In a virtual panel titled “Keep Bans Off Our Books,” the Children’s Book Council examined not only how adults target kids’ books, but how young people themselves respond to censorship efforts. The Banned Books Week event on October 5, open to CBC members, spotlighted the CBC’s freedom to read mission. For this month, the organization has distributed 2,000 free speech kits, with resources to emphasize inclusion, combat censorship, and make connections with partner organizations.

Carl Lennertz, executive director of the CBC, opened the event. “Due to the very nature of your work every day in publishing, you are by definition for free speech and against book bans,” Lennertz told the online audience. “It may sound obvious, but you work every day to move that conversation forward. We want everybody, especially young people, to read the books they want. It’s that simple. It’s become complicated and scary, but we will keep fighting.”

“Keep Bans Off Our Books” featured moderator Pat Scales, former chair of the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee and, most recently, the author of Banned Books for Kids: Reading Lists and Activities for Teaching Kids to Read Censored Literature. Scales invited conversation between picture book author Raj Haldar; Jonathan Haupt, executive director of the nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center in Beaufort, S.C.; and student activist Millie Bennett, who as a high school student was president of the South Carolina–based Diversity Awareness Youth Literacy Organization, known as DAYLO, where Haupt serves as mentor.

Haldar, whose This Book Is Banned! captures a cultural moment and has made him an unofficial spokesperson, talked about how he jumped into the fray. “I was incensed to see how many challenges around the country were against books for our youngest readers,” he said, so he created his humorous picture book as a resource to help beginning readers understand censorship.

As the author of P Is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever—a book that introduces silent letters and attracted minor controversy because “O is for Ouija”–Haldar knew that “the best entry point to getting something to connect with kids is to be funny. The tricky thing with This Book Is Banned! was figuring out how to take this gravely serious subject and make a super fun, enjoyable, zany read.” The result was a book where everything gets banned, from unicorns to avocados, until, Haldar said, “there’s no ending left to read. Along the way, kids connect with the idea of what happens when all these things you love are arbitrarily taken away.”

He saw this firsthand at a school visit when he read a page about a fight over birthday cake, which leads to parties and cakes being canceled. In a video of the event, “you can see 200 kindergarten-to-fifth graders having an existential crisis, like, ‘Noooo!’ I realized the message in this empirical form is connecting with young people in the intended way.” He tells young readers, “We don’t want our books to disappear like the ending of this one did, so keep reading and sharing books. Remember that even if a book isn’t for you, it could still be perfect for someone else.”

Addition, Not Subtraction

Haupt agreed with Haldar’s approach. “Book banning is all about subtraction,” Haupt said. “It’s all about taking things away, as Raj’s book makes so abundantly clear.” He later added, in terms of authority, “you absolutely have the right to parent your own child and make decisions for your own family, but you don’t get to parent the world” by removing reading material.

He sees the student-centered DAYLO as an “additive” organization. “We’re doing a lot of pro-literacy activities, putting things back into the community,” he said. For BBW, “we’re stocking our Little Free Libraries not with banned books but with books about responding to book bans to help educate students.”

DAYLO was founded in 2020 by then–Conroy Literacy Center intern Holland Perryman, in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. In addition to three chapters in Beaufort, DAYLO has a chapter in Charleston and several nascent branches in Columbia, S.C. “It arose as a book club,” Bennett said, with the intention of connecting high school students and encouraging conversations about diversity. Soon it grew into a community literacy organization, hosting “teddy bear picnics” for kids at local farmers’ markets that boosted preschool and elementary reading.

“Our other way of acting as a community service group has been advocating for the books that have been banned in our county,” Bennett explained. When the Beaufort County School Board removed 97 books from libraries in 2022, DAYLO students knew the books well from their exercises in diverse reading. “A lot of the books that were banned were books that people had really connected with,” Bennett said, “so we ended up being able to take that step forward and work together.”

“Beaufort has become sort of a national success story of how student-led engagement can respond to censorship and how the community as a whole can respond to these issues,” Haupt said. Once DAYLO raised awareness of the board’s overreach, an organization called Families Against Book Bans rallied to conduct state and national anti-censorship action. FABB “has something like 350 members, which for tiny little Beaufort, South Carolina, is a huge deal,” Haupt added. “We definitely have numbers on our side, and we’re fortunate that at least thus far the school board has had a majority who have been supportive of returning these books to circulation.”

All but 20 books, which are still under review, have been restored. Charleston–based production company Atomic Focus Entertainment is hoping to complete a documentary about Beaufort’s banned-book battle, as a microcosm of the national debate, and Haupt teased another national media organization’s forthcoming coverage of DAYLO’s activism.

While FABB and other adult allies have encountered political opposition, Bennett—who is now a first-year university student—said her high-school classmates acted neutral or supportive. As a DAYLO member, “I never really had any pushback from students wanting book bans, even students I knew who were more conservative,” Bennett recalled. “There was a lot of indifference from students being like, ‘This isn’t my problem. I’m going about my life.’ But mostly there was support from the DAYLO students and from friends.”

Activists, Assemble!

Scales concluded the event by asking panelists how they forge activist networks, as DAYLO has been able to do. “From my vantage point as an author, I see so many small bookshops on the front lines, quickly stocking up” on books that are challenged, Haldar said. “I feel like publishers can step up and take more of an active role with those indies and with organizations like DAYLO.”

Haupt expressed support for Bluffton, S.C.’s children’s indie bookstore, the Storybook Shoppe, whose owner Sally Sue LeVigne “has been a huge advocate for DAYLO,” he said. Haupt also called attention to the website Get Ready, Stay Ready, which gathers freedom to read toolkits. “Everybody is in the toolkit business right now, so there’s a wealth of resources, but it takes time to find them,” he said. “That’s the piece that’s missing: not so much the creation of the toolkits but the marketing.”

Bennett said that for young people, being in a supportive social group made all the difference. “Where are your friends?” she asked. “It’s too scary to figure this all out by yourself, and people end up getting overwhelmed [because] they don’t know where to start. If you bring a friend along, it makes everything more manageable.”

Haupt brought Bennett’s message home, saying, “A DAYLO gathering to plot for a school board meeting is like 67% Taylor Swift lyrics and teenage tomfoolery, but the 10 minutes that is actual advocacy work is magical, and it gets the whole rest of the thing done. I’m so glad students are taking a leadership role, but I’m even more glad that they still get to be teenagers.