Welcome to Pensacola, Florida, America’s Book-Banning Capital

One of the epicenters of contemporary book banning is Escambia County, Florida, on the westernmost edge of the Panhandle. Some historians contend that Pensacola, the county seat, saw the first shots of the American Civil War. In February 2023, another conflict was brewing in Pensacola, as parents and community members gathered for a special school board meeting devoted to “reconsideration of educational materials.”

The agenda included votes on three books that were subject to “citizen challenge”: All Boys Aren’t Blue, the memoir of a Black LGBTQ activist, When Aidan Became a Brother, about a trans boy, and And Tango Makes Three, an illustrated book about two male penguins who raise a baby penguin in the Central Park Zoo. These were among more than one hundred titles that had been challenged by a single district high school teacher, Vicki Baggett.

A state-mandated Instructional Materials Review Committee, consisting of parents, teachers, and administrators, had already determined that all three books had educational merit and that Baggett’s complaint was unfounded. The board, however, would have the final say, and the mood was tense.

Right-wing book bans, rife in Escambia and throughout the South, are the product of a political moment.

Decisions would be made on a book-by-book basis, and members of the public used their allotted speaking time to debate whether the books were “age-appropriate, agenda-setting, or a flat-out abomination before God,” according to the Pensacola News Journal. Many justified their opposition with appeals to a higher power: God “gave marriage as a beautiful picture of his relationship with His people. But we want to distort that picture, because we hate God,” argued Joshua Luther, a community member who believed it was un-Christian to normalize same-sex marriage, even in a parable about penguins. “All the people that come to defend these books need to repent,” Luther declared.

Rick Branch, a minister at the local First United Methodist Church, disagreed, arguing that Jesus would have wanted his followers to build inclusive spaces. “I have seen the hurt that has been caused by people who say God doesn’t love you the way you are,” said the minister. “I am a white, Anglo-Saxon, cisgender, Protestant, Christian male. I can find myself reflected in society anywhere. But for this book [All Boys Aren’t Blue]—Black, queer, youth— they can’t find that everywhere.”

The debate ground on for nearly five hours. In the end, it wasn’t even close. The board voted 5-0 to overturn the review committee’s earlier decision, deeming the books unsuitable even for optional reading and subject to immediate removal. “I believe in parental rights,” explained one board member, emphasizing that parents could buy their children any books they pleased, but that these books—one of which pushed an “LGBTQ agenda using penguins”—had no place in Escambia school libraries.

One student in attendance, Ella Jane Hoffmaster, had a different takeaway. “I am currently embarrassed to be a student in Escambia County tonight,” she said.

Unfortunately for Hoffmaster and other students, the book banners of Escambia County were just getting started. A meeting about the next challenged book, Ground Zero—Alan Gratz’s novel about the historical impact of September 11, 2001, told through the eyes of American and Afghan children—was just a couple of days away.

The meetings devoted to challenged books continued throughout that spring, with tensions escalating on both sides. Concerned citizens met up in parking lots to distribute matching T-shirts and divvy up their talking points. More than 150 people, including children, turned up to debate Drama by Raina Telgemeier, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, The Nowhere Girls by Amy Reed, and New Kid by Jerry Craft. These challenges, too, had come from Vicki Baggett, who cited “indoctrination of LGBTQ,” “sexual introductions,” “race-baiting,” and “anti-whiteness.”

“My [classroom] space will always be a safe place for trans kids, Black kids, and any other kid who needs a safe space,” said West Florida High School social studies teacher Jerrod Novotny. “Majority rule does not make minorities’ rights obsolete…Diverse stories are essential [because] they validate the experience of those who can see themselves.”

The pro-censorship contingent doubled and tripled down on their religious convictions. “The Bible says that these things [homosexual relationships] are unnatural,” said Aaron Schneier, a local handyman who had become a fixture at the board’s meetings. “We don’t need to bring perverted things and perversion for our children. There is a day of judgment coming and I wish that you all would know—it’s not funny—the blood of Jesus Christ.”

On this occasion, after nearly eight hours of debate, the board sided with the books, deciding that all four could remain on the shelves. Some grumbled about the board being “inconsistent.”

“There was an incredible amount of pressure from the community on the school board members as they made their decisions,” Brittany Misencik, a reporter who covered educational issues for the Pensacola News Journal, told me via email. “The complicated part of it was, I do think that parents and community members on both sides thought they were ‘keeping children safe,’ whether by shielding them from books that didn’t align with their own morals, or by giving them freedom to read books widely from various perspectives.”

Some parents took more extreme measures. Jennifer Tapley, who was then a school district candidate, turned Storm and Fury, Jennifer L. Armentrout’s YA novel about a girl who can communicate with ghosts, in to the Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office. While it had not been subject to a formal challenge, Storm and Fury—which had been checked out by a seventeen-year-old student—constituted “child pornography” under Florida House bill 1069, Tapley told a sheriff’s deputy. “It’s a serious crime,” she can be seen arguing on bodycam footage. “It’s just as serious as if I handed a Playboy to [a minor] right now, right here, in front of you.” Storm and Fury was subsequently returned to the school, where it was “quarantined” for review.

By the end of 2023, more than 1,600 books, including the Merriam-Webster dictionary, had been banned, pending investigation, in Escambia County. Books by Anne Frank, Agatha Christie, Toni Morrison, Jodi Picoult, Cormac McCarthy, Stephen King, Jonathan Franzen, Margaret Atwood, and countless others had been removed, along with The Guinness World Records and Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, for fears they violated Florida’s new laws prohibiting sexual material in schools. As for the dictionary, its descriptions of sexual acts might constitute pornography under Florida law.

