How Orlando became ground zero for Florida’s latest book ban battle

In Pinellas County, Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” was temporarily pulled from the shelf for its descriptions of rape and incest. Students protested against the censorship by holding signs that said “Save our books” at School Board meetings.

“Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” books filled with bizarre but real facts led school officials in the Panhandle’s Escambia District to remove them. Ripley’s started giving thousands of the books away for free to any Floridian who wanted a copy.

The latest battle over Florida’s book bans is now happening in Orlando.

For the first time, the world’s biggest publishers are collectively filing a lawsuit and are suing the Orange and Volusia School Boards, as well as state education leaders, over HB 1069. The new law prohibits pornographic or inappropriate materials in school libraries and makes it easier for adults to challenge titles that make them uncomfortable.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court’s Orlando division, says the measure is unconstitutional. Plaintiffs say it infringes on First Amendment rights, since many classic books are being removed due to adults taking passages out of context.

Why did Orlando become ground zero in the state to challenge the law?

“We were listening to where we were hearing the most pain, and that was Florida,” said Dan Novack, a vice president and associate general counsel for Penguin Random House who spoke to Florida Politics.

“There were so many students, parents, teachers, educators, authors who were telling us about what they were experiencing in Florida and the chaos and turmoil associated with 1069, we felt that we had to do something at that point.”

But Novack also said the group of plaintiffs — which includes bestselling authors like John Green, Jodi Picoult and Laurie Halse Anderson, whose books have been targeted — were mindful about the lawsuit’s optics.

“We don’t want to come in and be seen as carpetbaggers, a bunch of people in New York telling a bunch of Floridians what they should and shouldn’t read,” Novack said.

So as Penguin formed an internal task force last year to fight against censorship and got all the other publishers on board with the lawsuit, the litigants wanted to include real stories of parents and students to prove what was happening at schools. 

“It’s not theoretical. This is what’s happening in these two Districts that we have identified,” Novack said.

They found two local parents in Central Florida to join them.

The lawsuit lists as a plaintiff Heidi Kellogg, the mother of a Deland High senior who wanted to check out Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and a book about #MeToo survivors. The books were pulled for being too pornographic, the lawsuit said.

Judith Anne Hayes, another plaintiff in the lawsuit, is the mother of a William R. Boone High junior in Orlando. Her son wanted to read Gabriel García Márquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera,” but that had also been pulled from the shelves.

Both children said they wanted access to the books to read about different viewpoints.

“This is a stunt,” Florida Department of Education spokesperson Sydney Booker said this week when reached for comment about the lawsuit. “There are no books banned in Florida. Sexually explicit material and instruction are not suitable for schools.”

The Orange and Volusia School Districts declined to comment.

With the federal lawsuit, Novack said the litigants are hoping to create a precedent and are aware of the impact Florida can have setting policies that other states follow.

“The publishers are here. We’re not backing down. We’re going to defend the right to read,” Novack said. “You can put that in big, bright lights — we do not publish pornography. So the law that purports to ban pornography, but in effect, bans our books, is not behaving with respect for the First Amendment.”