Bringing it all together

South Carolina considering a law that withholds public library funds if "inappropriate" materials are available and more censorship news.

Democrat Rhode Island lawmakers on Wednesday promoted a suite of bills motivated by the Freedom to Read movement — an assertion of libraries’ right to hold controversial books, amid an ongoing culture clash over the written word.

Both the Indiana and Iowa State Legislatures have introduced legislation regarding criminally charging libraries and librarians over “inappropriate” material. These bills are closely related to widespread book challenges occurring at schools and public libraries across the nation, with people trying to remove books that address certain topics relating to gender, sexuality, and race from library collections. In many cases there is already a clear process for reconsidering materials in a collection, so how do legal defenses play a role in this and what do the bills change?

List of books by Native authors that have been challenged or banned

Two new reports provide a mixed but compelling outlook on the wave of book removals and challenges as the annual Banned Books Week begins for schools, stores and libraries nationwide.

The final count for the 2023-2024 school year will be released later this fall along with a public Index of School Book Bans.

The American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) has released new data documenting book challenges throughout the United States, finding that challenges were nearly double that of 2021, reaching the highest number of attempted book bans since ALA began compiling data about censorship in libraries more than 20 years ago.