One Tennessee school district’s list of nearly 400 books removed from library shelves, including titles by authors ranging from Dr. Seuss to Toni Morrison, is being used by other school systems as a possible template to follow.
Administrators for Wilson County Schools directed the district’s librarians to pull the books a month ago. This week, leaders with Clarksville-Montgomery County Schools sent its librarians the same list to consider when reviewing their collections.
A third large suburban district, Rutherford County Schools, instructed its librarians this week to remove around 150 titles — 51 of which overlap with the list in neighboring Wilson County.
The removal there came at the request of school board member Frances Rosales, who told Chalkbeat that she used the Wilson County list and reviews on the website Book Looks as the basis for her request.
The purges come under Gov. Bill Lee’s 2022 “age-appropriate” school library law, which lawmakers expanded this year to prohibit public school libraries from having books with “nudity, or descriptions or depictions of sexual excitement, sexual content, excess violence, or sadomasochistic abuse.”
Sponsors of the changes, enacted amid national “culture wars” fueled in part by pro-censorship websites, say their goal is to protect students from obscene content and give families more control over their children’s education.
But the changes have also created a climate of fear, confusion, and self-censorship for school leaders and librarians, prompting some to revise or ignore their own review processes and preemptively pull titles from their shelves.
Graphic novels and books containing LGBTQ+ topics for high schoolers are among the casualties, as are classics like Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, about a young African-American girl who longs for blue eyes, and popular children’s picture books like David Shannon’s No, David! and Seuss’ Wacky Wednesday.
“This law was designed to catalyze book banning,” said Kasey Meehan, director of PEN America’s Freedom to Read program. “We should not be surprised now that we are seeing the mass removal of books in response to this censorial legislation.”
Tennessee law likely faces a constitutional challenge
Tennessee’s original 2022 law, championed by the governor, required districts to publish the list of materials in their library collections and periodically review them to make sure they are “appropriate for the age and maturity levels of the students who may access the materials.” Each community was to define what is considered age-appropriate based on local standards.
This spring’s revisions by the legislature added a definition of what’s “suitable” — including verbiage about sexual content, nudity, and violence that could be interpreted to prohibit literary classics like Romeo and Juliet, historical novels such as All Quiet on the Western Front, and encyclopedias containing photographs of nude statues.
The law is expected to be challenged in court over its vague wording, a lack of compliance guidance from the state, and the uneven way the law is being applied across Tennessee.
Among groups tracking its implementation are the ACLU of Tennessee and some publishing companies.
In Florida, several large publishers sued education officials there in August over a 2023 state law prohibiting sexual content in school libraries. They argued that the law had ignited a wave of book removals in violation of the First Amendment.
‘Creating an unofficial statewide book ban list’
A survey conducted this fall of members of the Tennessee Association of School Librarians found that more than 1,100 titles had been pulled statewide under the revised law during the first few months of the academic year.
“I’ve removed 300 books in the first month of school,” one librarian anonymously told the organization.
Since the survey, the number of titles pulled across Tennessee has ballooned “from a trickle to a tidal wave,” said Lindsey Kimery, a Nashville school library supervisor who is one of the group’s leaders.
“If Wilson County’s list is being shared around, and district leaders see it as a cheat sheet so that they don’t have to conduct their own reviews, it’s creating an unofficial statewide book ban list,” Kimery said.
A spokesman for the Clarksville-Montgomery district, which serves about 38,000 students near the Kentucky border, emphasized that Wilson County’s roster was being used “as a resource, not a mandate” for its own librarians.
“We are not directing you to immediately remove all of these titles from your library collection,” curriculum leaders told principals last week, according to talking points from the meetings that the district shared with Chalkbeat.
“However, we are providing this list as an example of books already vetted by Tennessee educators and strongly encouraging you and your library-media specialists to review the list and consider, if you have these titles in your collections, whether these materials violate state law.”
Books in violation must be removed, the principals were told.
In Rutherford County, where 150 books were removed this week, the school board voted Thursday night to give librarians time to review the titles and come back with a formal recommendation on whether they should be permanently removed or returned to the shelves.
“I don’t believe we intentionally have pornography in our schools, but I do believe that some books with questionable content have trickled in,” said Rosales, who told Chalkbeat that she “put a lot of thought and research” into her request to remove 150 titles.
She added, however, that “our librarians are experts, and we need to give them time to review these books and give us a report.”
Other school systems conducting library reviews reported that Wilson County’s list isn’t factoring into their work.
A spokesperson for Knox County Schools said the East Tennessee district is collaborating with its librarians and legal team to identify books for possible removal and will provide its schools with a list in the weeks ahead.
Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
