How anarchists in North Carolina rescued books banned in Florida

August 02, 2024

ASHEVILLE, N.C. — When the managers of a small bookstore in this Appalachian mountain town received a call from a distributor wondering if they could take in 22,000 books rejected by a Florida school district, it felt like a colossal ask.

Firestorm Books usually stocks fewer than 8,000 books — titles that range from historical fiction to solarpunk. The self-described queer feminist collective wasn’t sure where they’d put them, and their customers typically weren’t looking for picture books.

“We were like, this feels like a bigger thing than we can manage,” said Libertie Valance, a managing member of the group that runs the store. “But I think even in that conversation, there was an acknowledgment that we were going to do it.”

And so began the journey to bring eight tons of books — most of them banned under Florida’s state laws restricting classroom discussion on race, gender identity and sexual orientation — from Duval County Public Schools in Jacksonville to left-leaning Asheville.

As Florida becomes ground zero in the push to remove books that touch on racism and LGBTQ+ people from public schools, more titles are ending up pulled from shelves and stuck in warehouses. But the tale of the banned books from Duval County is unusual for how it ends: Firestorm Books not only took in the rejected children’s stories, but is now sending them to anyone who requests them. Many of the books are heading back to Florida.

“It’s up to the parents if they don’t want their child to read a book,” said Armand Rosamilia, an author and Duval County resident who requested a box of the books to put in a Little Free Library outside his home. “It shouldn’t be up to politicians.”

The books were part of Perfection Learning’s “Essential Voices” collection, a curated set of books for elementary school students that feature diverse authors and subjects. The titles include a history of the rainbow Pride flag; picture books on iconic figures such as civil rights leader Rosa Parks; and the tale of a family that escapes enslavement in Georgia.

Duval ordered 180 titles from that collection, but later found 48 to be problematic, the district said in a statement, concluding that some ran afoul of Florida’s new education laws. Some were returned because they’d been sent as a substitute for an unavailable title and were not needed.

“As an educational institution, the district’s main goal is this: To help children learn to read,” Duval County Public Schools said in a statement. “There are thousands of books we can use to do that, and the district will take the time and make the effort to ensure our students and teachers have access to a diverse, legally compliant set of books.”

Like many other large school districts in the state, Duval has struggled with how to follow the new laws heralded by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The 2022 “parental rights” law prohibited Florida schools from teaching students in kindergarten through third grade about topics involving sexual orientation or gender identity. Another law passed that year barred instruction that might make students “feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress” because they were forced to reflect on bad acts committed in the past by members of their race.

A spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Education said the state does not keep track of how many books have been removed and what has happened to them since the new laws took effect. State statute leaves it up to each school district to decide what to do with rejected books. They can donate them, give them away, sell them or recycle them.

Several districts, including Duval, are storing books in warehouses while reviews are conducted.

Watching the events unfold from Iowa, Dave Jacks grew frustrated. As the vice president of operations for Perfection Learning, he understood his customer had a “big logistics problem.” But he also couldn’t resell the books. They’d been sold in pre-assembled kits that would have been impractical to repackage. Still, he wanted to make sure these particular books ended up in the right hands. So he agreed to take them back and find a home for them.

“Those collections are specifically made for kids who might feel otherwise left out,” he said. “I mean, everybody should be able to, I think, feel special or wanted about something.”

Half of challenged books return to schools. LGBTQ books are banned most.

He took a crew from Perfection Learning to Jacksonville, where they worked for nearly a week collecting the rejected titles and packing them into a semitrailer. Finding someone to take the books, however, proved a challenge. He called bookstores around the country and no one seemed to have the will or capacity to take them.

Then someone told him about Firestorm Books — a small store located in a remodeled 1956 service station that sells books mostly from independent and underground publishers, serves vegan pastries and fair-trade coffee and offers “a welcoming, sober, and anti-oppressive space” for community events.

