Notebook: (1) Classroom Libraries
by Ann Kjellberg, editor
On Thursday U.S. District Court Judge Kent Wetherell issued a bench ruling allowing a lawsuit brought by Penguin Random House, PEN America, and a group of authors and parents against the school board of Escambia County, Florida, to proceed. The suit alleges that the district has overridden its own review process to remove books from school libraries on “openly discriminatory bases” in violation the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Two years into the unprecedented wave of library book challenges, the major book publishers are beginning (finally, in the view of some) to bring their muscle to the defense of librarians and libraries.
When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed Florida House Bill 1069 into law in May 2023 as part of his “Let Kids Be Kids” package, prohibiting instruction on gender identity and giving residents the right to demand the removal of any school or library book that “depicts or describes sexual conduct,” the Escambia County School Board, which had begun preemptively withdrawing hundreds of books mostly at the request of a single person, high school teacher Vicki Baggett, adopted an emergency rule requiring the district's librarians to review of all the county’s school library books and remove those that might be so described. Judd Legum reports this week that among the 2,800 books that have been pulled from school library shelves in Escambia County are The American Heritage Children’s Dictionary, Webster’s Dictionary for Students, Merriam-Webster's Elementary Dictionary, eight encyclopedias, two thesauruses, five editions of The Guinness Book of World Records, biographies of Oprah Winfrey and Thurgood Marshall, Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, The Adventures and the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and Atlas Shrugged. Fewer than one hundred books of the 2,800 removed have completed their reviews, Judd Legum tells us. (Before the current wave of book challenges, most school district policies required that books remain on library shelves if challenges were raised by the public until a review was concluded.) A Lake County, Florida, suit by students and the authors of the picture book And Tango Makes Three, challenging Lake County School District’s restriction of access to the book, was extended to Escambia County, where Vicki Baggett had also fingered it. She told Judd Legum, that she was concerned “a second grader would read this book,” which depicts two real-life male penguins who raise a penguin chick, and “that idea would pop into the second grader’s mind … that these are two people of the same sex that love each other.” Also in Florida this year, the Southern Poverty Law Center, on behalf of All Rainbow and Allied Youth and PFLAG of Port Charlotte, sued the School Board of Charlotte County for removing of LGBTQ+ books and content from the county’s schools.
Meanwhile a decision is expected any day in a large suit that the American Booksellers’ Association, the Association of American Publishers, the Authors Guild, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund joined with two Texas bookstores against Texas’s HB 900 “READER” (“Restricting Explicit and Adult-Designated Educational Resources”) Act, signed into law by Texas Governor Gregg Abbott in June, which mandates that “library material vendors” rate books sold (both in the future and the past) into Texas schools and school libraries for their “sexual” content. Publishers were roused to action when the nation’s largest distributor of books to schools, Follett School Solutions, turned to them for help rating the thousands of books they make available to the huge Texas market ahead of the 2023–24 school year. Follett acknowledged that the law’s requirements were vague but pointed out that enabling sales of “every title we deem OK” will keep some receipts coming in. Valerie Koehler of the Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston, one of the two bookstores bringing the suit, told Washington Post book critic Ron Charles the law would be “devastating.” About a fifth of her business comes from educational sales, many from the hundreds of school visits she arranges for authors every year, she told him in July. “We sell books to libraries. We sell books to school teachers. I don’t know what they’re doing with those books … It is untenable for a bookseller to say, ‘Yes, I can rate every one of the books in my bookstore.’ It would cost us a fortune.” In September a federal judge blocked the law, saying it represents “a web of unconstitutionally vague requirements” and places burdens on vendors that are “so numerous and onerous as to call into question whether the legislature believed any third party could possibly comply,” but in early October an appeals court allowed an “administrative stay” on the judge’s order, now awaiting review by the conservative Fifth Circuit of the US Court of Appeals. The Fifth Circuit also has a pending appeal to overturn a judge’s order that officials return to shelves books removed from libraries in Llano County, Texas, a suit into which since-impeached Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton briefly inserted himself. The county threatened to close its public library system rather than comply with the judge’s order, but County Commissioners April elected to keep it open amidst a strong showing of community support.
In November Penguin Random House also joined the Iowa State Education Association and five authors in a federal suit against portions of Iowa’s Senate File 496, signed into law in May by Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, requiring the removal of books with depictions of sex and gender identity and sexual orientation from school libraries and classroom collections for students through sixth grade. The Mason City School District in Iowa made waves when it was discovered that they had resorted to using ChatGPT to vet the thousands of books potentially affected by the law. At the end of December a federal judge blocked two key portions of SF495, saying the law’s “sweeping restrictions” are “unlikely to satisfy the First Amendment under any standard of scrutiny.”
Other school library book restrictions that are currently in the courts include a suit brought by the American Booksellers Association, the Association of American Publishers, the Central Arkansas Library System, and the Fayetteville and Eureka Springs Carnegie public libraries against Arkansas’s 2023 Act 372, which would criminalize librarians and booksellers who “knowingly” distribute books related to LGBTQ+ people, sexuality, or racism to anyone under the age of eighteen, temporarily blocked by federal judge a in July; a suit brought on behalf of Missouri librarians against Missouri Senate Bill 775 which would criminalize the provision of sexually explicit materials to minors; and a November suit that the American Civil Liberties Union brought on behalf of parents and students in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District in Alaska over the unlawful removal of fifty-six books (including The Bluest Eye, The Kite Runner, and Slaughterhouse 5) from the district library. (Kelly Jensen of Book Riot and the newsletter Literary Activism has been keeping a comprehensive list.) Publishers Weekly reported that the library advocacy organization EveryLibrary has supported some eighty local libraries battling book restrictions in 2023, including a November referendum in Pella, Iowa, that would have ceded control of the library to the city council; the successful effort of residents of Jamestown, Michigan, to fund the Patmos Library against efforts to close it altogether over book disputes; and a legal decision in Columbia County, Washington, protecting the Dayton Library from a ballot initiative to close it down, also over book disputes. Three states and several localities have severed ties with the American Library Association (ALA); Tracie D. Hall, the first Black woman director of the ALA, resigned in October, after receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Foundation. In a first-of-its-kind measure, the US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights in May notified the Forsyth County, Georgia, School District, after an investigation, that its removal of books featuring Black and LGBTQ+ characters was a violation of students’ civil rights and created a hostile environment. In June the Department of Education announced the appointment of Matt Nosanchuk as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Office for Civil Rights responsible for monitoring school and library content challenges and defending students’ First Amendment rights. Today Paul Brandeis Raushenbush of the national Interfaith Alliance released a statement identifying library book challenges as also an issue of religious freedom, as book challenges often appeal to faith as a rationale, imposing a narrow definition of Christian identity on a religiously diverse population.
Other major pending legal decisions in the world of arts and ideas are the Federal Trade Commission’s anti-trust suit against Amazon, supported by seventeen state attorneys general, alleging that the company illegally maintains monopoly power with “a set of interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies,” and The New York Times’s recent suit alleging copyright infringement against OpenAI, filed after talks broke down for a licensing agreement (as has been negotiated with Associated Press, Business Insider, and Axios-owner Axel Springer) governing the use of writing from the Times in large-language model artificial intelligence. Observers consider the Times’s case against OpenAI to be the strongest among a group of suits brought by authors and authors groups this year.
Read Part Two of this post here.
Ann Kjellberg is the founder and editor of Book Post.
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