Bills Igniting Book Bans

Evolving State Legislative Efforts to Censor Public School Libraries – “Thousands of books removed from schools out of fear of state governments nationwide. Judy Blume’s Forever… banned from every Utah public school; To Kill a Mockingbird and 39 other titles pulled from a Texas school district that used AI to review materials; a list of 400 titles removed in one district quietly circulated in Tennessee as a resource for other school administrators to find books to ban; 22 titles barred from all South Carolina school districts after the state board of education deemed them inappropriate. Five years ago, these stories may have felt more fitting in a dystopian novel or a satirical publication. But for public schools and libraries across the country, instances like these are the new normal. What began in 2020 with politicians’ threats to defund schools that used curricula from the New York Times’ 1619 Project has snowballed into a multifaceted campaign to impose a narrow vision of what should be taught or read in schools. PEN America has characterized this campaign as the “Ed Scare”, an effort to create fear and anger within the public, with the goal of suppressing free expression around gender, race, sexuality and sex-related content in public schools and public libraries. To date, PEN America has recorded nearly 23,000 book bans in public schools since 2021, and while book bans are not new, an explosion of well-organized, political organizations putting pressure on local school districts and library boards marked the emergence of something unprecedented. By 2022, these highly localized efforts converged with the passage of state-level legislation: educational gag orders, educational intimidation bills, and other state proposals seeking to suppress free expression in education. Some laws imposed direct prohibitions on instruction by restricting teaching about topics such as race, gender, American history, and LGBTQ+ identities; others used indirect means to chill speech, such as criminal punishments and other penalties. Taken together, state laws inflamed a campaign to ban books. In this policy brief, we describe the evolving ways in which state laws are propelling book bans at the local level and the impact they are having on schools and students. Ignited by misleading “parents rights” rhetoric, coupled with moral panic over what’s in schools, organizations and elected officials have proposed and enacted laws designed to censor. Following a blueprint that originated from Florida politics, the results chip away libraries’ autonomy, students’ right to read, and public education as we know it.

Since 2021, PEN America has tracked school book bans and cases in which districts cited a state law or policy as the justification for bans. The below map illustrates states where state law or policy were directly linked to book bans in our indexes from Fall 2023 through Spring 2025. This is not comprehensive of all book ban-related legislation, but does offer a look into how common these laws are cited in book banning…”