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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. We've got news now of banned books in US schools. Apparently, bannings have reached record levels. You know the group PEN America, the free speech group? Well, they report Cover to Cover. That's their new report. It's called Cover to Cover, and it documents more than 10,000 instances of book removals this past school year alone, affecting over 4,000 unique titles. The trends are clear. They say books featuring characters of color, LGBTQ+ people, and discussions of race and sexuality are being targeted at disproportionate rates.

One of the most striking findings is that picture books and graphic novels, often key tools for early literacy, have become a major battleground. As the report puts it, there has been one kind of book that has dominated discourse about book removals in school libraries over the last three years, books with pictures. These bans go beyond concerns about individual titles. PEN America's new report says they're part of a broader organized effort to limit what young people can read and, by extension, what perspectives they're exposed to at school.

Why these books? Why now? We'll mention some titles and some of the bigger trends and what's really at stake. We'll ask Jonathan Friedman, managing director of US free expression programs at PEN America, who joins me now. Hi, Jonathan. Welcome to WNYC.

Jonathan Friedman: Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, you can help us report this story. Have you seen book bans or attempted book bans at your school or in your community? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Have you felt their impact, whether as a student, parent, teacher, librarian, author, anyone? Are you someone who supports these bans and want to tell us why on any particular titles? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text. Jonathan, I see your report tracked over 10,000 book bans in public schools just in the last year. That sounds like a lot. How does it compare to previous years?

Jonathan Friedman: Well, since PEN America started tracking this three years ago, this is a clearly escalating trend. I don't think we've ever comprehended the idea that so many schools around the country would be removing so many books and so often without really attending to due process. Those are books that people are pulling out of libraries without even necessarily reading them or where it is actually quite questionable whether the books break whatever the current rules that people think they're following.

There is tremendous fear among teachers and librarians around the country, and it is only getting worse. This is what we hear from school districts in red states, blue states, urban cities, rural areas. Everywhere you look, it seems that somebody is worried about the content of a book. I must stress this, so often, the books that are being pulled, as you mentioned, are just books. They're picture books. Maybe they're books where the book in some way touches on an issue that somebody might have questions about or take offense with.

The idea that we would just remove all of these, just scrub them from schools and with such little regard for the incredible content that is being cast aside and taken away from young children, it's a travesty, and it's one that we've never really seen.

Brian Lehrer: Your report highlights how books that reflect real experiences, particularly stories of people of color, LGBTQ+ identities, and historical injustices, are being erased from the shelves. Have some examples?

Jonathan Friedman: Oh, we've seen books pulled that, for example, tell the story of Wilma Rudolph, a former Black Olympian. A book was pulled because somebody complained that a quote in a fold of the book, the Olympian was quoting her mother saying something about the history of white people not understanding or not respecting Black people. This is someone-- It's their memoir. They're retelling something that their mother said.

The idea that we would be so unable to confront that history or to even talk about it in any way or that the slightest-- I don't know what to call it, discomfort with that would then lead to that book being pulled for everybody is shocking. That's just the tip of the iceberg. If you have a book that is more ardently talking about the history of racism, something like the 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones in The New York Times, or books that try to highlight LGBTQ individuals from history, those tend to be targeted with a hugely disproportionate level, and that is what's key.

A lot of these books are stories that just made it onto the shelves a few years ago. One of the twists of this moment, they reflect almost a kind of burgeoning of freedom of expression, more publishers willing to tell stories that haven't been told before to communicate to the rising generation, people from history whose stories were otherwise forgotten. What you realize is there's a rich tapestry of history that is much more diverse, much more nuanced, and in so many places, those are the books that get pulled.

Brian Lehrer: Some of the examples that we saw in your report that might surprise people, for those who know these books, Tara Westover's memoir Educated, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot's book there about the Black woman whose cells were taken without consent in 1951, becoming one of the most important tools in medical research. Also, Anne Frank's Diary: The Graphic Adaptation. Really, Anne Frank's Diary?

Jonathan Friedman: Really, Anne Frank's Diary. Let me tell you about that one. The story there is, sometimes it's the diary, but more often, it's the illustrated graphic novel adaptation. What people object to is a portion of the book. There are two. One in which Anne Frank is dreaming in a dream sequence, and she's illustrated walking in a kind of imaginary garden of nude Greek female statues. It's a part of the diary where she was reflecting on the female body.

