Author Ashley Hope Perez gave one of the conference keynotes Photo by Bob Sandrick

Librarians and educators across the United States are facing mounting pressure from parent groups and state legislators to keep books they deem inappropriate for young people off the shelves. New state laws threaten librarians with jail time or fines if they don’t comply. The political intimidation has produced a chilling effect, causing library and education professionals to exclude from their collections books they would not have thought twice about in the past.

“We’re just simply very concerned,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association Office for Intellectual Freedom and executive director of the Freedom to Read Foundation.

“The idea that public libraries should become vehicles for elected officials smacks at the heart of our democracy,” Caldwell-Stone said. “The public library should not be confused with an arm of the state.”

Caldwell-Stone made her comments on October 10 at the Banned Books and Libraries Under Attack Conference at the Cleveland State University (CSU) College of Law. About 100 lawyers, library professionals, educators, students, and activists attended the conference, which featured more than a dozen speakers and panelists.

Keynote speakers included Ashley Hope Perez—whose award-winning young adult novel, Out of Darkness, has become one of the most frequently banned books in the United States—and Dan Novack, deputy general counsel for Penguin Random House, who has filed several lawsuits against book-banning legislation.

Also speaking at the event were Steve Potash, chairman and chief advocate of Freedom to Learn Advocates, which helped organize the event; and Lee Fischer, former Ohio attorney general and today dean of the CSU law school.

Speakers and panelists said citizens are fighting back against book banning by forming their own parent groups that stand up for First Amendment rights. Meanwhile, lawsuits challenging new censorship laws have been successful because the laws violate the U.S. Constitution.

The conference participants urged attendees to join the battle. “What’s the one thing you can do starting today?” Perez asked the audience.

Perez’s Out of Darkness was targeted during a surge of book-banning that began in 2021. The novel, set in 1937 Texas, describes incidents of racism and sexual assault. It was banned in 71 school districts.

Perez said racism and sexual assault are issues the country must confront—and they are issues with which young people are already familiar.

“If you think a 16- or 17-year-old is too young to know about the world they are stepping into, how are they going to be prepared?” Perez asked. “It’s going to be ugly at times because our human experience is not all roses and tea parties.”

Novack said parents, before seeking to ban books, should check the material on their children’s phones. “If they can pass that test, then we can start talking about books.”

Leila Green Little, a Texas mom, told her personal story, a case study on how parents can push back against book banning. In 2021, she started attending local county commission meetings to oppose the banning of some children’s books, including, Gary the Goose and His Gas on the Loose , which contained words like “fart” and “butt.”

Once Green Little spoke up, others joined her. Then she approached the Texas Tribune , which published an article about the book bans. She and her supporters were called “pornographers” and “groomers” by their opponents, but the name-calling backfired and caused more people to join her cause.

“The rhetoric got so nasty, harmful, and hateful that people in our community said this is getting out of hand,” Green Little said.

Eventually, she hired a lawyer, and now is plaintiff in a First Amendment lawsuit against Llano County. She and other speakers and panelists agreed that legal action is the way to go when it comes to combating book bans.

Katie Schwartzmann, director of the Tulane Law School’s First Amendment Clinic, said her organization won six censorship cases and turned back book-banning laws simply by sending letters to elected officials, warning them that they were about to break the law with proposed censorship legislation.

Novack said he’s involved in several right-to-read lawsuits across the United States. “We’re not asking anyone to be forced to read,” he said. “It’s about choice.” Caldwell-Stone helped form Lawyer for Libraries, a network of attorneys who want to learn how to protect libraries and librarians’ First Amendment rights.

Perez exhorted everyone to act, first by reading banned books, something that book-ban advocates often fail to do, and by finding positive things about those books. Then they can attend library and school board meetings to stand up for those publications. Parents should encourage their teens to do the same. All the speakers and panelists agreed that parents, not legislators, should decide which materials their children can read.

“There are books I would never put into the hands of a child,” Caldwell-Stone said. “The core value of the First Amendment is that’s the choice of the family. If they want to read that book, it’s their right to do it.

“But they better not interfere with my choices for my children and my family when I go to the library,” she added. “I’ll go to my grave defending that.”