Is this a sign of progress? With Banned Books Week 2024 underway, the American Library Association released its preliminary data documenting attempts to censor books and materials in public, school, and academic libraries, finding that the number of tracked challenges fell significantly for the first eight months of 2024.
Between January 1 and August 31, 2024, ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked 414 challenges to censor library materials and services that amounted to 1,128 unique titles challenged. That’s down from 695 cases and 1,915 unique titles challenged during the same period last year, and puts the 2024 numbers on pace to come in well below 2023, when ALA tracked a total of 1,247 demands to censor books and 4,240 unique book titles targeted for censorship—a 65% surge over 2022 numbers.
ALA reps said the positive news likely reflects the success of advocacy efforts—including efforts by individual librarians, key wins in several lawsuits, and broad anti-censorship programs such as ALA's Unite Against Book Bans. Despite slowing the growth in the number of challenges, the report noted that censorship efforts remain far above levels tracked prior to 2020, when an organized political movement first began taking aim at books and materials in schools and libraries.
“We must continue to stand up for libraries and challenge censorship wherever it occurs,” said ALA president Cindy Hohl, in a statement. “We know library professionals throughout the country are committed to preserving our freedom to choose what we read and what our children read, even though many librarians face criticism and threats to their livelihood and safety.”
Once again, ALA data shows that most of the challenges included multiple titles, and targeted books "written by or about a person of color or a member of the LGBTQIA+ community." The ALA will release the full 2024 results (along with the year’s top 10 most challenges books) in its annual State of America’s Libraries report in spring 2025, during National Library Week.
While the decline in tracked challenges in the first part of 2024 is welcome news, the ALA’s statistics stand in contrast to a report also released this week by PEN America, which found that censorship in school libraries nearly tripled in the 2023-2024 school year, surpassing 10,000 book bans in public schools, up from 3,362 bans in the previous school year.
In a release, PEN officials said its stats reflect “a detailed content analysis” of titles banned in the last school year—with some 8,000 book bans recorded in Florida and Iowa, in reaction to new state laws that broadly target sexual content (laws which are currently being challenged in court). Like ALA, PEN officials insist their stats are “certainly an undercount,” noting that most book bans likely go unreported. PEN also found that book bans from the 2023-2024 school year overwhelmingly featured authors and stories involving the LGBTQ community and people of color.
PEN America will release the final count for the 2023-2024 school year this fall along with a public Index of School Book Bans.
The new statistics come as Banned Books Week 2024 gets underway, under the theme “Freed Between the Lines,” which reps said is a reference to “the freedom we find in the pages of books and the need to defend that freedom from censorship.”
Among the highlights of Banned Books Week, a day of action is planned for September 28—Let Freedom Read Day—on which everyone is encouraged to “do at least one thing on September 28 to fight censorship.”