She is known to have been someone who appreciated and was interested in Greek sculpture. This is, of course, the act of rendering a diary into pictures and putting illustrations around it. We want to have some creative and artistic liberty around this, but the idea that that is pornographic, which so often seems to be the reason that is wielded against that book for that reason, is highly problematic.

Then another portion of the book is based on a part of the diary that had been at one point in time censored by her father, Otto Frank. It has to do with her reflections on her own pleasure, on her own anatomy. They have a part of the book that talks about that. Is that a reason to restrict that book from any young person or the very young people who you would think that for the past 40 years, 50 years, 60 years, the story of Anne Frank has been one that they can connect to? That's why it is so universal. It is really atrocious to me that that becomes the reason why these books are removed.

In more than one case, what we see also is just this jitteriness, this hesitation, this kind of fear. People are afraid that someone might complain about that book, and so they obey in advance. They remove the book before anyone has even had the chance to do it. We've seen this time and again. Directives sweep through an entire library system, and librarians feel they have no option but to pull dozens of books.

I will never forget seeing that in Missouri, a group of textbooks that are sort of educational books about the Holocaust but do have pictures of concentration camps, were removed because a librarian was fearful that somebody would say that those images were sexual. That's where this is going.

Brian Lehrer: My guest, if you're just joining us, is Jonathan Friedman, managing director of US free expression programs at PEN America. Their new report, called Cover to Cover, documents 10,000 instances of book banning in US schools last year, a record as they see it. I think we have an author calling in whose book was banned. Let's take the call from Victoria in Fairfield County in Connecticut. You're on WNYC, Victoria. Hi.

Victoria: Hello. It's truly an honor to be speaking with you. I'm a huge fan.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Tell us your story. I see what you wrote. I'm going to let you say it because I know a lot of parents know this book. Go ahead.

Victoria: Okay. I'm the author and illustrator of the Pinkalicious book series. There are over 80 books. There's Pinkalicious The Musical, there's Pinkalicious & Peterrific TV show on PBS KIDS. I've sold over 24 million books. It's very popular. It came out in 2006. In September, I guess it was banned. Pinkalicious, the first book, was banned in Wilson County, Tennessee because of a page. Pinkalicious wakes up, she turns pink, and she says, "The next morning when I woke up, I was pink. My face was pink, my hands were pink, and my belly was the color of a sunset."

She's wearing underwear, and she's very joyful. It's whimsical. It's a very happy character. I guess it was censored and banned because of this innocent image of a joyful child in underwear. I guess they thought it was obscene. I haven't really been able to find out why. I've contacted many people. There were teachers who reached out to me in the school system to tell me on social media what happened. The teachers are fearful for their jobs because they can be fined if they have the book.

I reached out to a library in the area, and I said, "Let me send you Pinkalicious books so that children can have access to them," because the thought of children not being able to have access to books in school is very frightening. They banned over 420-something books in the school district.

Brian Lehrer: Did the public library take your books?

Victoria: Oh, yes. They have a good collection. I said, "Let me fill out the collection," and I sent them about 20 more. I said I'd do a story time with them. I just want to support the kids in any way. They haven't gotten back to me. They might be frightened, I don't know, because I think there are a lot of people who have contacted me on social media and said that they're fearful, they're frightened.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think that the motivation for the ban was exactly what they described to you, I guess, or the way you took it that it was because of this underwear image, as opposed to any other political agenda that they're using the image as an excuse to pursue? You know what I mean?

Victoria: Yes. I think there's nothing wrong with this image. Every human being has nipples. [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: [unintelligible 00:12:41] shocked.

Victoria: Are they afraid of themselves? I'm sorry I've said the word. [laughter] This is just an illustration, and it's not photorealistic either.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Well, I think that we're--

Victoria: I think it's--

Brian Lehrer: I'm sure there are people-- I'm sorry. Go ahead and finish your thought. You think it's--

Victoria: No, it's just censorship, and it's a dangerous precedent. It limits creative expression, and it restricts access to meaningful books. It's really bad for children. Most importantly, children need to have access to diverse ideas and thinking. Not just my book, but all the books that you're speaking of.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. I'm going to leave it there. Victoria, thank you so much for adding your voice. I know there are parents listening right now and saying, "`Oh, the author of Pinkalicious called The Brian Lehrer Show." Victoria, thank you very much. Here's another one, Jonathan, in a text. Listener writes, "Hi from Alabama. Our GOP super majority legislature is moving a bill, HB4, that proposes jailing librarians for--" "Well, the language of the bill is extremely vague," the person writes. Are you familiar with that? Anything you want to say very briefly about Victoria's call?

