“Woke.” “Critical Race Theory.” “DEI.”
Across the country, conservative lawmakers are using these buzzwords to justify banning books and silencing teachers. Entire parts of the curriculum are being stripped away thanks to so-called “educational gag orders” designed to censor and criminalize teaching honestly about United States history.
But a growing coalition of educators, students, and organizers is pushing back.
This June, people in more than 200 cities are participating in the Zinn Education Project’s Teach Truth Day of Action, a nationwide series of events focused on fighting back against censorship.
In Harlem, a Pop-Up for Truth
Blending art and activism, the nonprofit RootzGround & WingzFly hosted a June 7 pop-up display at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. For the event, founder Dr. Skyller Walkes, a lecturer at Columbia University, teamed up with journalist and scholar Dr. John E. Williams, who led a racial geography walking tour of the surrounding blocks.
It’s “representative of a larger global community, which I think we all need to desperately be reminded of in this moment of organized chaos,” Walkes says.
Data from PEN America shows that 36% of the books banned or challenged in schools or libraries centered on characters of color or were written by authors of color. That’s why the pop-up gave away over 50 books as well as a dozen copies of “Teaching Black History to White People” by Leonard Moore.
The Day of Action is “work that must and should and has to continue the other 364 days of the year,” Walkes says.
Losing Their Jobs for Telling the Truth
Author and activist Jesse Hagopian, whose book “Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education” documents the growing resistance to school censorship, feels the same urgency.
Donald Trump wants “to defund any school that teaches honestly about U.S. history and doesn’t leave out the negative parts or the oppression that this country has perpetrated,” he says.
Even before Trump’s re-election, though, educators were being fired for teaching and showcasing topics that go against the conservative agenda.
In 2021, Amy Donofrio, a Florida teacher, was removed from her position at Robert E. Lee High School because she hung a Black Lives Matter flag in her classroom. And Matthew Hawn, a Tennessee teacher, was fired after teaching about white privilege and showing a video of spoken word artist Kyla Jenée Lacey’s poem about “White Privilege” in the classroom.
A 2022 analysis by The Washington Post found that more than 160 teachers lost their roles due to political reasons related to what they taught in the classroom.
“There’s really an intense attack on any educator who wants to teach the truth about Black history, about trans history, about American history,” Hagopian says.
But Hagopian notes this backlash is history repeating itself.
“As horrific as these laws are that we’re seeing that are attacking teachers for teaching the truth, unfortunately, it’s nothing new because in 1740, South Carolina passed the first anti-literacy law banning Black people from being able to read or write.”
Teaching Truth Can’t Be Just One Day
Keesha Ceran, the deputy director of Teaching for Change, says they’re “not just calling for a day of action when it comes to the Teach Truth campaign. It really is this push to teach truth all year long.”
Ceran led a march from the National Museum of African American History and Culture to the National Museum of the American Indian. Despite the rain, nearly 100 people celebrated alongside the Dream City Brass Band — a defiant response to attacks on these institutions by the Trump administration for having “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology.”
Teaching For Change, which provides free social justice-focused education resources, is “committed to defending educators’ right to teach truth, defending educators who are committed to not lying to students about history,” Ceran says.
She encourages students, parents, and teachers to attend school board meetings, write op-eds, and “reach out and say they support educators.”
Strategy and Action
Planning for the future was also part of an event at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, where Kijua Sanders-McMurtry, the school’s vice president for equity and inclusion, hosted a screening of “Banned Together” a documentary about students resisting curriculum censorship and book bans. People of all ages attended and participated in “an action step debrief session where we came up with ways that we could resist the banning of books,” Sanders-McMutry says.
Among their ideas: screening the film in local schools during Banned Books Week in October and possibly making it required viewing for first-year students.
An educated generation is what censors and book banners want to prevent, Hagopian says. “What we’re really seeing is a fear of a generation that can think critically, and they want to rob our young people of the ability to analyze the past — gain lessons from it so they can create a better future.”
