Welcome to How We Won, a new newsletter about organizing victories and the people that made them happen.

I’m Lindsay, a Chicago-based writer and editor, and the creator of the Beyond November resource guide. In the overwhelm of living through what some days feels like a neverending tidal wave of crises and cries of “we’re cooked,” once a month, this newsletter will highlight a big community win — be it related to housing justice, climate, education or any number of other issues — and interview the organizers behind it about what worked, what didn’t and what lessons you can apply to the fight in your own communities. In honor of Banned Books Week, we’re starting with this story of a student-teacher collaboration to fight book censorship in central Pennsylvania.

I hope this is a source for grounding, guidance and hope in a difficult time. Thank you for being here, and hope to see you again next month. Onward! 

Central York High School educators Ben Hodge and Patricia Johnson are believers in the power of a story to affect change.

Galvanized by the racial reckoning of the summer of 2020 and reading Me and White Supremacy by Layla Saad, Hodge worked alongside students to launch the Panther Anti-Racist Union (PARU), a space to facilitate brave, candid, student-led conversations about race and culture, process experiences of racism at school and advocate for representation of marginalized voices in educational materials.

In the summer of 2020, following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the subsequent uprisings, Johnson joined a group of her colleagues to prepare for what would happen when students returned to school, and they began compiling a list of books and resources for discussion about what had happened over the summer. When the administration got the school board involved, racism followed.

“The first school board meeting after that was ugly,” Johnson says. “One of the school board members asked, a white woman, asked ‘Do we even have a race problem at Central?’ They chased off one of our diversity speakers.”

The school board elected to “freeze” materials included on the list of resources until they could be vetted by the board, and Central York’s principal sent out an email indicating said resources were banned for instructional use. The list of resources included dozens of titles, ranging from a picture book about soccer star Pelé to young adult bestseller The Hate U Give, as well as a CNN/Sesame Street town hall about racism. In response, Central York students, led by a group from PARU, began protesting every morning before school demanding the ban be lifted, and showing up to school board meetings to share their stories.

Johnson, a published author, has been telling stories in the Star Wars universe for more than 20 years. She was galvanized by the hurt of looking at famous films and stories and not seeing herself in them, and hearing this echoed in children who weren’t seeing themselves in the media they loved.

“Now there are tons of stories that are uplifting the voices of children, and someone wanted to silence them, and they weren’t having it,” she says. 

Prior to the school board’s pushback, Central York had been “a beacon on a hill” with respect to diversity programming, Hodge says. The district was the first in York County to have a diversity specialist in every school back in 2007. It was this history that led to one of the students’ campaign slogans — “This is not the Central I know.” 

Johnson, whose parents lived under Jim Crow segregation, says she was taught growing up to keep her head down and go quietly. 

“At our first protest, I told them they were following in the footsteps of the children who really won the civil rights movement and how it was children who did it,” she says. “These guys, it was the same way. Once they found their voices, they were not going to be silent.”

Another club Johnson helped facilitate, an LGBTQ+ student group called The Beautiful People, joined in to raise their voices and demand their stories not be erased. Students protested every day for a month and a half until the ban was lifted and the policy changed. 

Hodge says students led the efforts to tell their stories and debunk the school board’s misinformation. When he brought the claim that the district didn’t have a racism problem to PARU students, they laughed, rolled their eyes and scoffed.

“I said, instead of laughing and scoffing, which you have every right to, what would you say in response to that?” he says. “We said to them, ‘Okay, if you think we do have a race problem here, tell us.’ We encouraged them to tell their stories, and that snowballed.”

Students began speaking with candor about the racism and microaggressions they experienced, and by sharing their stories in the community and testimonials at school board meetings, Hodge says they gained the high ground against misinformation.

Johnson recalls how she and Hodge were accused of writing the students’ speeches. When PARU was invited to an event at the Pennsylvania Capitol by a state senator, the two teachers were put under investigation. In another incident, the superintendent of schools pulled PARU members out of class without notifying their parents in an attempt to silence the group, she says.

