Book Banners Lost In Texas Elections

Politicians who ran for school boards on a pro-book banning platform in Texas had a rough time on Election Day. Most, but not all, lost.

The Texas Freedom to Read Project is an activist group formed in 2023 made up of parents and writers who formed to protest the spate of book challenges in public schools from conservatives in recent years. Co-director Frank Strong compiled a list of 15 candidates for various school boards who have overt or tenuous ties to pro-censorship organizations like Moms for Liberty. The candidates stood for posts in Conroe, Corpus Christi, Granbury, Leander, Round Rock, and Tomball ISDs.

Of the 15, 9 were defeated.

“This is pretty much exactly what we’ve seen in every school board cycle going back to November 2022,” Strong told LoneStarLive.com. “In general, when book banners run, if people know who they are and organize against them, the book banners lose.”

The fight in Montgomery County was particularly brutal. The Montgomery County library system has already been dealing with increased book challenges, including a controversial book re-assignment. The conservative library committee moved a children’s book about colonialism and the Wampanoag tribe to the fiction section.

It’s a good example of the tone surrounding the Conroe ISD school board elections. Nicole May, Lindsay Dawson, Melissa Semmler, and Marianne Horton all ran as part of a far-right slate that opposed books in school libraries that addressed LGBT themes, racial history, and the labor movement. All four won, securing a full conservative

However, they were the only major success in the book banning movement. Samuel Aundra Fryer in Corpus Christi captured only 10 percent of the vote. Previously, he had referred to all LGBT as “groomers.” In Leander, Brandi Burkman was also defeated. She filed a police report in 2021 over a school library containing a coming-of-age novel with a gay main scharacter. As a whole, Texas rejected candidates with deep ties to the banning movement.

The fight against school libraries is likely to continue into 2025 despite these results. School reform is a top priority of Governor Greg Abbott, who insists that he now has enough Republican votes in the Texas House to pass his school voucher plan. Assuming he does, it’s likely that he or an ally in the legislature will push to further restrict content that can be carried in school libraries.

The primary targets for book bans have been “woke” material, a term used to describe anything from LGBT acceptance to acknowledgement of America’s history of white supremacy. It has gone hand-in-hand with the voucher movement as conservatives insist that public schools are indoctrinating rather than teaching. Under the banner of “school choice,” these groups say parents should be able to use taxpayer money to send their children to private, mostly Christian schools, which are free from many of the anti-discrimination laws that govern public schools.