Many Pensacola parents were appalled by this surge of censorship; some wondered if it was unconstitutional. By early 2024, a U.S. district court judge ruled that Penguin Random House, PEN America, authors, and families in Escambia County had standing to sue. The resulting suit, which is ongoing, alleges that Escambia violated First Amendment rights by removing books “based on ideological objections to their contents or disagreement with their messages or themes,” further claiming that “the removals have disproportionately targeted books by or about people of color and/or LGBTQ people.”

Lindsay Durtschi, a Pensacola optometrist and mother of two—her Instagram handle is @doctormommyod—remembers the incident that impelled her to join the lawsuit as a plaintiff. A member of the PTA, Durtschi had volunteered to serve on the district’s review committee when Raina Telgemeier’s graphic novel Drama was flagged for LGBTQ “indoctrination.” In one scene, a boy in the story confesses to having a crush on another boy. The notion that this amounted to indoctrination, Durtschi felt, was ridiculous.

“I had already read the book with my third grader who loves all of Raina Telgemeier’s books,” Durtschi recalls. “There was no LGBTQ indoctrination. I still have a straight child as far as I know,” she said. Yet here she was, listening to local bigmouths who didn’t have children at the school and who possibly hadn’t even read the books. Hearing them fulminate, you’d think Florida was on the cusp of losing a generation of youngsters to sexual pathology.

“It has become tyrannical,” Durtschi said of the current atmosphere. “One parent cannot tell me what my kid can read and what my kid can’t read, and what is and is not appropriate…A lot of the people that are wanting these books to be banned—they don’t want their kids and grandkids to know that they were one of the people still throwing stones.”

“The problem,” she said, “is weak people that are afraid of change.”

Right-wing book bans, rife in Escambia and throughout the South, are the product of a political moment. In the wake of the MAGA movement’s dual 2020 loss of both the Trump presidency and the subsequent campaign of election denial, the conservative operative Steve Bannon called for a new electoral strategy.

Bannon believed that Trump had been betrayed by elites within the Republican party. It was now time to flip the script. On his War Room podcast, Bannon outlined plans for a MAGA comeback, which would involve seizing control of the apparatus of municipal and state governance from the bottom up. He urged his audience, which can number in the tens of millions, to focus on the lower rungs of American democracy: positions on finance boards, city councils, state legislatures, and libraries.

“It’s going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won,” Bannon declared. “We’re going to take this back village by village…precinct by precinct.”

Many board positions were not hotly contested, and almost anyone could show up at a school board meeting and command their five minutes of airtime.

Bannon would devote particular attention to schools. “The path to save the nation is very simple—it’s going to go through the school boards,” he stated in May 2022. A growing cohort of American parents, Bannon believed, exhausted by the pandemic and the roiling social conflicts of recent years, were fed up with mask mandates, increasingly strident progressive racial politics that upended the nation’s founding narratives, and an evolving vocabulary of gender inclusivity that could make your head spin.

Schools were where these vectors of outrage converged. They also offered low barriers to entry, democratically speaking: many board positions were not hotly contested, and almost anyone could show up at a school board meeting and command their five minutes of airtime. MAGA Republicans should, as Bannon was fond of saying, “flood the zone.”

Bannon was hardly alone in identifying schools as an ideological flashpoint. Throughout these years, conservative parents’ rights groups including Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education, MassResistance, and Florida Citizens Alliance arose to confront progressive trends in education, especially those stemming from DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion). The Florida Citizens Alliance, for instance, opposes sex education in K-12 schools and advocates for the removal of fifty-eight books including Beloved, The Kite Runner, The God of Small Things, and a rhyming children’s book called Everywhere Babies. The organization’s website claims that explicit materials “harm children and potentially groom them to be trafficked.” Teachers “can’t give a child an aspirin without the parent’s permission, yet we can give them this smut and encourage them to be sexually active,” said alliance co-founder Keith Flaugh.

No Left Turn defines its mission as “reviving in American education the fundamental discipline of objective thinking…and emphasizing the role of the parent as the primary custodian and authority of their child.” They claim to forward a vision of education in which “appreciation of American founding principles is fostered, family values are preserved, and every individual can pursue truth, virtue, beauty and excellence.”

In practice, No Left Turn provides parents (or anyone, really) with a comprehensive toolkit for banning books—resources including lists and form letters targeting texts like Front Desk, a middle grade graphic novel about a Chinese American student living in the motel where her parents work as cleaners. (The author, Kelly Yang, “doesn’t miss an opportunity to characterize Caucasian and wealthy people as racist and evil,” the letter states.)

Even a small number of committed partisans can generate a staggering volume of challenges to libraries: One man—Bruce Friedman, who leads a Florida chapter of No Left Turn—is responsible for about five hundred complaints in Clay County, where challenged books must be removed from shelves pending review. Friedman’s reasons for challenging books include: claims that Donald Trump is a racist; claims that Confederates were pro-slavery; harm being done to human teeth; pentagrams, demons, devils, and ghosts; sexualized youthful banter such as “spank you very much”; wealth redistribution; sexual interactions with aliens, androids, and robots; mentions of mutants; and mentions of Palestine.

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