“They thought Ben and I were the head of the serpent,” Johnson says. “They didn’t realize they had the head of the serpent. They had those five babies that were in that room and those kids stood their ground and went even harder after, speaking their truth. A lot of kids who still had some fear, that crushed any fear that was in them because they knew then they had them on the run.”

In the end, through their advocacy, PARU students not only were able to get the banned titles restored, but changed district policy so that one single parent cannot remove a book from the library for everyone. It was also revealed that the superintendent was doing business with a right-wing advocacy law firm behind the scenes with taxpayer money and thanks to students’ efforts, a policy was also put on the books that no employee can work with that firm or any other third party. “The kids did that,” Johnson says.

Some of the protest signs are proudly displayed outside of Hodge’s classroom to remind the school community they’re still here. One reads, “Put the books back and fix the policy.” Students chose that slogan, Hodge says, in that first week of brainstorming.

Beyond returning the challenged books to shelves and changing local policy, the student action had a ripple effect throughout the entire community. “As the kids grew in number, they were going home and they were telling their parents what was going on,” Johnson says. “As election time rolled around for the school board, we came pretty darn close to flipping the school board. And it was because of kids going home and insisting their parents get out and vote.” 

In the following election cycle, the school board flipped with a slate of pro-education, pro-teacher candidates.

Both Hodge and Johnson emphasized the importance of telling your story, no matter how small it may seem, and listening to the stories of marginalized people.

Johnson recalls one student who shared his story with the school board about how George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue saved his life. The book, one of the most challenged in the U.S., relays the story of a gay Black man’s survival following a sexual assault, and the student explained to the board how he had survived sexual assault by a family member and that the book had given him the courage to tell someone. In the final meeting of her tenure, the board president who had previously allowed these book bans to occur shared that she had actually read the book. 

“She said that while she’s still opposed to having the book in the school library, she clearly understands that there is value in the book much more than the things that were taken out of context about it,” Johnson says. “That was a seismic shift.” 

Hodge and Johnson devised a system where they would deliberately go up to speak at school board meetings after attendees who trafficked in racist misinformation and disinformation. That coordinated effort of showing up to meetings and consistently staying on message to debunk right-wing talking points and falsehoods in the places they are being spouted is essential, they say. 

“You have to make them uncomfortable by making them say it out loud,” Johnson says. “Then they look foolish and stupid and other people will take note that you’ve got problems and say, ‘I’m not going to let you do that to me and my family.’” 

That included debunking the talking point that a small group of pro-censorship parents were pushing, saying that hundreds of families wanted to opt out of their children reading these books. In the end, only one family requested to opt out of the library at Central York. 

Hodge advises a unified front between students and staff in these kinds of campaigns — students who have gone it alone in other districts have been shouted down, and teachers who try to do it themselves put themselves more at risk of losing their jobs. And that unified front should stay on message, and encourage those seeking to plug into this work to explore the principles and guidance of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change.

‘If there’s one sign at a protest that says ‘Fuck the Administration,’ that’s the one that’s going in the news, not the one that says ‘Put the Books Back,’” he says. 

One strategy that didn’t work? Avoidance. 

“The reason we won was because of the kids,” Johnson says. “I felt very lonely. You had parents high fiving you behind the scenes and telling you you were doing a good job, but they weren’t stepping up to do or say anything.”

Citing education leader Dr. Bettina Love, Hodge cautions that the time is past due to organize around education and the freedom to read. He recalls speaking at a conference with a peer in a very liberal area of a deep blue state, and advised him to go to board meetings, ask about existing policies and advocate for policies that support the freedom to read and ensure school boards maintain independence from right-wing astroturf groups.

“They were afraid and they did it anyway,” Hodge says. “I can do it too.”

Join us every second Friday for more stories of How We Won. Thank you for reading and sharing. Keep going!