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Podcast: The State of the First Amendment

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Podcast: The State of the First Amendment

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Morning Edition explores who felt censored before President Trump returned to office and who feels stifled now in “The State of the First Amendment: The Right From Which All Other Rights Flow.”

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Podcast: Jane Fonda Calls for Defense of Free Speech

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Podcast: Jane Fonda Calls for Defense of Free Speech

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Jane Fonda calls for ‘creative nonviolent noncooperation’ to defend free speech

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Hundreds of A-list celebrities have signed on to support the Committee for the First Amendment, an organization that was created during the Red Scare after World War II, to defend free speech.

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Banned Books Week: Effort to document and highlight support of the freedom to read

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Jennie Pu, New Jersey’s librarian of the year, talks with NPR’s Steve Inskeep about new estimates on the number of book bans happening across the country, and what’s being done to offset them.

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Fighting back on book bans : Code Switch

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B.A. Parker brings us around the country to see what access to books is looking like for students in Texas, librarians in Idaho and her own high school English teacher in Pennsylvania.

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Book censorship in US schools has become ‘rampant and common’, free speech advocates warn

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Since July 2021, PEN America has documented more than 22,800 cases of book bans across 45 states and 451 public school districts.

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This report offers a window into the complex and extensive climate of censorship between July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2025.

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Collection of essays explaining the educational value of challenged literature.

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May and June recognize the AAPI and LGBTQ+ communities-both integral to our society-giving us another reason to celebrate and protect their literature.

What so many misunderstand about banning a book is that the repercussions stretch way beyond the book itself. We're not being dramatic when we say that banning a book is the first step toward erasing not just someone's work, but their humanity, and their surrounding culture.

Put another way, if you don't think a person's perspective should be allowed on a bookshelf, and if you're so afraid of what they have to say and who they might be that you want to silence them and hide them from your children, you are one move closer to treating them as if they don't exist or shouldn't. It's the first step on a journey toward ignorance, hate, and all-too-real violence.

As you know, this month and the last mark two important celebrations: May was AAPI Heritage Month, honoring Asian Americans and Pacific Islander Americans, and June is Pride Month, honoring the LGBTQ+ community. Unfortunately, both of these groups know all too well what it's like to be silenced-on the shelves and in their communities.

2021 was a particularly grim year for Asian Americans, with hate crimes up 44% in major cities like our own and 339% nationwide. That same year, Human Rights Campaign tracked a record number of violent incidents against the transgender and gender nonconforming community.

We here at The New York Public Library have seen it firsthand, with librarians at our branches in Chinatown and beyond reporting that the lives of many patrons have been touched by violence. People were rightly afraid-afraid to come to the library, afraid to walk down the street, afraid to be identified.

Book bans-erasing perspectives and identities-contributes to these atrocities. And they're on the rise. The American Library Association (ALA) tracked an "unprecedented" number of challenges to library, school, and university materials in 2021: 729 challenges to 1,597 individual books. This is more than double the challenges tracked in 2019, and the books being challenged often focus on race, LGBTQ+ issues, religion, and history. As providers of free and open access to all information and all perspectives, public libraries have a clear role to play in fighting such censorship.

To combat this atmosphere of dangerous close-mindedness, we created Books for All, a partnership with publishers Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers, and Scholastic that made four commonly banned books available for free-with no waits or fines-to anyone in the country. The goal was to advocate that all books be available for people to read (or not read). Censorship, book bans, are against the mission of all public libraries, and we could not be silent.

The campaign was a clear success as both an advocacy effort-generating millions of media impressions supporting our efforts and the role of public libraries in combating censorship-and as a test of how we can use our library-controlled e-reader app SimplyE to encourage reading on a large scale: over the course of the campaign we saw 28,304 new downloads of SimplyE, and over 7,000 checkouts of the four commonly banned books. About 60% of the activity came from outside of New York, particularly in Texas, Pennsylvania, and Florida-states with high numbers of challenges and bans.

