The Grandparents Fighting Against Book Bans

Last August, a retired special-education teacher named Holly Hall joined a rally of grandparents warring against book censorship in Temecula, a small Southern California town. Locals had gathered to oppose a school-board decision to ban a social-studies reader, Social Studies Alive!, for citing Harvey Milk — the first openly gay politician elected in the state. “The Harvey Milk reference was in the supplemental materials,” 72-year-old Hall says, “which meant that it wouldn’t have even been mentioned in some classes.”

The world of literature is currently ablaze with rapidly escalating book bans targeting narratives and histories about gender and sexual identity, race, class, and just about anyone deemed “other.” This year alone, 1,128 books have been challenged, according to the American Library Association, which documents ongoing censorship attempts across the nation. Florida is the state with the most banned books (3,135 bans, according to PEN America), and in the 2022–23 school year, there were book bans in 153 districts across 33 states, including Texas, Missouri, Utah, and Pennsylvania. Earlier this year, schools in Escambia County, Florida, removed 1,600 books on gender and race from school libraries and, through this process, even banned multiple dictionaries. In August, New College of Florida, a public liberal-arts college, disposed of hundreds of library books, emptying the school’s Gender and Diversity Center. Then, this fall, major publishers — including Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, and HarperCollins Publishers — filed a lawsuit against book-removal provisions in Florida (through HB 1069, a law introduced in 2023).

When Hall, who taught in California for 40 years, spoke out at that rally in Temecula, she gave an impassioned speech about censorship in her state. “I addressed the dangers of banning books,” she says. “It’s not 1933 Germany.” Opponents attended the Temecula rally too, such as Moms for Liberty, a Florida-based parenting group formed in 2021 that’s pushing for banning books on race and what it calls “gender ideology.” A few months prior, the same three school-board trustees Hall spoke against had voted to ban the school’s study of critical race theory the day they were sworn into office. This preemptive act confused many, as no courses on critical race theory had been offered at the school.

Last summer, Hall had yet to learn about the newest threat under what cultural theorist Stuart Hall has called the momentary “swing of the pendulum” in political fortunes with the rise of the far right: Project 2025, a 922-page report arguing a case for an autocratic government published by a conservative think tank called the Heritage Foundation. While many members of Donald Trump’s administration developed the plan, the former president has distanced himself from the project, claiming at the September 10 debate with Kamala Harris that he hadn’t even read it. But as the project proposes, there could be a 180-day game plan after the election pushing toward an authoritative, Christian-nationalist government. As parents across the country and groups like Moms for Liberty have joined the attacks on literature, grandparents like Hall are mobilizing in response, and they are afraid. “I am so concerned about my country, our freedom, and the world,” Hall says.

But she felt encouraged to speak in front of her peers and opponents last year because she knew she was not alone. She was invited to the rally by Grandparents for Truth, a national organization formed in the summer of 2023 to fight for the right to read. “A neighbor walked by and told me about the group. He had a sign in his yard,” says Hall, who lives alone and tutors in her spare time. “We needed that because that was when the district decided not to use one of the social-studies books and the governor was getting involved in it.” Grandparents for Truth, the last project from late television producer Norman Lear, formed the collective with peers at People for the American Way, an organization Lear created in 1981 against right-wing Christian fundamentalism. When he launched Grandparents for Truth, it was a direct response to the rise of support for Moms for Liberty and collaborated with additional organizations working in anti-censorship movement, including Red Wine & Blue, Equal Ground, Defense of Democracy, Stop Moms for Liberty, and Indivisible. Grandparents for Truth currently has 1.5 million members.

The social-studies textbook Hall and her cohort rallied to keep is no longer available to Temecula students from kindergarten through grade five. Yet the fight against book bans is not simply an elementary-school struggle. Colleges and universities face greater financial cuts and cancellations of classes and programs in the humanities, including courses about women and gender studies as well as sexuality and ethnic studies, particularly across the Midwest and the South. Literature about Palestine or by Palestinian authors endures a unique and painful conundrum here. The few Palestinian authors whose work has made it into public education have especially been discriminated against since October 7, 2023.

Today, the most banned book in the country is Gender Queer: A Memoir, by Maia Kobabe, who tells me they weren’t shocked to see their book challenged but adds that “the viral spread of copy-cat challenges did surprise me.” Kobabe views the book-banning movement as directly correlated to bans against LGBTQIA+ people in the fields of health care and sports and even in public bathrooms. “It’s an attempt to erase queer people and erase queer stories from public life,” Kobabe says. “This attempt is already harming families all over the country. Ultimately, it will fail.”

In Philadelphia, Ruth Littner, one of the earliest members to join Grandparents for Truth last summer, discovered the collective through her daughter, Alana Byrd, the national field director of People for the American Way. Like Hall, the pair are committed to countering book banning despite heckling or pushback from the police. “I am the daughter of two Holocaust survivors,” Littner says on the phone from her home. “When Alana told me she had an initiative to fight this kind of authoritarianism, I jumped right on that. I was the first one to get the Grandparents for Truth T-shirt. My daughter was my initiator.”

In January of this year, Byrd spoke outside a town hall in Manhattan organized by Moms for Liberty. It wasn’t her first time joining a counterprotest; she had done so in Philadelphia and Temecula before and had been interrupted many times. She described the events in New York City, however, as “wild.”

