No one used to envision libraries as battlefields. But in 2025, that’s what they have become.
Across the South over the last decade, control of what happens on bookshelves has turned into a pitched battle, with white supremacist and Christian nationalist groups on one side facing off against an unlikely coalition of progressives, educators, Black leaders, and drag queens on the other.
Just two months into a second Trump presidency and its scorched-earth policy against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), the culture wars are heating up the stacks.
According to an analysis of banned books from PEN America released on Feb. 27, more than a third (36%) of the 4,218 books banned during the 2023-2024 school year featured characters or people of color. Measuring only history books or biographies, that number rises to 44%. More than a quarter (26%) of the banned history and biography titles focused specifically on Black people, according to the analysis. And a quarter (25%) of all the banned books included LGBTQ+ people or characters.
Legislation from ruby-red legislatures is poised to tilt the scales in favor of censorship. In Alabama, a bill has been introduced that would subject librarians to a $10,000 fine if they receive a request for a book removal and do not take action on it. Louisiana lawmakers passed a law in 2024 that allows parish (county) governments to dismiss their library boards without cause.
And in Florida, 2,672 titles were challenged in 2023 under that state’s law, making it the state with the most book challenges nationwide, according to the American Library Association. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis eventually signed a bill into law in 2024 narrowing the public’s ability to challenge books because the previous 2022 law was too broad.
“While some of the initial attention has been focused on LGBTQ books,” said Sam Boyd, a senior supervising attorney in Florida with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Democracy: Education and Youth litigation team, “there has been an effort to restrict books featuring Black characters or written by Black authors. And these attacks have certainly created a chilling effect on educators and schools.”
Controlling the message
In Lafayette, Louisiana, a group called “Warriors for Christ” filed a frivolous lawsuit in 2018 to stop the library from hosting “Drag Queen Story Time” (DQST), when LGBTQ+ people would read stories to children.
In 2021, one of the opponents of DQST, Robert Judge, became the chair of the Lafayette Parish Library Board of Control. During a rocky two-year tenure, Judge had police arrest or escort out members of the public on multiple occasions when he deemed they were getting out of hand in the board’s meetings. He eventually resigned from the chairmanship after the board fired its then-library director during an executive session, violating the state's open meeting law.
But Judge, along with the Christian nationalist policies he supports, remains on the board. And it was one of those policy decisions — refusing a federal grant for a voter education workshop — that prompted one grassroots resistance group to get started.
“The very first salvo in this new phase of the library war here was an overtly racist one, right? Because voting rights are something that disproportionately affects Black and Brown people,” said Lynette Mejia, a self-described “library kid” who now serves as the chair of Lafayette Citizens Against Censorship. “So that’s when it had gotten to the point where I said to myself, ‘OK, they’re not going away.’ This is a sustained attack.”
Mejia had watched the DQST issues unfold from the sidelines. Despite her lack of action to that point, she said she had a bond with her local libraries throughout her life as she moved around southern Louisiana. The library board’s rejection of voter education funding set her in motion.
“I started going to the meetings and just listening, finding out who these people were and what they were doing,” she said. “At that point I didn’t understand why they were doing it. But over time, I learned.”
One thing she saw was the rising, far-right influence of Michael Lunsford and his organization, Citizens for a New Louisiana, which sought to stop drag story hour. But eventually, she found a stronger tie between the far right and the board.
“There was a guy named David Pitre on the board,” Mejia said. “He resigned in August ’23. And then I think a month, two months later, Robert Judge comes up with this packet of information on ‘how Marxist the American Library Association is,’ and how ‘the library needs to disaffiliate from the ALA.’
“He sent it to Robert Judge just before he resigned as his parting gift,” Mejia said. “David Pitre is the uncle of (Heritage Foundation President) Kevin Roberts. So there’s a direct line from The Heritage Foundation to Pitre and, through the library board, to Michael Lunsford and his group.”
The Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank that opposes abortion and reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, immigrants’ rights, and racial equity. It authored Project 2025, a manual for reorganizing the federal government, agency by agency, to serve a conservative agenda.
Citizens for a New Louisiana was instrumental in a campaign that saw the Lafayette Parish Public Library lose one of its tax millages in 2018, severely curtailing its operation. It has also been involved in library battles in two other Louisiana parishes, Livingston and St. Tammany. But its influence can also be seen in the actions of the library board in Lafayette.
“So for one month last February, we had a Black History Month display,” Mejia said. “Then the board came back the very next month and banned all displays.”
Black history in books
Nearly a century ago, the historian Carter G. Woodson started a movement to teach Black history in America’s schools. First called Negro History Week and now Black History Month, it has pushed back on curricula that have either completely ignored Black people or treated them as subordinates. Many enterprising educators, librarians, and parents have used the occasion to bring stories, new interpretations of the past, and intellectual challenges to students of all ages who would not encounter them otherwise.
Today, however, the books that adults have used to help in this passing on of history are disappearing from libraries, much like the Black History Month displays in Lafayette.
“They get around it because they say, ‘We’re banning anything from this place with any kind of sexual content, OK?’” Mejia said. “Like librarians are going to be putting sexual content on display. But the way they got around that was they said, ‘anything political or controversial.’ The librarians here are so scared and so cowed and, so, many of them have left.”
