Controlling the Narrative

The majority of Americans oppose banning books. A unified voice emerges from Florida, the country’s cradle of censorship, to spur small groups into big change.

Words by Alison Law | Illustration by Martha Park

September 23, 2024

“All right, so, just a little bit of background about me,” began Hedieh Sepehri, founder of the Miami-based organization Families Against Banning Books. “I grew up in Iran, where everything's banned.” 

When Sepehri was a child, her father took what he remembered from classic books and told them as bedtime stories. Her favorite story at age 5 was her father’s retelling of “Fahrenheit 451,” a Ray Bradbury novel that envisions a future where firefighters burn outlawed books.

“I couldn't imagine a world where books were being burned,” said Sepehri, a mother of two. “It was sci-fi. It was unreal. And fast-forward, I live in Miami, and Florida is starting to ban books.” 

Her comments elicited weary groans from the audience, a standing-room-only crowd at the Unified Voices Summit this July at a DoubleTree hotel in Orlando — the first event of its kind to bring together writers, teachers, librarians, faith leaders, students, and grassroots activists fighting educational censorship across Florida.

They gathered because a  vocal minority has authored a dystopian tale as chilling as “Fahrenheit 451.” The opening chapters villainized educators and silenced the majority, who trust them to choose subjects and books for their schools. And unlike the people who went underground in Bradbury’s book-burning dystopia, the “Book People” in Florida know they cannot hide and wait for the political tides to change. The activists who have spent years, sometimes decades, defending free expression and fighting for human rights have seen a version of this story many times before. As the 2024 elections approach, they know that the arc bends at the will of those who vote and use their collective voice to support freedom of thought.

“We acknowledge that these book bans are not about actual books,” Sepehri said. “It's about a bigger problem. It's about intellectual freedom.”

The summit was hosted by PEN America, a nonprofit organization that has championed creative freedom and human rights for over 100 years. Founded in 1922 by the likes of Willa Cather and Eugene O’Neill, PEN America’s mission now extends beyond supporting “Poets, Essayists, and Novelists” to protect the rights of editors, journalists, and anyone dedicated to protecting free speech and thought as cornerstones of American democracy. 

The band of allies includes the parents, educators, faith leaders, and students at the summit. That’s why Katie Blankenship, an attorney and inaugural senior director at PEN America’s new Florida office, and others spent more than a year bringing them together in Orlando. A group of bestselling authors, including Michael Connelly, Judy Blume, and Amanda Gorman, funded the office in 2023 in response to a barrage of laws passed in Florida under Republican Governor Ron DeSantis and a conservative-led state Legislature. The regulations spurred copycat legislation in other states, muzzling teachers and librarians and effectively erasing certain stories. 

Florida has banned more books than any other state in the country, according to PEN America, with a whopping 1,406 titles banned across the largest number of school districts (33) in 2023. (Texas came in second with 625 book bans, and Missouri rounded out the top three with 333 book bans.) Across the U.S., the American Library Association tracked a record-breaking 4,240 book titles challenged last year in schools and public libraries. Many of the titles are by or about people from marginalized communities: women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ individuals.

Most people in the U.S. disagree with these measures. A 2022 survey commissioned by the American Library Association showed that seven out of 10 voters across party lines opposed book bans. And three out of every four parents trusted public school teachers and librarians to make decisions about classroom curricula and the books to make available to children.

Blankenship said one of her goals for the summit was to harness the collective energy of anti-censorship campaigns clustered across Florida and show protesters they’re part of a larger movement that falls in the historical continuum with other struggles for freedom and equality, like the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. 

“This moment has always been for two reasons,” Blankenship told the crowd of more than 300 attendees on the first night of the summit. “It is to take this time and space to recognize the truth of who Florida is, of what we are, and to recognize that there is a movement in this state that says we will not go quietly into the dark night.”

During the COVID pandemic and a time of deep racial reckoning across the country, DeSantis shifted to far-right policies and grew weirdly obsessed with attacking “woke indoctrination” in Florida public schools. He and his appointed State Board of Education scrutinized curricula and adopted new education standards, culminating in three key bills inked into law in 2022 that censored discussions around race and gender, skewed the teaching of history, and caused fear and confusion in schools. 

Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (or, “Stop WOKE”) legislation banned the teaching of critical race theory in schools and workplaces and imposed civil penalties for those who tried. Then conservatives fully embraced this messaging with the discriminatory “Parental Rights in Education” legislation — known as “Don’t Say Gay” — prohibiting materials and classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity. Another bill, HB 1467, required elementary schools to provide a searchable list of all books in classrooms and libraries and to allow public comment on all new materials. 

These laws contain vague or overly broad language, enabling school districts to interpret them at will, with mechanisms in place for citizens and parents to object to any materials they deem inappropriate — giving one person the power to single-handedly alter the curriculum or remove books for thousands of students.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Florida harbors the second-highest number of hate and anti-government groups in the U.S. (behind California, but it’s higher per capita) and is the headquarters for many of these groups — including Moms for Liberty (M4L).

