September 27th is the last day of Banned Books Week -- which celebrates open access to information. Last year, Illinois passed a law to ban book bans. WNIJ’s Peter Medlin talked with the law’s author, state representative Anne Stava-Murray, about how it’s working in its first year…
Peter Medlin (PM): How does the legislation attempt to stop book challenges or book bans?
Rep. Stava-Murray (SM): By taking eligibility for Secretary of State grants away from any library that participates in book banning for partisan or doctrinal personal beliefs alone. So, you don't get money from us, as a state entity, if you are engaging in this type of partisan book banning.
PM: So far, is the law working as planned in its first year? Have there been fewer attempts to ban books?
SM: We don't know yet for school libraries, specifically, if there will be any school libraries that choose to opt out of our grant program because they want to be able to ban books. But the majority of libraries in our state, both academic and school libraries, rely on that Secretary of State's grant funding for incredibly important community services. All eligible applicants for public library funding, of which there were 639 this year, did file a compliance statement [with the law]. Similarly, all academic library applicants for open educational resources funded this past spring filed compliance with the new law. So, the jury is out on the school libraries, but every other entity of libraries that have received grants this year are in compliance with our new law. A community member might still go to the library and complain about a book's presence there. There's nothing the library can do about that, but they can point to the fact that we no longer ban books on partisan or personal beliefs alone.
PM: So, there have been no removals for those reasons this year?
SM: Yeah, correct.
PM: I was looking back at the American Library Association's data from the last couple years. They track the number of attempts to restrict access to books in Illinois. They showed that the number of those attempts went down in Illinois from 2022-2023 but last year, in 2023, the total number of titles challenged in those attempts actually went up. So, total challenges down, total number of titles represented in those challenges went up. I don't have the data for this year with the new law in place. But what, to you, does that say about the trajectory we've been on with this issue over the past few years?
SM: Yeah, so the data that I have when it came to the book ban efforts, and that I worked off of when I was passing this bill was data between 2021 and 2022. 96% of these bans were enacted without following best practice guidelines for book challenges by the American Library Association and the National Coalition Against Censorship. Only 4% of bans have been a result of parents or community members filing formal charges about classroom or library materials. At that time, just to give you some context and background for why I even wanted to pass this bill, in my community, in Downers Grove School District 99 we were targeted by a hate group called the Proud Boys who decided that they had a problem that Genderqueer was in the library of Downers Grove High Schools. So, our school district board literally had to go through six or eight weeks of meetings where they could barely get the work that they were meant to do done, because these hate groups would show up and spend hours and hours of public comment making the most vile statements about every group imaginable.
PM: Is there something about this that you wish more people knew about?
SM: I think the lack of visibility of minority groups within our libraries historically has led to some great efforts to diversify and be inclusive and make sure that everyone can see themselves in their library. To say, categorically, certain people's stories won't be told because they're somehow offensive to someone else's sensibilities, then that person should just not check out that book.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for brevity & clarity.
