Today across the United States, students, teachers, librarians, and parents are finding themselves at the center of contentious debates over what books and topics can be accessed in the nation’s libraries and schools. In 2023, a record 4,240 books were challenged in libraries across the United States, a 92% increase over the previous year. Censorship activists often target books and curricula that explore the experiences of people of color, LGBTQ+ people and women. Though these campaigns have reached unprecedented heights in recent years, the United States has a long history of battles over censorship, intellectual freedom, and the freedom to read.
This online exhibition, accompanied by a curriculum guide and temporary displays of material in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, explores censorship in the United States through four themed sections: Literature and Film, Sexual and Reproductive Freedom, Archiving Against Censorship and White Supremacy, and War, Colonialism and Protest. Each section offers a glimpse into a variety of materials in the Library’s collections that narrate the modern reality of censorship, from manuscripts and letters, to novels and periodicals, to ephemera, photographs, and artwork.
With school and public libraries being institutional targets for censorship, this exhibition also highlights The New York Public Library’s efforts for more than a century to protect the freedom to read. As the largest public library system in the US, The New York Public Library is committed to maintaining and promoting the more than 56 million items in its collections, all freely available to anyone with a library card.
In 1984, the Library presented an exhibition titled Censorship: 500 Years of Conflict. A week before its opening, Toni Morrison—whose novels have been repeatedly challenged and banned—spoke at the Library, relaying how public libraries led to her discovery of the freedom that comes from reading. Approximately 40 years before that, in 1942, the Library mounted an exhibition titled Books the Nazis Banned. New York City Council President Newbold Morris, among the dignitaries attending the opening, declared: “Our great public library system is the first line of defense against tyranny.” In 2024, as demonstrated with Banned: Censorship and the Freedom to Read, the Library is committed to holding this line and protecting the freedom to read.
A selection of items from this online exhibition will be on display in the McGraw Rotunda on the third floor of The New York Public Library's Stephen A. Schwarzman Building starting September 21, 2024 and in the Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library’s Treasures in Gottesman Hall on the first floor, starting October 31, 2024.
