Who Writes History?
When books disappear from classrooms and libraries, who decides what the next generation is permitted to remember?
Seat Affected: The right to learn a complete
history
Seat Status: Increasingly restricted and politically
contested
Location: United States
Theme: Education, public memory, authority and
accountability
History is never only about the past.
It tells children whose achievements built the country, whose pain deserves to be remembered, whose mistakes must not be repeated—and whose presence can be treated as optional.
That is why the current fight over books is larger than any one title.
PEN America recorded 6,870 instances of school book bans during the 2024–2025 school year across 87 public-school districts in 23 states. Because the organization counts each removal in each district as a separate instance, that number does not mean 6,870 different books. Its underlying index contained 3,743 unique titles.
The American Library Association measures censorship differently. It reported that 4,235 unique titles were challenged in schools and libraries during 2025. According to the ALA, 92 percent of challenges came from pressure groups, government officials, and other decision-makers; fewer than 3 percent came from individual parents.
Those figures are not interchangeable, and not every challenged book concerns Black history. But together they show that organized efforts to control access to books are not isolated incidents.
Removal Is a Decision
Schools must make choices. No library can carry every book. Material must be age-appropriate, factually responsible and educationally relevant. Parents have a legitimate interest in what their children encounter.
But those principles do not answer the most important questions:
Who applies them?
By what standard?
Is the standard applied consistently?
And what happens when removing “uncomfortable” material repeatedly makes
the same people less visible?
A book can be removed through legislation, a school-board vote, an administrator’s directive, a formal review—or a quiet decision by a teacher or librarian who fears punishment. The result for the student may be the same: the information is no longer there.
That does not mean every removal is an attempt to erase history. Motives differ, and disputed books must be assessed individually.
But the cumulative pattern still matters.
If books about slavery, segregation, Native displacement, LGBTQ+ lives or racial inequality are scrutinized more aggressively than flattering national stories, the curriculum does not become neutral. It becomes selectively incomplete.
What Is Left Behind?
There is another fairness question.
If schools remove material that might cause students to feel discomfort about white Americans, do they apply the same concern to material that has historically reduced Black Americans to slavery, poverty, criminality and protest?
Are students still shown Black pain while Black scholarship, enterprise, invention, family life, military service, landownership, art and political thought receive only a few paragraphs?
Removing a distorted account is not the same as correcting it.
If the only Black history a child learns is oppression, that child has not received a complete history either.
Who Has the Authority?
Public schools are governed through a mixture of state law, elected school boards, education agencies and local administration. Courts can intervene when constitutional rights are implicated, but the First Amendment does not turn every curriculum dispute into an automatic legal violation. The authority is divided—and that makes public scrutiny essential.
The harder question is not merely who possesses legal power.
It is who should possess moral permission to narrow a shared national memory without showing the public exactly what was removed, why it was removed and what evidence supported the decision.
Government may choose curricula. It should not be allowed to make consequential choices invisibly.
Who Is Missing?
Students who cannot ask questions about histories they were never taught.
Teachers and librarians who know the educational value of a work but fear professional consequences.
Parents who support broad access but are less organized than national pressure campaigns.
And communities whose stories become negotiable whenever their history makes powerful people uncomfortable.
One Action
Ask your school district for its current challenged-and-removed book list, the written policy used to decide each case, the names or roles of decision-makers, and whether a qualified review committee read each work in full.
Then ask a second question:
What is still being taught about Black Americans—and does it include what they built, created, owned, discovered and led?
Return to the Seat
The Missing Seat will return to this question. We will examine whether challenged books were restored, whether review processes became more transparent, and whether students gained a fuller history rather than a politically safer one.
Children do not need a history designed to make them ashamed.
They need a history accurate enough to make them informed.
The past cannot defend its place on the shelf. The living must decide whether truth is something young people inherit—or something officials ration.
Who is missing?
Ally = Action.
Take Your Seat. 🪑
Verification Notice
PEN America and the American Library Association use different definitions and data sets. Their figures should not be added together. A challenge is not always a removal, and a “book-ban instance” may count the same title separately in multiple districts. The interpretation of the consequences for public memory is TMS analysis.
Sources
- PEN America, The Normalization of Book Banning: https://pen.org/report/the-normalization-of-book-banning/
- PEN America, Facts & Fiction methodology note: https://pen.org/report/facts-fiction/
- American Library Association, 2025 book-ban data: https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data