The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) has contacted the Florida Department of Corrections to express its concern regarding reports that The Militant was removed from several prisons due to the ideas expressed in the newspaper. The confiscation of First Amendment-protected material affects inmates' constitutional rights. Prisoners have the right to read and must be allowed unfettered access to various informational [...]
The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) has written a letter to the Pinellas County School Board in Largo, Florida regarding the district’s recent removal of the book The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison from school libraries. NCAC is deeply concerned that the Associate Superintendent misinterpreted state guidance and improperly removed The Bluest Eye from school libraries and curriculum. District [...]
NEW YORK – The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) today released a new resource that provides practical advice for authors whose books are being challenged and banned in K – 12 schools and libraries. Prepared in collaboration with writers who have faced censorship, it is available on the NCAC website. Book challenges can be exasperating, demoralizing, and deeply painful for [...]
NCAC contacts Hernando School District in Brooksville, Florida, to express its concerns about the removal of 13 books by Ellen Hopkins from its libraries. A district administrator claimed that the materials are "harmful to minors" under Florida Statute 847, which makes it illegal to provide minors with access to "obscene" materials. This is problematic because, under Florida law, a book [...]
Updated 2/2/23 – NCAC has received a response from the Superintendent of St Lucie Public Schools. He has agreed to follow the district's appeal process and to reconsider the four books that were improperly removed. On 1/18/23 - The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) wrote to St. Lucie Public Schools in St. Lucie, Florida regarding their response to book [...]
Updated 01/18/2023— NCAC and CAA have sent this joint statement to the Hamline University president. In an egregious and chilling violation of academic freedom, Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota refused to renew the contract of an adjunct professor in retaliation for her inclusion of two artworks depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a class on global art history. As [...]
NEW YORK — The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), PEN America, and the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund, organizations dedicated to artistic, intellectual, and academic freedom, today expressed deep concern over the cancellation of the student production of the play, Indecent, by the administration at Douglas Anderson School of Performing Arts in Duval County, Florida. The groups urged school officials [...]
NEW YORK – Today, the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), which represents 59 education, publishing, religious and arts organizations and Don’t Delete Art (DDA), a project of NCAC and several other organizations and artists, joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation and over 50 other organizations and institutions in supporting Protect the Stack, a statement calling on internet infrastructure providers not [...]
Companies providing core internet infrastructures—including internet service providers, website host companies, payment processors, and more—rarely have substantial contact with their users, user-generated content, or user activities. And, even though they typically lack expertise, authority, resources, and policies to regulate user content with consistency, many online infrastructure companies do just that. The result has severely restricted free speech on the internet, [...]
In the Fall of 2022, the much-anticipated reopening of the Orange County Museum of Art was marred by the censorship of a painting by renowned artist Ben Sakoguchi in the museum’s California Biennial 2022: Pacific Gold. A few months prior to the opening, the artist was informed of concerns coming from the museum’s education department that some of the [...]
The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) has written to Batesburg-Leesville Middle School in South Carolina regarding the removal of Stamped: Racism, Anti-Racism, and You from the school library. As we understand it, the school removed the book from the library in order to be compliant with South Carolina State Proviso 1.93, which prohibits certain school spending on ideas often [...]
The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), which represents 59 trusted education, publishing, and arts organizations, joins the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund and PEN America to encourage Texas Wesleyan University to support artistic free expression and reschedule Down In Mississippi, a play by Carlyle Brown that the university's theatre department recently canceled due to language concerns and complaints. History is [...]
The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) has written to the San Francisco Public Library (SFPL) regarding their decision in March to cancel the exhibition Wall + Response over objections to an idea expressed in one of the pieces. It is our understanding that when Wall + Response was approved by library officials, the poems and murals comprising the project [...]
Photo Credit: Jerald Braddock The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) has written to the Town Supervisor of the Town of Greenburgh, New York, regarding its recent call to remove the depiction of Minister Louis Farrakhan, and potentially other controversial figures, from a new town-commissioned mural overseen by the artist known as Kindo Art. The mural was initially commissioned to [...]
The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) has written to Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District in Grapevine, Texas, regarding recent policy changes which seem to allow library books to be removed based on the ideas they contain. As we understand the changes to Board Policy EMB (Local), the policy has been amended to restrict the use of instructional materials that advocate [...]
The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) has written to the Madison County School Board in Ridgeland, Mississippi, regarding recent restrictions on 10 books, requiring students to obtain parental permission in order to read them. The 10 books in question address race-related or LQBTQ+ themes, and we are concerned that the district may have unconstitutionally targeted these books for the [...]
The National Coalition Against Censorship has written to the School Board of the Collier County Public Schools in Naples, Florida, after District libraries recently added an “Advisory Notice” to hundreds of library books—raising censorship concerns. Placing advisory notices, or “red-flagging” books often misleadingly reduces complex literary works to a few isolated elements—those that some individuals may find objectionable—rather than [...]
The National Coalition Against Censorship and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression have cowritten a letter to the Pennridge School District in Perkasie, Pennsylvania, demanding changes to a proposed policy that would unconstitutionally restrict the communications that students can distribute both on and off school grounds. The proposed policy is shockingly broad and impermissibly vague. If implemented it [...]
