Christina and Renee Ellis both attend a predominantly white high school in Pennsylvania, and they both were affected when the school joined a wave of others in banning books written by Black authors. These were stories about civil rights icon Rosa Parks and Black mathematicians Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden, who helped NASA launch men into space.

“If a little girl or Black girl goes into her school library and can’t find a single book that represents her and people are telling her that she doesn’t really matter, she will treat herself as such,” Christina told NBC BLK. “She will act like she doesn’t matter, and that’s how a cycle continues.”

She joined Renee and Black students across the country in making sure that did not become a reality.

“We didn’t want history to repeat itself, with hiding history, hiding the experiences of people of color in this country,” Renee told the news network. “We also wanted to make sure that the younger kids underneath got a full education, especially with the murder of George Floyd and the murder of Breonna Taylor and so many other social justice issues in America.” 

So Christina and Renee, sisters at Central York High School, helped their student social justice group Panther Anti-Racist Union challenge the book ban. They joined parents and teachers in protest outside the school, read from the banned books on Instagram, and wrote letters to the editor in the local York Dispatch, NBC News reported.

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Edha Gupta, an organizer of one of the student protests, wrote in the newspaper:

“Recently, the Central York school board decided to ban a diversity resource list that would be accessible to teachers in classrooms.

The one common factor?

All of these books either include main characters of color or are written by people of color.

This ban is not only an infringement on the education of all students growing up in this district — from kindergarteners to seniors — but also shows blatant disrespect for the students of color in this district, denying their experiences and ancestry a part in the curriculum. The students have had no voice in their own education, and I am an example.”

Books and resources banned in the Central York School District:

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Following a student protest that attracted about 200 people, the school board voted unanimously to rescind the book and resource ban, York Daily Record reported in September. Board President Jane Johnson said in a statement that the board action on Nov. 9, 2020 was merely a “freeze,” not a ban. She said she planned to review the list of books “expeditiously,” but “it didn’t happen … It has taken far too long,” Johnson said.

Jennifer Hyman, who supported the book ban during the board meeting, called the books a “smokescreen” to indoctrinate students in critical race theory, a framework for interpreting law that maintains racism has an undeniable effect on the legal foundation of American society. The framework would be pretty exclusively confined to law schools if not for Republicans taking advantage of public ignorance about the theory to assert that it translates to anything revealing the truth of racism or prejudice in America.

Some 35 states have filed 137 bills since last January to restrict what schools can teach about race, sexual orientation, gender identity, politics, and other elements of history, researcher Jeffrey Sachs found. Proposed legislation in South Carolina is intended to restrict teachers from covering topics that lead to “discomfort, guilt or anguish” because of political belief.

“That means that a teacher would have to be very, very careful about how they discuss something like, let’s say, fascism or racism or antisemitism,” Sachs told NPR. “These are political beliefs, and it means that teachers are going to have to second-guess whether they can describe that political belief in as forthright and honest a way as we wish for fear of falling afoul of this bill.”

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The American Library Association found in its special COVID-19 report released last April that 273 books were challenged in an attempt to have them removed or restricted based on content. The most challenged books in 2020 were author Alex Gino’s George for LGBTQIA+ content, author Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds’ Stamped for not encompassing “racism against all people,” and authors Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely’s All American Boys for “profanity, drug use, and alcoholism and because it was thought to promote anti-police views.”

Mikki Kendall, author of the nonfiction title Hood Feminism, told NBCBLK such bans are nothing more than publicity stunts, and they’re not having the desired effect. “There’s nothing more attractive to a kid than a forbidden book,” Kendall said. “I’m watching kids respond by saying, ‘Well, I read the book to see what they were so upset about.’”

Jaiden Johnson, a seventh-grade student at Meridian World School in Round Rock, Texas, told NBC News his school library featured banned books in a temporary but wildly popular special section. “There was a bunch of kids crowded trying to get through trying to check out all the books, because they wanted to read them before they went away again,” Jaiden said. He started a virtual student group dubbed Round Rock Black Students Book Club after leaving a school because he was subjected to so many microaggressions, such as teachers mixing him up with other Black peers.

“It makes me feel good when I read about characters and they have the same skin color as me and they’re not just, like, background characters, like in most books,” he said.

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