As the stakes are too high to be silent, upon the conclusion of the Books for All campaign, we decided to continue shining a spotlight on the issue, and this month we worked with our partners at the Brooklyn Public Library and Queens Public Library systems to launch our Banned Books Challenge: asking New Yorkers to read a selection of 10 books that represent voices, identities, and perspectives that book banning threatens to erase. To get folks started, we are making the title Last Night at the Telegraph Club, a beloved book by Chinese American author Malinda Lo, available with no waits to any New York library cardholder.

Winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Young People's Literature and the 2022 Stonewall Book Award, as well as being named a Michael L. Printz Honor Book, Last Night at the Telegraph Club is a queer coming-of-age story set in San Francisco's Chinatown circa 1954. Fueled by Red Scare paranoia, the strict gender norms of 1950s America, and the plight of immigrant cultures, the book is a masterful exploration of several key themes caught in the crosshairs of book bans, as well as a look at the power of empathy to heal and grow.

Ms. Lo herself understands firsthand the price of banning books, especially the cost to marginalized members of society. As she recently reported in diversityinya.com, "It's clear to me that books that fall outside the white, straight, abled mainstream are challenged more often than books that do not destabilize the status quo....The message this sends is loud and clear: diversity is actually under attack. Minority perspectives are being silenced every year."

Our challenge is an attempt to directly address the inequities and distortions that are created by silencing voices. Really it's simple: The way to fight ignorance is to read everything you can, in order to foster and strengthen your own sense of empathy. Read what makes you uncomfortable. Read what you don't understand. With empathy on your side, you can make informed decisions and create a personal bulwark against hatred of every kind.

Once you have read a book by someone from a walk of life other than your own and practiced the art of empathy, you can never hate them-at least not if you're intellectually honest. It's this empathy muscle that gets us out of the morass of false categories, nuance-crushing stereotypes, and black and white thinking.

At The New York Public Library, we take our role in connecting people with the knowledge they need to generate that empathy very seriously. It's a role every library system in the country must take seriously-and all Americans must fight to protect.

American sociologist Eric Klinenberg notes that the library is one of the key public spaces that can help define what he calls "social infrastructure"-those physical elements of community that act as a conduit, bringing people together in order to build social capital. At the broadest level, the public library makes it possible to interface with people from your world that are not exactly like you. But at the specific level, every banned book you choose to read and learn from brings an important human voice back to life.

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The Importance of Reading Banned Books | The New York Public Library

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What so many misunderstand about banning a book is that the repercussions stretch way beyond the book itself.

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Historical example of book banning in Nazi Germany

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Book burning is the ritual destruction by fire of books or other written materials. The Nazi burning of books in May 1933 is perhaps the most famous in history. Learn more.

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Republican Response to Charlie Kirk Reactions

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Republican Response to Charlie Kirk Reactions

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Trump administration joins Republicans’ campaign to police speech in reaction to Kirk’s killing

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Vice President JD Vance is jumping onto the conservative movement demanding consequences for those who have cheered Charlie Kirk’s killing, calling on the public to turn in anyone who says distasteful things about the assassination of his friend and political ally.

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What Jimmy Kimmel’s Suspension Says About the Trump Administration’s Crackdown Against Mainstream Media - The New York Times

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Late Night Hosts Respond to Jimmy Kimmel Firing

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Late Night Hosts Respond to Jimmy Kimmel Firing

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US TV hosts back Jimmy Kimmel and lampoon Donald Trump in free speech row

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America’s leading late-night TV hosts lament Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension as a “blatant assault on freedom of speech”.

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Protecting Free Speech in the Face of Government Retaliation

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Since Charlie Kirk’s killing, the government has threatened to punish anyone who speaks ill of the conservative free speech activist. This violates the First Amendment.

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Teachers Face Discipline for Social Media Posts 

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Teachers Face Discipline for Social Media Posts 

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CA teachers face discipline over comments about Charlie Kirk - CalMatters