A school district in northeastern Florida must restore three dozen books about race and the LGBTQ community to school libraries as part of a deal reached Thursday with authors, parents, and students.
Last year, the Nassau County School Board deleted 36 books after a conservative advocacy group, Citizens Defending Freedom, disputed their titles. The books included “And Tango Makes Three,” a popular children’s book by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson based on the true story of two male penguins who raised a chick together at New York’s Central Park Zoo, as well as classics such as “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison and “Crank” by Ellen Hopkins.
“This settlement—a watershed moment in the ongoing battle against book censorship in the United States—significantly restores access to important works that were unlawfully removed from the shelves of Nassau County, Florida’s public school libraries,” said Lauren Zimmerman, an attorney with the New York law firm Selendy Gay, which sued the district on behalf of Parnell and Richardson, as well as Florida parents Sara Moerman, Toby Lentz, and their children.
“Students will once again have access to books from well-known and highly-lauded authors representing a broad range of viewpoints and ideas,” Zimmerman said in a news release.
The Nassau County School Board did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The lawsuit was one of several challenging the removal of books from school systems around Florida under a statute passed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis that made it simpler for community members to dispute materials they felt unsuitable in school libraries. The statute, which has since been repealed, was one of several bills that limited how schools may give information about race and the LGBTQ community.
The plaintiffs filed their lawsuit in May, claiming that the school board engaged in “unlawful censorship” by removing “the children’s book behind closed doors and without community involvement or comment.” The lawsuit also claimed that the district violated the state’s “Sunshine Law” by removing the books without holding a public meeting.
“They have a statutory right to get the opportunity to attend and comment on these types of decisions, the removal of books or the restriction of books, and they weren’t given that opportunity here,” Zimmerman said to First Coast News at the time. “All 36 books, including ‘Tango’, were removed without any public hearing whatsoever, which means there wasn’t any community commentary on, you know, whether this was the appropriate decision.”
Florida had the most book-ban cases in the United States from July 2021 to December 2023, with 3,135 bans across 11 school districts, according to an April report from PEN America, a nonprofit that works to protect free expression and has also filed a lawsuit against another Florida county over book bans.
novels featuring LGBTQ characters and themes accounted for 36% of all book bans between 2021 and 2023, while novels addressing race and racism, as well as books with characters of color, accounted for 37%. Book ban data for the entire 2023-2024 school year have yet to be announced, however PEN America reports that by mid-year, book bans had already topped the previous school year’s total.
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