Book challenges in the United States reached a historic high between 2021 and 2024 — a coordinated effort to remove books from school libraries at a scale not seen since the 1980s. These are the books that have been targeted in the current wave, with the context behind each removal.
The current wave of book banning is different in scale and coordination from previous periods. The ALA recorded more challenges in 2023 than in any previous year — and analysis shows that a significant proportion were coordinated through national organisations rather than arising from individual parents. The most targeted books share a common characteristic: they depict the experiences of people who have historically been marginalised — LGBTQ+ people, people of colour, survivors of abuse.
2021–2023 — The surge years
These books were targeted during the sharpest spike in challenges on record. Many were removed from school libraries in multiple states.
Three consecutive years as the most challenged book in America. A graphic memoir about gender identity and asexuality — removed from school libraries in Virginia, Texas, Florida, and dozens of other districts. The visual format made it particularly easy to challenge by presenting selected images without context. Kobabe has stated the book was written for people who felt isolated in their identity; the banning pattern has confirmed that audience exists and is being told their experience is unacceptable.
A memoir about growing up Black and queer — Johnson writes about family, identity, first sexual experiences, and surviving in environments that weren't built for them. Removed from school libraries in over a dozen states. Johnson has noted that the same passages challenged for "sexual content" are comparable in explicitness to passages in straight romance novels that are never challenged. The disparity is the point.
Morrison's first novel — about an eleven-year-old Black girl who prays to have blue eyes, believing white beauty standards make her worthless — has been challenged since the 1990s but saw a spike in removal attempts after 2020. Challenged for sexual content (it includes a rape scene) and for being "anti-white." Morrison's Nobel Prize citation specifically praised her work's moral power. The challenges intensified after her death in 2019.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel depicting the Holocaust through the metaphor of cats (Nazis) and mice (Jews) — removed from a Tennessee school district's curriculum in January 2022 for "inappropriate language" and a nude illustration of Spiegelman's mother. The removal made international news, in part because it occurred during a period of rising antisemitism in the United States. Jewish organisations and Holocaust educators condemned the removal universally.
Published days before police violence became a national crisis point in 2020, Thomas's novel about a Black teenager witnessing a police shooting saw both its sales and its challenges spike simultaneously. Challenged in districts across Texas, Georgia, and the Carolinas as "anti-police" and "politically divisive." Thomas has pointed out that the book is about grief, not policing — and that the two characterisations reveal exactly the discomfort the book is designed to address.
Shilts's account of the AIDS crisis — the political failures, the medical system's slow response, and the human cost — became a target in the post-2021 wave of challenges. The book is journalism, not advocacy; Shilts himself died of AIDS in 1994. Its removal from some school libraries sits alongside the removal of other books about LGBTQ+ history — part of a pattern of erasing the record of that history from educational settings.