Books by Black Authors Banned in North Carolina

By Cash Michaels –

School bells are weeks away from ringing across North Carolina, and beyond the normal drudgery of getting students properly prepared, many parents are bracing themselves for something they thought they’d never see in their lifetimes—the banning of books at their local schools and public libraries.

Spurred by the conservative political movement, school systems and libraries across the nation, and in North Carolina, have had to deal with demands primarily from white Republican parents that certain books be taken off the shelves of local libraries, or be removed from local school curriculums because they are deemed “not appropriate” for their children.

According to the American Library Association, during 2021, at least 729 attempts to ban library books were made. And in a report from PEN America, 2,532 book bans were issued in 18 school districts in 32 states during the 2021-22 school year. Forty percent of the challenged titles “prominently featured people of color.”

By “not appropriate,” these book-banning parent groups, like Moms for Liberty, claim they don’t mean books geared toward African American or LBGTQ subjects, but rather books that contain what they consider to be sexually explicit content. In some cases, these parents have actually filed criminal complaints in their local counties and school boards to have what they consider to be books with offensive materials removed.

Many of the titles are by African American authors who write about the Black experience, and/or deal with racism in America. Toni Morrison, Nikole Hannah Jones, Nic Stone, and Ta-Nehisi Coates are just some of the popular Black authors being targeted by conservative parent groups.

Nikole Hannah Jones has had her award-winning The 1619 Project targeted by Republican congressmen and even former President Donald Trump while he was still in office. They objected to the book documenting how America was built on the institution of slavery.

Nic Stone’s acclaimed book, Dear Martin, a New York Times bestseller about a fictional Black student in a white school who writes letters to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was yanked from an approved high school reading list in Haywood County, NC, after just one parent’s complaint.

The school district superintendent made the decision to pull the book on his own. He admittedly did not read the book beforehand.

Ta-Nehisi Coates actually attended a South Carolina school board meeting where a high school teacher was under fire for using his 2015 book, Between the World and Me, to help teach students about what it is like to grow up Black in America. The book became an issue when some of her students complained to a school board member, claiming that it made them feel “uncomfortable” and “ashamed to be Caucasian.”

Ironically, the North Carolina House has now twice passed a bill outlawing teaching any lesson that makes students feel “ashamed” or “uncomfortable” because of what history may show their race allegedly did to another race in history. Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the leading Republican candidate for governor—a Black man himself—has spoken out against books and school curriculums that teach that America has a history of systemic racism.

For the past several years, school systems in Wake, Alamance-Burlington, New Hanover County, and other areas have reported book challenges by conservative parental groups, forcing some to take various titles off school or public library shelves for review. Wake County has instituted a new process for reviewing challenged books, but still will take the books down until that process is completed.

According to WUNC-FM, over the past two years there have been over 189 book challenges across North Carolina’s 115 school districts. Most of the books are written for middle school students and are about race and racism.

To opponents of book banning, there is little doubt that the movement is purely about politics, especially now during the run-up to the 2024 elections.

Janice Robinson, the North Carolina program director for Red, Wine and Blue, an Ohio-based progressive group, told NC Newsline, “We believe that this is just a smokescreen for the anti-CRT (critical race theory, the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric that’s been going around the country. It’s the right wing really pushing their political agenda at the expense of our kids.

“When you look at the books being banned, they’re books on African American history, about race or LGBTQ issues,” Robinson continued. “Parents have a right to be concerned, but there is a process that schools and school libraries have in place to address those concerns. The problem is that people are going around the process and pulling books off the shelf because one parent has an issue with it.”