Mom’s for Liberty’s list of invited speakers was short: the recently disgraced former congressman George Santos and Andrew Giuliani, the son of former mayor Rudy Giuliani. The event sold out, but according to Patch News, many seats inside remained unoccupied while over 100 counterprotestors stood outside in the cold. Librarians, community members, the group D28 Action for Equity (a Queens-based community-engagement project focused on increasing diversity), a rabbi, and parenting groups against book bans chanted as speakers entered and guests left.

Byrd spoke about her fears at a press conference for the event. As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, she says her elders raised her to understand the direction in which groups like Moms for Liberty want the country to go. “First, they ban our books, then they tell us we’re poisoning their blood and they’ll get rid of us if we take their jobs,” she says. She announced her first pregnancy to the crowd before stating, “I will be f- – -ed if I have to co-parent with these assholes.”

“They were so aggressive,” Byrd says, reflecting on how she was silenced earlier this year. She remembers her fellow press-conference speakers being called “groomers” and “demons” by hecklers who were eventually pulled away by police. “They were brazen. The cops were on their side, so they could say whatever they wanted.”

Byrd and her peers weren’t the only vocal ones at the event. New York politicians spoke out against the arrival of Moms for Liberty in the city. The Upper East Side Democratic Party district leader, Benjamin Akselrod, asked Patch News, “How is advocating for book bans liberty?” Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine attended the protests and announced, “The MAGA movement has come to Manhattan.”

Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, has a different recollection. “We’re taking our cities back,” she says. “Urban areas, urban cities, and school districts are abysmal.” By phone, she tells me her work is not concerned with banned books or solely focused on “gender ideology.” Her interest, she claims, is illiteracy rates, exclusively among Black students. Data shows, however, that two-thirds of all New York City students struggle with literacy. She says Levine “stood outside in 25-degree weather, yelling at a building, when he was invited to [come inside and] talk about the abysmal reading scores in New York City public schools and how we could work together to try to fix them.”

Moms for Liberty was formed in Florida after Justice, a former school-board member, met with her peers Tina Descovich and Bridget Ziegler over concerns about school responses to the pandemic. Their focus on “parental rights,” an issue that emerged in response to masking during COVID-19, was widespread among parents in the country, expanding their group to 115,000 members in 285 chapters in 45 states by July 2023. Their mission expanded too, shifting from an emphasis on lockdowns and masks to “wokeness” in the education system and stories on “gender ideology.”

Despite recent setbacks — such as the American Historical Association shunning its censorship advocacy, law centers identifying the group as an “extremist” organization, group membership idling, and co-founder Ziegler being caught in a sex scandal — Justice has taken her censorship rebellion north with plans to launch chapters in Brooklyn and Manhattan to join the chapter in Queens. The group’s new goal is to increase literacy rates for Black students, but Justice also remains against diversity, equity, and inclusion in schools. “There is not one shred of evidence that shows any correlation between DEI offices and improved academic achievement,” she says, adding that she feels “gender ideology” is “pseudoscientific nonsense.”

When it comes to actually discussing the books she fears are “promoting” sexually graphic content in American public schools (one of those being Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan’s Let’s Talk About It, which Moen has said does not promote sex but instead explores topics in sex education such as agency and consent), Justice instead shifts focus: “We’re not talking about the most important issue, which is that the kids can’t read.”

“They’re playing the long game,” says legal scholar and critical race theorist Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw. Her tour, “From Freedom Riders to Freedom Readers,” launched in 2022. She has spread over 6,000 copies of banned books across the country in collaboration with the African American Policy Forum, of which she is the executive director, and the Transformative Justice Coalition. Two years after her work on intersectionality was added to the College Board’s AP African American Studies course in 2021, Crenshaw’s writings were removed along with the work of many Black writers who have covered reparations, race in America, gender expression, and feminism. “We’re at a moment where centuries-old ideas are [central to] American politics,” she says.

Crenshaw believes the policy changes in the AP curriculum mirror the upswing of the censorship movement’s focus on diversity and equity, but she and Grandparents for Truth share another concern besides censorship: a lack of awareness around the anti-censorship movement. Still, both she and the grandparents are hopeful. “The courts are not going to save us. Our moderate institutions are not going to save us. The College Board certainly is not going to save us. The only thing that will save us is us,” Crenshaw says.

Hall retired from public-school teaching many years ago yet routinely encounters book censorship as a volunteer. Now, she tutors two sisters three days a week for two hours per session. Their parents are often present during their sessions, watching over the books and topics introduced to their daughters as many parents do. But their watchful eye is targeted: They don’t want their little girls learning about race or gender pronouns.

Hall’s tutoring sessions included trips to the library with the girls until their parents grew wary of the kinds of stories they would encounter. “Isn’t that sad?” Hall asks. She plans to attend the next Grandparents for Truth demonstration in Temecula and continues to observe local school-board politics.

When Littner reflects on the events that unfolded in New York earlier this year, she tells her daughter, “It’s good they are heckling you. It means you are showing a side that is fighting. There is a lot of voice against these Moms for Liberty folks.” Byrd, who recently gave birth to her son, agrees: “That’s true. If we were doing something that wasn’t threatening to their hegemony, they wouldn’t be fighting back.”

“There’s a book titled Mein Kampf, written by Hitler,” Littner continues. “From where I sit, as a child of survivors, it is the worst book on the planet — and I do not believe that book should be banned.”

Littner hesitates before Byrd interjects, “You wouldn’t want your grandson to read it. But you wouldn’t ban it for other people, right?”

“Correct,” Littner confirms. She draws a long pause before her final thought: “I want to make sure my grandchildren grow up in a world where they can read and form opinions based on knowledge, not on a narrow truth.”