Talk about an action-packed Banned Books Week. While there were many events scheduled this week to celebrate the freedom to read, it was the threat from book banners that was pulled into sharp relief this week during a court hearing before the full Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Louisiana.
As we reported in Publishers Weekly, lawyers for rural Llano County, Texas, urged the court to toss its own holding in Campbell v. St. Tammany Parish School Board, a 1995 First Amendment decision involving the attempted removal of a book from a public school library that has long served as an anti-censorship bulwark for librarians. "Twenty-nine years ago, this Court held…that the speech clause limits the authority of librarians and school officials to remove books from a government-owned library. That holding is wrong and should be overruled," Llano County lawyer Jonathan Mitchell argued.
The September 24 oral argument is the latest twist in Little v. Llano County, a closely watched book banning case filed in April 2022 by seven Llano County residents. Arguing for the plaintiffs, attorney Matthew Borden warned against discarding a 30-year-old precedent that has hardly been controversial. "The First Amendment prevents the government from getting rid of ideas that it disagrees with. That was the standard that this Court set out in Campbell," Borden argued. "And Campbell has been the law in the circuit for 30 years without a flood of litigation or other difficulties."
EveryLibrary posted an excellent take on the arguments: "The outcome of this case will set a crucial precedent for the role of libraries in our democratic society, and it must reaffirm that libraries exist to serve the public’s right to access diverse, lawful ideas—not to promote government-sanctioned ideologies."
Meanwhile, as Publishers Weekly also reported, a coalition of publishers, authors, students and educators, and advocates have gone back to court in Iowa, seeking to strike down the book banning provisions in the state's controversial law, SF 496. The move comes after the Eighth Circuit court of Appeals in August rejected the very argument that Llano County lawyers are asking the Fifth Circuit to adopt.
And in Congress, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD-8) and Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) introduced a bicameral resolution to mark Banned Books Week. The resolution calls on local governments and school districts "to follow best practices and guidelines when addressing challenges to books," as well as "to protect the rights of students to learn and the ability of educators and librarians to teach, including by providing students with the opportunity to read a wide array of books, reflecting the full breath and diversity of viewpoints and perspectives."
In a statement, PEN America thanked Raskin and Schatz (and the resolution’s cosponsors) for their efforts. "The movement to ban books is an affront to public education and students’ ability to understand the world," said PEN America’s congressional affairs lead, Laura Schroeder, in a statement. "Students are being deprived of stories that can help them deal with real lived experiences such as trauma and violence or even to see positive representations of themselves in their local school or library. This must end."
While Kelly Jensen is on vacation, her counterparts at Book Riot stepped in with some Banned Books Week items from the week.
Truthout has a good piece on "the right’s raid on libraries."
The Indy Star reports that, per the ALA, 346 books were challenged last year in libraries across Indiana, according to the ALA, from Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer to the Holy Bible.
The Newark Post in Delaware reports that computer labs at libraries across the state were shut down after hackers seized control of the virtual servers that run the facility’s public-use computers. The hackers are demanding money from the state. “We see a lot of stories about this around the nation, and it seems to be recommended not to pay the ransom, but to rebuild,” Delaware Division of Libraries director Annie Norman said. She said she will direct the Division of Libraries not to pay any ransom, insisting instead that Delaware libraries rebuild the servers that run the public’s computers.
Via the Seattle Times, the "Seattle Public Library "expects to spend about $1 million responding to a May ransomware attack by the end of 2024 and is still investigating what, if any, personal data hackers stole."
Time has a story on how underfunding our libraries nearly lost us World War II. "The fact is that the health of the nation’s libraries is a national security issue," writes historian Elyse Graham. "We learned this lesson once, and profoundly, during World War II. The story of how underinvesting in our libraries almost lost us the war is worth retelling—especially because what we’re losing by cutting back on acquisitions—or, worse, digitizing and then throwing out archives—is exactly what we had to send spies to acquire overseas during that war."
And finally, the Carnegie Corporation of New York announced it will devote $4 million to three of the city’s public libraries with a set of grants that mark the philanthropy’s return to its roots. Carnegie will give $1 million to the Brooklyn Public Library, $1.2 million to the Queens Public Library, and $1.8 million to the New York Public Library in Manhattan to provide English-language and workforce training classes for adults as well as civics and college and career-prep courses for teenagers.
