Students, parents and teachers of St. Francis Area Schools in Minnesota who are fighting the review or removal of at least 47 books got a boost from author Dave Eggers last week.
Eggers and Amanda Uhle, executive director and publisher of McSweeney’s, joined authors Kelly Barnhill and Anne Ursu and dozens of St. Francis students and parents as well as representatives of PEN America, EveryLibrary and MN Authors Against Book Bans, to discuss the impact of ongoing bans in St. Francis, and strategize about further resistance to book bans in the school district about 40 miles north of Minneapolis.
They also screened the documentary To Be Destroyed, which follows Eggers as he travels to Rapid City, South Dakota in 2021, where the local school board banned his book The Circle.
St. Francis’ board in November adopted a policy that removed librarians and teachers from the process of selecting books and instead relied solely on ratings posted on the website BookLooks.org, which was created by a member of the conservative activist group Moms for Liberty. At least 11 books were banned, including classics like The Kite Runner, Beloved, Brave New World, and The Handmaid’s Tale.
In March, another 35 were targeted for removal, the Holocaust memoir Night by Nobel Prize winner Eli Wiesel among them.
In response, students at St. Francis High School staged a walkout and “read-in” of some of the titles. Meanwhile, the Education Minnesota-St. Francis and the ACLU Minnesota each filed lawsuits seeking to end book banning in the district. Coincidentally, the BookLooks website ceased operation on March 23.
Local news reported that the district paused the new bans in response to the lawsuits.
“The people of St. Francis show how it’s done,” Eggers said in a statement to PEN America. “Faced with an unAmerican and unconstitutional book ban, they took quick and strategic action. They showed up at school board meetings. They rallied teachers, students and parents. They called the ACLU. They sued. And they’ve dealt a significant, national blow against those who would deprive Americans of their fundamental right to read freely.”
Multiple bookstores have also signed on in support of the campaign, including Wild Rumpus Books of Minneapolis, which sold books at the event..
In addition, Eggers and Uhle arranged for their foundation to foot the bill with Scout & Morgan Books of Cambridge, Minnesota, to provide St. Francis High School seniors with free copies of the book of their choice from PEN America’s banned book list.
“I never thought we would be in a situation where authors are reaching out to us to come help us,” said parent Nikki Kruse-Dye, who created a group called Parents for the Freedom to Read, at the event. “Here we are living in one of my favorite dystopian novels, that isn’t as much fun to live in as it was to read about.”
“We all know our situation is not unique, what’s happening in our district is a textbook attack on a public school library,” Kruse-Dye continued. “We also know that book bans are contagious. Our mission isn’t important to just us, it’s important to schools around Minnesota and around the nation.”
Barnhill, herself a former teacher whose writing has been targeted for bans, told the crowd about her experiences in the classroom with parents who wanted books removed, often because they misunderstood the content.
“What struck me at the time and what I see really writ large now, is that what these book bans are about is control, and what these book bans are about is this twisted idea of ‘contagion,’” she said, adding that she is the mother of a “wonderful, wonderful trans young man.”
“And that word ‘contagion’ gets applied to young trans kids, and trans adults, and trans old people. This idea of contagion … I remember reading that for the first time and thinking, you know, they’re talking about my child!” she said. “Realizing they’re not really talking about contagion, they’re talking about control. They’re talking about the control of thought, the control of imagination, the control of possibility, the control of conversation, the control of connection.”
“These are things that can’t be controlled,” she added.
