A school district in Texas has banned approximately 1,500 books from its libraries, including titles by former U.S. presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, the literary nonprofit group PEN America reports.
The book removals took place in New Braunfels, a fast-growing city of about 100,000 people located 30 miles northeast of San Antonio. The city’s school district has banned or restricted hundreds of titles, including Obama’s A Promised Land, Clinton’s My Life, and Bush’s 41: A Portrait of My Father.
Other memoirs or biographies banned by the district include former first lady Michelle Obama’s Becoming and The Light We Carry; Malala Yousafzai’s I Am Malala; Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton; Matthew Perry’s Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing; Britney Spears’ The Woman in Me; Cicely Tyson’s Just as I Am; and U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar’s This Is What America Looks Like: My Journey.
The bans also targeted novels including Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, and Tommy Orange’s There There.
The books were banned in accordance with the Senate Bill 13, which requires school libraries to remove titles deemed “indecent” or “profane.”
Laney Hawes, a co-founder of the Texas Freedom to Read Project, said in a statement, “The latest slate of book bans from SB13 confirms what many Texas parents have been saying for years: The culture wars are ruining our kids’ education. Texas has produced world class authors, scientists, leaders; it’s as though our state legislators want to put that in jeopardy.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
