Our ancestors risked everything to secure the right to read and write our own stories. Honoring their sacrifices means building a defensive wall around our libraries to ensure our children can always access the books that show them who they are and what they can become. 

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