Students Protest Book Bans

When Alanah Wali joined a hundred of her high school peers to protest a national surge in censorship of literature about race and sexuality, she thought about the American laws that forbade enslaved Black people from learning how to read. 

“Our ability to read should not be taken for granted,” she said.

The protest, convened by local educators and librarians along with the Yale School of Art’s Class Action Collective on Thursday afternoon, brought together students from six different high schools: Metropolitan Business Academy, Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School, Wilbur Cross, Hill Regional Career High School, High School in the Community, and Achievement First Amistad High School.

Class Action Collective Founder Pamela Hovland kicked off the protest at Temple Plaza. She cited PEN America’s count that in the last school year, 3,362 instances of book banning occurred in 33 states. Of the books at stake, 41 percent featured LGBTQIA+ characters and 40 percent featured a ​“prominent character of color,” said Hovland.

“Many Connecticut schools have been targeted by a small minority of people who want to control what you read,” Hovland told the students.

New Haven Federation of Teachers’ Megan Fountain stressed the importance of having a library in every school; currently, she said, about half of New Haven public schools either don’t have a full-time librarian or don’t have a library at all.

“Don’t let people say they can’t learn about you,” said Luis Chavez-Brumell, the New Haven Free Public Library’s deputy director.

Soon, the teens and adults marched along the east side of the New Haven Green — stopping first at the New Haven Free Public Library’s Ives branch on Elm Street, and then outside Yale’s Beinecke library by Wall Street. (The protest coincided with the Beinecke’s Art, Protest, and the Archive exhibition.)

Wali, an Amistad senior and a co-leader of the school’s Wolfpack Drumline, joined her band-mates at the head of the march. She crashed a pair of massive cymbals as the group’s spirited percussion resounded through the city streets.

Behind the drumline, some of the high schoolers carried posters of frequently-challenged books. Others held up words provided by the Class Action Collective — words that would soon be arranged in sentences calling for the students’ right to read, but that at first were a jumble of isolated nouns, verbs, and conjunctions dispersed randomly through the crowd. For much of the march, the posters’ intended meanings were powerfully inaccessible, evoking the frustration of not being able to access a book.

Then, on the steps leading up to the main library branch, the students assembled the words into excerpts from the American Library Association’s ​“Freedom to Read” statement, such as ​“Trust Americans to decide about what they read and believe.”

Every teen interviewed could point to a book that changed their lives by representing Black, Latino, immigrant, and queer characters — and shaping the way they understood their own role in history.

Co-op student Akira Thompson said she’s enjoyed challenging herself with complex books since middle school. Reading allows her access to perspectives outside of her own, she said. ​“I like hearing people’s thoughts.”

Thompson’s favorite book is Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960 and banned last school year in two school districts in Florida and Pennsylvania. ​“I have it in my bag,” she said as she marched on the New Haven Green with her classmates.

To Kill a Mockingbird centers around a Black man sentenced to death over false allegations of raping a white woman and includes uses of the n‑word.

“I do agree that sometimes, some books are not good for certain ages,” Thompson said. But she said that reading Lee’s classic novel provided her with an invaluable perspective on American history. ​“It’s a clear picture of what went on back then, with race and the rape.”

Metropolitan Business Academy sophomore Elodie found it hard to pin down a favorite book, but she said that ​“books that have something to do with immigrants” have had an enormous impact on her life, including a biography of ​“founding father” Alexander Hamilton.

(Last year, one Texas school district banned The Duel: The Parallel Lives of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, by Judith St. George, from elementary and middle school libraries.)

To Elodie, an avid reader who moved to New Haven with her family from Haiti when she was 3 years old, learning about Hamilton ​“shows that immigrants can truly find a place in America.” 

“There are lonely people, people who are shy and introverted. They find meaning and they find themselves in books,” Elodie said.

“There’s immigrants in America. There’s LGBTQ people in America,” she added. That fact doesn’t change when books are banned.

Career sophomore Naylanee, another passionate reader, found meaning in a book she read recently in school: Piri Thomas’ 1967 memoir Down These Mean Streets, which has been banned or challenged in a number of school districts including in Darien.

Naylanee described the memoir as a ​“coming-of-age book” about a Black Latino writer’s life — one that may be controversial for featuring LGBTQIA+ content and racist slurs, but that ​“spreads awareness about living as a person of color” and ​“how to accept yourself.”

Naylanee attended the protest alongside classmates from her AP African-American Studies class — a pilot program at Career High School.

That very AP curriculum was banned by the Florida Department of Education last year.

“I love this class,” said Naylanee — especially her teacher, A’Lexus Williams.

Williams said the students in her class decided themselves, by way of a class vote, to participate in Thursday’s protest.

Contrary to some assumptions from right-wing advocates of banning the AP course, she said, ​“there’s no indoctrination” in her classroom. She said she tries to stay ​“as objective as possible” when teaching. In turn, her students are ​“asking the critical questions” and ​“drawing their own conclusions” — not, as book banners might assume, blindly absorbing the material in front of them.

According to Williams, her students have been ​“very engaged” in the class. They are learning about a history that shapes their lives, stretching back to centuries-old African nations, ​“no matter how difficult that history is.”