ACLU and GLAD Push Massachusetts Schools to Stand Firm Against Book Bans

As school book bans surge across the United States, two major civil rights groups are urging Massachusetts not to follow suit. The ACLU of Massachusetts and GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) have sent an open letter to public school leaders across the state, calling on them to reject growing demands to pull titles from library shelves.

The groups warn that removing books—especially those by and about LGBTQ+ people and communities of color—would violate students’ constitutional rights and Massachusetts’ own guarantees of equal education.

Rights Groups Move Before Bans Take Hold

The joint letter, sent to the Massachusetts Associations of School Superintendents and School Committees as well as state officials, urges districts to “protect students’ legal rights by rejecting censorship in school libraries,” according to the ACLU of Massachusetts. It responds to a rise in complaints from a vocal minority seeking to remove certain titles from school collections.

Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, frames the fight as part of a broad national trend. “Across the country, there is a coordinated attack on students’ right to learn,” she said in the release, calling book bans in school and public libraries “misguided attempts” to suppress that right.

The letter also reminds districts that the U.S. Supreme Court has held that student free speech rights are violated when school boards strip books from library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas those books contain.

Book Bans Keep Rising Nationwide

The Massachusetts pushback comes amid a historic wave of school book bans. PEN America has documented 6,870 bans in the 2024–2025 school year alone across 23 states, with nearly 23,000 bans since 2021, according to its latest “Banned in the USA” report. Just three states—Florida, Texas, and Tennessee—account for about 80% of known removals, illustrating how aggressive local campaigns can reshape what students are allowed to read.

Those campaigns overwhelmingly target books by LGBTQ+ authors and authors of color, as tracked in PEN America’s ongoing book ban database. That pattern mirrors what the ACLU and GLAD say they are seeing in Massachusetts, where challenged titles often center on queer characters, racial justice, or other historically marginalized voices.

We’ve already seen how these fights play out elsewhere, from a Missouri court striking down a school book ban law in a recent free speech victory (Missouri judge overturns school book ban law) to local students turning reading contests into protests over censorship (Georgia teens’ reading bowl protest).

Mary L. Bonauto, senior director of civil rights and legal strategies at GLAD, says access to a full range of stories is “fundamental to growth and learning.” Laws, she notes, protect students’ rights to encounter books in which they can see themselves and their families reflected—and to engage with different perspectives in the world around them.

For book lovers watching the steady normalization of censorship, Massachusetts’ proactive stance may be an early test of how far communities are willing to go to defend the right to read—before the bans arrive at their own library doors.