The uncertainty of some laws used to attack Black and LGBTQ+ voices has led to a larger chilling effect on educators. Georgia passed a “divisive concepts” law in 2022, aimed at restricting discussions of race in schools, with Gov. Brian Kemp going as far as signing the bill into law in Forsyth County, which has a history steeped in anti-Black violence. But because of the vague language in the law, it has been cited in complaints ranging from requests to remove the works of Shakespeare from libraries to attacks on LGBTQ+ works.
It was that law that was used to justify the firing of Cobb County teacher Katie Rinderle in 2023 for reading to her class My Shadow is Purple, an age-appropriate picture book about self-acceptance and navigating gender stereotypes.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is representing Rinderle in a lawsuit contesting her firing and the basis for it in the divisive concepts statute.
“It’s not a direct challenge of the divisive concepts law, but based on it and its aftereffects,” said Mike Tafelski, interim deputy legal director of the SPLC’s Democracy: Education and Youth litigation team. “It shows you how these vague laws that may be targeting race get interpreted much more broadly to include other communities, as far as what is on the shelves and what isn’t.”
Saving a sinking ship
The library in Prattville, Alabama, has similar issues.
It’s not the fact that the board fired the director, which it did. It’s not that staff is leaving — or at least those who can. It’s that the library in Prattville is literally falling apart. One wing of the facility has been closed off, the books removed because of the possibility of water damage from the elements.
Yet with a library board that recently fired its director, there has not been a swarm of qualified candidates for the position so far.
“We are the poster child of how you lose your library and everything just goes downhill,” said Angie Hayden, co-founder of Read Freely Alabama, a group of concerned citizens who oppose censorship in libraries. “They couldn’t hire somebody if they tried. What librarian is going to come and work in Prattville right now?”
Even more dire than the physical plant in Prattville is the political environment down the road at the Alabama Capitol in Montgomery. Hayden said the current legislature’s bill addressing library book choices — HB 4 — would make any librarian run for the hills in another state.
“So they can take this book to your library and say, ‘This is indoctrination propaganda. It’s inappropriate, and I want it removed.’ That librarian then has to make a decision, and I believe it’s 15 days to do it. If they choose to relocate or remove the book completely, that ends it.”
But what happens when a librarian thinks the request is not valid?
“If they decide to stand up for the book — maybe they decide Heather Has Two Mommies needs to be on the shelf for families — there’s no mechanism for them to defend that book. They have five days to notify the complainant, and then that complainant can elevate it to your local law enforcement. There is no — and I can’t stress this enough — no mechanism by which the librarian can say, ‘This stays and this is why.’”
As the bill is currently written, that decision could be a very expensive one.
“Basically, if they don’t remove the book upon request without any fighting it, there’s no way to defend it and they could go to jail and receive a $10,000 fine,” Hayden said. “So, it has to come off.”
Like the issues in Lafayette, Prattville’s far-right influence may be tied to external forces. In an audio recording from a public meeting that then-board chairman Ray Boles and board member Gloria Kuykendall were attending, they were caught openly discussing the fact that Prattville’s library became a test subject for larger state legislation after its board quit.
“If we start removing books, we are in trouble,” Boles can be heard saying on the video, which was provided to the SPLC. “And then we’re gonna mess up the whole state. And see, this is about the state, it isn’t about us. This is about the state of Alabama.
“When that whole board quit, then I got a call asking me to go on,” Boles can be heard saying on the recording. “Asking, ‘Will you do it? This is what we need you to do.’ And I said, ‘Yes, absolutely I’ll do it.’ Someone from the state. Quietly. They know me.”
Some issues, however, are bigger than the state. The bias and prejudice that enters the book banning conversation is a constant reminder of where these motivations start.
“Book banning is not new to this country,” said Lacie Sutherland, a former Prattville librarian now working at the Montgomery City-County Public Library. “It’s just on a whole other level because when book banning was on the rise post-World War II in America, it was mostly tagging Black people. Like The Rabbits’ Wedding, published in the 1950s showing a Black boy rabbit and a white girl rabbit getting married. We have that book at the Montgomery County library. It just recently got lost.
“That started Alabama’s first massive waves of book banning in the 1950s because of interracial bunnies,” she said. “Come on, really? But then, the vast majority of books banned around that time period were of anything related to empowerment of Black people or interracial relationships.”
Sutherland, who is currently working on a project with the Bayard Rustin Community Center in downtown Montgomery to build its own library of inclusive books about LGBTQ+ people and people of color, said the issue of censorship and banning books is likely not going anywhere as long as hate still exists.
“When the vast majority of your citizens are white and straight, then they feel privileged and powered because they were given that power to go after the people who are different from them,” said Sutherland, who is white, straight and Christian. “The majority of the American population is white and the majority is straight. So, I think the people who feel the most hate, the most passionate hate towards LGBTQ people feel the exact same about people of color.”
About the author: About the author: Dwayne Fatherree is the special projects editor for the Southern Poverty Law Center.
This article was published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based civil rights organization.
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