Jacks paid for the truck delivery to Asheville, a popular tourist town filled with trendy restaurants and colorful murals. The “little anarchist bookshop,” as its owners describe it, sells stickers and posters and cards with slogans such as “Smash Capitalism, John 2:16,” “Become Ungovernable” and “Life isn’t beautiful until it’s beautiful for everyone.” They hold community events such as game nights and an Abolitionist Reading Club.

When the semitrailer arrived at the store in November 2022, the collective got to work figuring out how to take in so many books, ultimately deciding on renting a storage unit.

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Meanwhile, the debate in Duval over books grew even more contentious.

Duval County Public Schools has 54 media specialists who were given the gargantuan task of reviewing more than 1.6 million titles to determine which now broke the law. While they did the analysis, the district advised teachers to “temporarily reduce” their classroom library collections to books that had been previously approved.

The result in some schools was immediate. Substitute teacher Brian Covey posted a video early last year showing aisles and aisles of empty library shelves at one of the county’s schools. The video went viral, igniting a debate over censorship and putting Duval County in the national spotlight.

The district later said that a “small number of principals” had interpreted the guidance on which books to retrieve “more intensely, out of an abundance of caution.”

Outrage over the books barred from Duval classrooms even reached the halls of Congress, where Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) read Perfection Learning’s Rosa Parks book into the record, to “see what they’re so afraid of.” The book was in the batch of titles sent to North Carolina. Duval schools said that book had been returned because it already had similar stories about Parks and other leaders of the civil rights movement.

In Asheville, the Firestorm collective decided they’d find a way to get the books back to Florida. When they first received the books they were in the process of moving, and it wasn’t until three months ago that they finally launched a project to get the books back on reader shelves.

The initiative, “Banned Books Back!,” offers to send the banned books free of charge to whoever fills out an online request form. More than one-third of the requests have come from Duval County, and many books are going to families with community libraries in their yards.

Firestorm’s customers showed up on a cold and windy day in late January to help pack the boxes. They formed a loosely organized assembly line, putting the boxes together and selecting six titles to place inside.

Volunteer Katie Croft, a therapist in Asheville, said she’s worried that Florida’s book ban laws are creeping into North Carolina. A state law passed last year says that “instruction on gender identity, sexual activity, or sexuality shall not be included in the curriculum provided in grades kindergarten through fourth grade,” echoing Florida’s original Parental Rights in Education law. Florida has since expanded the law to cover all grades.

“I was looking at some of these books, nearly crying,” Croft said. “These books represent the voices of so many people, and the children in those schools in Florida aren’t going to experience them.”

The lives upended by Florida’s school book wars

A representative for Duval County schools said the district had no comment on the journey of the books from Jacksonville to Asheville and now back to Florida.

“What the publisher did with those books after we returned them is really up to them and not a topic we would have a position on,” said Tracy Pierce, chief of marketing and public relations for the Duval County school district.

At the book-packing event, volunteers dropped surprise gifts in each box — a sticker that says, “Trash Fascism Not Books,” and a small paper pamphlet that looks like a coloring book titled “I Am a Unicorn and I like to Fight: A Kid’s Guide to Standing up to Fascism and Bullies.”

At the end of 90 minutes, they had packed 200 boxes. In all, they’ve sent out nearly 1,700 books to date. The group organized an online fundraiser to help cover the shipping costs.

Three days later, one of the boxes arrived at Sarah McFarland’s Tampa home. The district where her two sons go to school has rejected far fewer books — but she is still concerned they aren’t learning about key moments and people in history under the new laws.

“I want them to be able to choose what they want to read,” McFarland said. “I want them to have open availability to the literature they want, like I did as a child.”

The first book they read from the box: a history of Harvey Milk, California’s first openly gay elected official. McFarland said she led her sons in a discussion after reading it.

“It was very emotional to me,” she said. “I have LGBTQ family members, so it’s very near and dear to me that my children understand that.”

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