The National Coalition Against Censorship has written to the School Board of Central Bucks School District in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, after recent proposed changes to the District’s Library Materials Policy raised serious censorship concerns. The Board voted to adopt the policy on July 26, 2022. The policy leaves the authority to remove materials in the hands of a single person. NCAC [...]
The National Coalition Against Censorship has written to the Fairview School District School Board in Fairview, Pennsylvania, regarding a recent decision to remove Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer from the Fairview High School library. It appears that the decision was made unilaterally by Superintendent Erik Kincade, circumventing district policy, which explicitly states that book challenges must be adjudicated by a committee [...]
NCAC has written to officials at Fredericksburg Independent School District in Texas after numerous books were removed from district libraries without a formal review based on arguments that they are “pervasively vulgar.” The books in question, which include, among others, Jesse Andrews’s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, address issues that [...]
Illinois school district pressured to remove books from school libraries by violent alt-right gang Proud Boys.
NCAC has joined a coalition of 20 organizations led by the ACLU in urging the Biden Administration to appoint privacy and civil liberties-minded candidates to fill the existing vacancies on the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) and uphold government transparency. The PCLOB, created based on a recommendation of the 9/11 commission, was charged by Congress in 2007 to [...]
NCAC joined with more than 90 civil society groups, led by the Center for Democracy and Technology, in submitting a letter to Apple urging the company to abandon its plans to build surveillance capabilities into iPhones, iPads, and other Apple Products. The plans, announced on August 5, 2021, are designed to protect children and reduce the spread of child sexual abuse [...]
The National Coalition Against Censorship has signed on to a letter by the Student Press Law Center calling on the Superintendent of Arkansas’s Bigelow High School to reprint yearbook pages that were censored after alleged “community backlash.” The letter also asks that the Superintendent apologize to the yearbook staff and former adviser Meghan Walter who resigned due to the censorship. [...]
A timeline of free expression issues that arose following the death of George Floyd and subsequent protests for racial justice.
The Free Expression Educators Handbook contains practical tools and advice for managing book challenges and censorship controversies in schools and school libraries. The handbook, created by NCAC in collaboration with the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), is intended for teachers, librarians, and school administrators. It offers guidance for educators developing inclusive and viewpoint-neutral instructional material policies, including sample [...]
NCAC is deeply concerned by Zoom, Facebook and YouTube's recent censorship of an academic forum due to the affiliation of one of the speakers with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
NCAC has joined Open the Government and two dozen organizations in urging Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar to rescind an order to hospitals requiring them to send daily COVID-19 data reports to HHS, a change that creates urgent concerns about transparency, accountability, and the politicization of data. In a letter sent to Azar on July 23, NCAC [...]
President Donald Trump is once again attempting to interfere with the publication of a book that he believes is critical of him. On June 16, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in an effort to block the June 23 release of The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, a book by John R. Bolton, Trump’s former national [...]
On June 15, the National Coalition Against Censorship, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and PEN America joined in protesting Zoom’s decision to close the account of Humanitarian China, a U.S.-based nonprofit that promotes the development of human rights in China. Zoom acted at the request of Chinese officials who wanted to suppress a virtual meeting commemorating the [...]
Rhetorically framed as defense of free speech, the President’s Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship, is exactly the opposite: an attempt to intimidate social media platforms into yielding to the president’s views of what speech should be allowed online. While we agree that social media platforms “function in many ways as a 21st-century equivalent of the public square” and share [...]
As misinformation proliferates, protests escalate, and the 2020 U.S. presidential election looms, how much should social media companies regulate the content on their platforms? Rules and regulations are changing as social media giants are figuring out how to wield their unprecedented power over information. As an organization committed to free expression, we welcome efforts to provide more information, alternative sources [...]
Update 5/27/2020 – The online marketplace Redbubble has reinstated the sale of the editorial cartoon that criticizes President Trump. Original Post 5/27/2020 – The National Coalition Against Censorship has joined the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) and other free speech organizations in calling for the online marketplace Redbubble to resume the sale of an editorial cartoon that criticizes President [...]
On May 19, 2020, an international coalition of arts and free expression organizations, including the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), IBEX Collection, Article19, PEN America’s Artists at Risk Connection (ARC), International Arts Rights Advisors, and Freemuse, launched Don’t Delete Art, a virtual gallery showcasing work which is banned or restricted on social media. The gallery, whose curators include frequently-censored artists [...]
Throughout its existence, NCAC has fought the censorship of art containing nude figures. Today, it is supporting the creators of the documentary series, NAK-ED, in their fight against body shaming. It is the idea that there is something shameful about the human body that leads to demands for art depicting the human figure to be repeatedly censored. The episodes will [...]
Following a walkout by members of its staff, Hachette announced that it has canceled the publication of a memoir by Woody Allen.
NCAC has filed an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to hear the case of a combat veteran who was arrested after he swore at a Department of Veterans Affairs employee on the telephone.
Svetlana Mintcheva, NCAC's Director of Programs, presented a talk at the Harvard Law School Library on the effects contemporary moral outrage has on the arts and culture.
This list of our best resources on censorship and the First Amendment in schools will help you get ready for the school year.