Founded in 2021, M4L began as a group opposing public health and school safety measures for COVID in Central Florida. Co-founders Tiffany Justice, Tina Descovich, and Bridget Ziegler have all served on county school boards in Florida and have encouraged their members to do the same. Shrouding themselves in parents’ rights, Moms for Liberty has shifted its focus from public health to book banning and dictating their views in school curricula. SPLC has dubbed them an extremist group for promoting anti-government and conspiracy propaganda, espousing anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-inclusive views, and labeling those who disagree with them as “indoctrinators.” M4L billed themselves as a nonpartisan group, but they quickly grew a national following through social media and regular appearances on right-wing media channels, including Fox News and Steve Bannon’s “War Room.” In a February 2024 speech at the Florida Capitol, Descovich said the group had grown to 130,000 members in 310 chapters in 48 states.

Their website includes a “Books” page with links to BookLook.info and BookLooks.org, two sites notorious for listing excerpts of books with “objectionable content” and an arbitrary rating system scoring the books’ appropriateness for children. Not surprisingly, many of the books found on BookLooks.org — books like “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” and a children’s story about book banning, “Ban This Book” — are the same titles being challenged in public schools and libraries. 

Despite its power, the book-banning movement boils down to a shockingly small base. In August 2023, a Tampa Bay Times analysis of about 1,100 book complaints filed in Florida school districts revealed that just two people — an Escambia County teacher and a Clay County dad — were responsible for 600 complaints. The explanations were often similar to or identical to the text found on BookLooks.org, citing issues like “indoctrination” and “pornography.” One handwritten note justified removing a children’s book because it was using penguins to promote the “LGBTQ agenda.” The process of reviewing these complaints pulls books off the shelves and costs time and resources most school systems don’t have. Some school systems, like Escambia County’s, have had to temporarily close libraries or media centers because they could not keep up with the overwhelming volume. 

“There’s a story that’s being told about the harms that are being caused,” said Trey Walk, a democracy researcher and advocate for Human Rights Watch who spoke at the Unified Voices Summit. “But the story that's less well-told and less well-known is the story of the resistance, the movement that's brewing here in Florida.”

He introduced a short documentary called “How They Defend the Freedom to Learn: Stories and a Blueprint From Florida,” where the true stars are the students and young people. Student-led organizations like PRISM work to expand access to LGBTQ-inclusive education and sexual health resources in South Florida, the Florida Student Power Network trains youth to canvass and demonstrate against book banning to hold legislators and school boards accountable, and the Youth Action Fund and the Social Equity Through Education (SEE) Alliance organized the largest student-led protest in Florida’s history in 2023 when they mobilized more than 300 high schools and colleges in the Walkout2Learn protest against state-mandated censorship. 

Zander Moricz founded SEE Alliance as a club at his Sarasota high school. He has since taken time off from his studies at Harvard University to lead its latest incarnation as a national 501(c)(3) nonprofit. In a Unified Voices panel, Moricz stated that most young people don’t want to vote because they have only ever known a Republican supermajority leading their state. The strategy of staging peaceful protests and training students to speak up against school board members has shown them they can disrupt the pro-censorship stronghold and have a voice in their democracy. 

“School board elections are winnable,” Moricz said. “The margins are winnable. We’re able to show students that if one marching band voted, they could flip a school board.”

The Unified Voices Summit also celebrated recent legal victories. In March 2024, the state of Florida settled a lawsuit challenging the “Don’t Say Gay” law. As part of the settlement, the State Board of Education must inform all school districts that the law does not prohibit anti-bullying measures to protect LGBTQ+ students, restrict discussion or groups around LGBTQ+ identity, or ban library books or references to LGBTQ+ people in classroom materials.

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling to block portions of the “Stop WOKE Act” for violating the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. (The state of Florida has promised to appeal.)

And a U.S. district judge ruled that a lawsuit filed against the Escambia County School Board could proceed, despite a motion to dismiss. PEN America, publisher Penguin Random House, and a group of authors joined with parents to sue the board after discovering that more than 1,600 books — including five dictionaries and The Guinness Book of World Records — had been preemptively removed from school bookshelves. 

At the summit’s grassroots mobilization session, Lissette Fernandez explained how she records bilingual social media videos to introduce the candidates and explain the issues to time-starved parents. The mother of two elementary-age kids co-founded Moms 4 Libros to educate Floridians whose first language is Spanish about book bans and other laws affecting public schools. 

During the session, Fernandez fielded a question from an audience member who wanted to know how she decides whether or not to defend a book. While she and the other panelists agreed that it’s important for educators to select books that are age-appropriate, she doesn’t agree with keeping books from kids because it has content she doesn’t like. They described how they’d read contested books with their older kids, opening a powerful line of communication and way to discuss important topics like sexual assault, suicide, and drunk driving. The audience member pressed her to give an example of a book she wouldn’t defend. The room fell silent for a few seconds before she responded.

“I'll defend all of them, to be honest with you,” Fernandez said.

Alison Law is an experienced writer, editor, and communications professional who runs a content marketing agency in Atlanta. A self-proclaimed book evangelist and unapologetic author ally, Alison covers the literary beat for The Bitter Southerner, WABE’s City Lights with Lois Reitzes, and other publications. Alison is a member of PEN America and the Editorial Freelancers Association.