There are growing signs that some Americans are becoming fed up with book-banning. One sure indication is that the state of Illinois passed a law which, from next year, will ban the banning of books in public schools and libraries. A similar bill is to be debated in the New Jersey Legislature.

In Arkansas, independent bookstores and publishers filed suit against a new law that would make it a crime to access certain books. Also, a group of parents in Crawford County filed suit against a policy of removing books with LGBTQ themes from the children’s section of libraries and placing them in a separate “social” section.

In Florida, where, the American Library Association (ALA) reported, book-banners made 22 attempts to remove 194 books in the first eight months of this year, some residents have formed the Florida Freedom to Read Project which is urging members to make their voices heard at school board meetings.

In Texas, where, according to the ALA, 30 attempts were made to remove 1,120 books, librarians formed Freedom Fighters to offer colleagues guidance on handling book challenges. The Association of American Publishers and six publishing companies filed a brief supporting a group of residents in Llano who sued the county and library officials.

Students are increasingly becoming involved in the anti-ban movement. In Florida, Iris Mogul,16, started a club in Miami as “a way to read beautiful literature that’s important and should be read” and as “kind of as an act of resistance,” ABC News reported. Her group prepared a list of banned titles to read and started with “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston. “Trying to hide the kind of unpleasant truth from us, that doesn’t do any good,” Iris said. “In fact, that’s harmful.”

In Lake County, a group of students and the authors of “And Tango Makes Three” have sued to have it returned to the shelves and asking the courts to declare the enabling law unconstitutional. The award-winning picture book about a penguin family of two fathers, geared to 4-to-8-year-olds, is among 40 books the county banned.

In Texas, Austin high school senior Ella Scott, 17, started leading an antibanned book club as a freshman when she found out about the banning. “It’s happening in our classroom, but students don’t have a voice,” she told ABC News. Adults behind banning books have “to understand that times are changing,” Ella said.

Euless high school student Da’Taeveyon Daniels, 16, noticed that his school did not have a lot of books and regarded that as a form of censorship, so he joined the National Coalition Against Censorship. “If we don’t have access to those materials and those opinions and perspectives … we won’t be able to understand where another person comes from, in order to feel for them and empathize with them and understand their own life stories and opinions,” Da’Taeveyon said.

Cameron Samuels, a non-binary student in the Katy Independent School District, spoke at a school board meeting in the 2021-2022 school year against restrictions blocking access on the school internet to certain websites, such as those dealing with LGBTQ issues and the Trevor Project that focuses on suicide prevention. Cameron, who graduated later in the year, told ABC News he had been the only student at the meeting and felt “isolated and alone.” He rallied fellow students, secured the support of the ACLU to file a complaint on their behalf and got the school district to unblock its internet filter for LGBTQ websites.

Both Da’Taeveyon and Cameron are now members of Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, a student-led anticensorship group which has distributed hundreds of banned books and continue advocating for more books on shelves. “Banning is most definitely targeting books that challenge the status quo, which leave queer students and students of color out of the picture,” Cameron told ABC News. “We are such a diverse generation and policies made by adults do not reflect our needs.”

Those who push the banning campaign really mean business. Jennifer Petersen, 48, said she reads one book a week, looking for a reason to file a challenge. Up to recently, she alone caused Virginia’s Spotsylvania County Public Schools to remove 71 of 73 books she had read; the district pulled the remaining two on its own before she got around to them, The Washington Post reported.

At the same time, over-zealousness can lead to comical situations. North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools actually banned the observance of “Banned Books Week,” October 1– 7 – but reversed itself following a Daily Beast report. And Alabama’s Huntsville-Madison County Public Library system selected for possible removal “Read Me a Story, Stella,” a children’s picture book about a pair of siblings reading books together and building a doghouse – because the author’s name is Marie-Louise Gay. The library system’s executive director Cindy Hewitt acknowledged the mistake and added, “Obviously, we’re not going to touch that book for any reason.”

Kirsten Brassard, Gay’s publicist at Groundwood Books, was not amused. “Although it is obviously laughable that our picture book shows up on their list of censored books simply because the author’s last name is Gay, the ridiculousness of that fact should not detract from the seriousness of the situation,” Brassard said in a statement.

“This proves, as always, that censorship is never about limiting access to this book or that one. It is about sending the message to children that certain ideas – or even certain people – are not worthy of discussion or acknowledgement or consideration,” Brassard added. “This is a hateful message in a place like a public library, where all children are meant to feel safe, and where their curiosity about the world is meant to be nurtured.”

Carla Hayden, the librarian of Congress, expressed a similar view during a Smithsonian discussion marking the observance of Banned Books Week. “There’s always been an effort to restrict what certain people could read. … To open up your mind to different ideas is somewhat threatening at different points in history for different groups,” Hayden said, according to a published transcript of the discussion. “Slaveholders in early America withheld access to the Bible, not wanting enslaved people to read, for instance, the story of the Exodus, when Moses led enslaved people to freedom. … a book that has those kind of pesky types of things, like, ‘Let my people go.’” This, of course, is not the first time books are being banned in the United States. in the 1630s, Puritans banned Thomas Morton’s “New English Canaan,” as noted during the Smithsonian discussion, deeming it heretical and exiling him. But the trend started more than 2,000 years ago in China, as the Canada-based Book and Periodical Council (PBC) noted during its annual Freedom to Read Week held this year on Feb. 19-25. The PBC traces the first book ban to 259-210 B.C. when Emperor Shih Huang Ti reportedly had 460 Confucian scholars buried alive. In 212 B.C., he ordered the burning of all the books in his kingdom, except for a single copy of each to be kept in the Royal Library. He ordered those copies destroyed before his death. Shih’s grand plan in destroying all historical records was to make people think that history began with him.

The PBC lists 59 other significant instances of books being banned or burned between Shi’s time and 2019, when efforts were made to ban J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.” The United States tops the list with 19 entries. Included in the list is East Berlin’s 1984 banning of Mickey Mouse comics, “because Mickey was said to be an anti-Red rebel.”

There is no Shih Huang Ti now but officials who have coopted the censorship campaign started by groups such as Moms for Liberty obviously have a similar objective: to shape American thinking by first brainwashing the young.