Once upon a now… some years into the new millennium, history was heating up and the world was amok with increasing conflict, global warming, and a deadly plague. Some things were new and some things not. Here, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, political polarization and the global pandemic landed squarely in school board meetings throughout the country with a fixation on “parental rights” and concern over the content of books in school libraries. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Lone Star state.
Book banning was nothing new, but sparked by the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, the term “critical race theory” becomes intensely politicized and book banning begins to rear its head in unprecedented ways. Even in late 2021, Virginia Gov. Glen Youngkin’s race is largely determined by controversy surrounding the banning of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
October 2021. Texas State Rep. Matt Krause issues a list of 850 books for public schools to review for obscene and race-related content urging state education officials to develop standards to ensure “pornography” and any material that might make students feel “discomfort, guilt or anguish” based on race or sexuality be removed from library shelves. Books with LGBTQia+ or racial themes (as well as authors) represent the majority of the content flagged for banning. As the culture wars rage across the country, Parental Rights groups dig in and pre-existing book review protocols are overturned by school boards in favor of rapidfire removal at an alarming rate.
In reaction to the Krause list, and as books are purged from library shelves, a group of librarians (#FReadom Fighters) mobilize to fight back, flanked by students, teachers and concerned parents. As we embed in the Lone Star state, tensions escalate as legislation proposing to criminalize librarians emerges and spreads to neighboring states. In a dystopian saga akin to a Fahrenheit 451 sequel, we traverse time and small town America with a cast of heroic characters in a chilling cautionary tale. From Granbury, where a high schooler helps spark the first federal book banning school investigation, to Llano, where a librarian / former Gulf War vet is fired for refusing to remove the books, and Keller, where all books of gender fluidity have recently been banned, librarians under siege join forces as unlikely defenders on the frontlines of democracy…
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