‘Unbanned Book Club’ puts controversial kids’ volumes in Jacksonville readers’ hands

Duval County schools should open next month with something that was hard to find last school year: books.

But when kids want books that schools don’t allow, there’s a place for them to look now, too.

“We don’t want there to ever be a lack of knowledge for any of our girls,” said Diamond Wallace, who oversees a girls’ mentorship program and helped spark the opening this summer of the Unbanned Book Club, a small haven inside a Northside barbershop for books that are often challenged by school systems.

Stocked with books donated by publishers HarperCollins and Penguin Random House, the project was launched here through the national Little Free Library network with hopes for replicating in other cities.

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Jacksonville’s disputes over book bans since last year made it an ideal starting spot in organizers’ eyes.

“Our decision to launch in Duval County was simply based on the high number of books being banned and challenged and the national focus on the issue there,” said Greig Metzger, Little Free Library’s executive director.

The Unbanned Book Club is showcasing titles with an intentionally diverse mix of authors whose publications have been challenged in school systems around the country.

“I think this can all help people to come in and want to know more,” said Cedrick Turner, whose Cutz-Linez & Trimz barbershop on Moncrief Road is intended to be the first of three club sites in Duval County, organized in conjunction with Little Free Library and Jacksonville-based inclusiveness nonprofit 904WARD.

The red and black library box came to the shop in June, after 904WARD reached out for locations to leaders of a circle of small nonprofits called the Youth Action Series that included Wallace.

“It was a no-brainer for us,” said Wallace, vice president of the group Jewels of the Future whose president, Renita Turner, is Wallace’s mother and Cedrick Turner’s wife. Talk of book bans felt like a slap in the face, Wallace said.

In fact, only a tiny sprinkling of titles — 19 out of 162,000 — have been recently rejected by Duval schools.

But until now, a mountain of books has remained unavailable to students since January because of a review that could last years.

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To stay within a 2022 state law, school media specialists have been reviewing reading material manually to certify whether books and circulars comply with rules forbidding material that’s pornographic, inappropriate to kids’ ages or grade-levels or “not suited to student needs and their ability to comprehend.”

A total of 1.6 million books and publications were taken out of circulation temporarily, although students still had access to a much smaller collections of books, like the Florida Department of Education’s Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking (B.E.S.T.) reading list, that were already state-approved. By late July only about a tenth of Duval County's holdings, 162,000 titles, had been read and cleared for classroom use again, while another 227,000 had been weeded out because they were old, damaged or not used for many years.

But unlike last school year, books will be available to students next month whether the titles are approved or still awaiting review.

“[A]ll media centers (libraries) in our schools will be open for student learning when school begins,” school district spokesman Tracy Pierce said by email Thursday. “Our certified media specialists continue to work through the daunting task of officially reviewing every book, but at this stage, we are confident in making the vast majority of our books available to students through both classroom libraries and our media centers.

“All books are available to students with the exception of the 19 books listed on the website,” Pierce said, a reference to a district webpage that explains details of the book reviewing process and lists the 19 formally labeled as “not approved.”

One of those 19 is in the barbershop’s book collection.

Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give was written as a young adult novel (a movie followed) about a Black high school student who witnesses her friend shot and killed by a white police officer, with an ensuing riot. Since the book’s 2017 publication, the American Library Association counted the title among America’s 10 most challenged titles for several years, although it slipped off the latest annual list.

Other titles in the barbershop box’s two dozen or so volumes include a graphic novel about a Black middle school student at a white private school; a Lakota Indian shaman’s explanation of Sioux rituals; a deeply literate Black summer romance; installments of Kazu Kibuishi’s Amulet graphic novel series; and a how-to for developing youth activists.

"An unprecedented number of books have been banned and challenged in America in recent years, silencing authors with diverse viewpoints and eliminating the chance for readers to feel seen and represented in their stories," Metzger said. "… The Unbanned Book Club aims to keep these voices and opportunities for connection alive.”

Publishers have donated 700 volumes for the Unbanned Book Club.

While organizers only plan to open three sites for the club’s initial footprint, Little Free Library has also been offering kits of banned books and related swag to 200 Little Free Library “stewards,” the people who keep library boxes in their front yards. The offer is free for 100 stewards in Florida and 100 in the rest of the country.

Despite months of cotroversy over books bans in Florida, hard data on the reach of school bans is still incomplete. The state education department plans to release a list of banned books from each of Florida's 67 counties by late August. While that will add clarity to the extent of book bans in public schools, book-ban critics are aready worried the list will become a sort of crib sheet for ban advocates to make sure their community isn't allowing books that have been banned in other counties.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: 'Unbanned Book Club' puts challenged titles in Jacksonville bookshelves