Jonathan Friedman: Yes. What's important for people to understand is that this may have started originally with some parents who were upset and going to school board meetings, school board officials being unsure what to do, but it is an entirely different matter for this to move into state law and now federal executive order that threatens to do the same thing on a much more terrifying scale. It is that scale that we have to be attentive to, as Victoria was talking about that story out of Wilson, Tennessee, with 400 books.

In numerous states now, there are new laws that are being implemented or that people are fearful of them being implemented, and almost all of them rest on some kind of vague construction of changing the ways in which we might punish teachers or librarians or others, people who work in museums, art galleries, university professors, for the kinds of material that they may in a time before used as part of teaching or made available on a public shelf.

Many of those laws do threaten pretty extreme repercussions that it would actually be probably hard to prove or demonstrate that a librarian had broken, depending on the circumstance, of course, but they're designed to be vague, they're designed to threaten, they're designed to intimidate, and they're working. This may have started at first, a few years ago. There was a lot of attention to Florida and Texas, but now, there is a lot more energy now in Tennessee, in Iowa, in South Carolina, in Utah. That's just the top of the list.

What I will say is this Alabama bill that you're talking about is by far not the first one. A similar bill passed in Missouri, a similar bill was proposed and I believe passed in Arkansas, and there's a law in place in Idaho that says books that might harm kids, et cetera, have to be segregated in their own space. In one library in Idaho, they made it an adults-only library because the library was so small they couldn't segregate the books from being accessible by young people. Now we have an adults-only library in this country, in the United States, a home of liberty and democracy.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. This is organizing to counter this movement from Jan in Ridgewood, New Jersey, at least on a small local scale. Right, Jan?

Jan: [chuckles] Thank you. I'm president of the New Jersey Council of Churches, and we'll be joining [unintelligible 00:16:43] in Ridgewood. One of the things we're doing is organizing a drive of banned books. My question is, where do we send them?

Brian Lehrer: A drive of banned books? What does that mean?

Jan: Books that have been banned in libraries and in school districts around the country. We're gathering those books and sending them to places where they are banned.

Brian Lehrer: Ah. Jonathan, any advice?

Jonathan Friedman: Well, please do reach out to us. We often try and connect people in different parts of the country who are trying to take actions like this, and we want to support more citizen involvement. I think this is an issue that more people need to put their voice behind because that, I think, does give us the chance of stopping it. I just say this all the time, most Americans do not want censorship, but nobody wants to live in a country like that. I think the message has to be much more clearly sent to politicians and elected officials, "Don't censor America."

Brian Lehrer: That's great that you, Jan, as the president of the New Jersey Council of Churches, reached out to us, and yes, I hope you follow up and contact Jonathan at PEN America. To end on that point, your report is clear on the fact, and you've talked about it, that this isn't a series of one-offs. This book-banning movement is backed by a well-funded coordinated network. Is there a well-funded coordinated network pushing back?

Jonathan Friedman: Well, I don't know if it's well-funded, but we are pushing back, PEN America with numerous allies that work on issues running the gamut from LGBTQ issues to racial issues to librarian associations and those other organizations who stand against censorship like ours. We are coordinating, we are trying to support a lot more activity at local and state and now federal levels because unfortunately, that is the situation we're in. We're facing now a many-headed Hydra that has multiple planks that it's moving forward on.

I just want to stress, anybody, everybody can get involved and behind this. We've all read books, we've all appreciated a book that changed our lives or that gave us information that we wouldn't have had otherwise. There's something incredibly universal, tangible, and just accessible for that, and it does not have to be political.

Brian Lehrer: Jonathan Friedman, managing director of US free expression programs at PEN America. He's been talking about PEN America's latest report, Cover to Cover, an analysis of titles banned in the '23-'24 school year. Thank you so much for sharing it with us despite what you had to report.

Jonathan Friedman: Thanks for having me.

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