Angela Dennis, Tennessee Lookout

A Knox County school board committee read a single passage from Alex Haley’s Roots and did exactly what Tennessee law told them to do. They banned it, voting to pull it from school libraries.

Knox County Schools Superintendent Jon Rysewyk reversed the ban May 26, returning the 1976 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to shelves at seven KCS high schools effective immediately. But the law that forced the committee’s hand is still on the books. And Thursday night, the Knox County Board of Education voted 5-4 to tell the Tennessee General Assembly to fix it.

Anne Templeton, Katherine Bike, John Butler, Patricia Fontenot-Ridley, and Kristi Kristy voted yes. Lauren Morgan, Betsy Henderson, SteveTriplett, and Travis Wright voted no.

The resolution, prepared by Templeton, passed after heated public debate that got to the heart of the fight: not just one book, but a state law that has reshaped what Tennessee students can access in school libraries.

Knox County School Board Member Anne Templeton was part of the majority approving a move to ask the Tennessee Legislature to revisit the Age Appropriate Materials Act. (Photo: screenshot from Knox County Schools)

Tennessee ranks among the top three states nationally for book bans, with more than 1,600 books restricted or removed statewide.

How “Roots” got banned

A passage depicting the rape of the enslaved woman Kizzy by her enslaver got the book banned,

Rape during American slavery was so common that historians have documented it as a systemic tool of racial and sexual terror.

Signed by Gov. Bill Lee in 2022 and strengthened by a 2024 amendment, Tennessee’s Age-Appropriate Materials Act requires the removal of any K-12 library book containing nudity, sexual content, excess violence or sadomasochistic abuse. The terms are drawn directly from the state’s Criminal Offenses Code and here are no exceptions for. literary merit, author intent or historical significance.

One flagged passage and the book comes off the shelf. The same standard applies to kindergartners or high school seniors.

State Rep. Gloria Johnson,a Knoxville Democrat, said that’s exactly the problem.

“You can’t judge a book based on one passage,” she said. “That’s ludicrous. You’ve got to take it in context.”

Knox County, she said, already had a process for assessing books before the state passed the law. Librarians were using the Miller test, a legal standard for evaluating obscenity that factors in a book’s literary, artistic, political and scientific value along with readability and guidelines for age-appropriate content.

“All of that stuff is gone,” Johnson said.

State Rep. Sam McKenzie, the Knoxville Democrat whose district includes the statue of “Roots” author Alex Haley in Morningside Park, called the ban a grave injustice.

“‘Roots’ won a Pulitzer Prize and became a cultural touchstone that inspired and united millions of Americans,” he said. “I knew that taking it out of the hands of thousands of schoolchildren in Knox County would be a grave injustice.”

Rysewyk spent the weeks following the ban consulting independently with multiple attorneys and found no consensus.

“There were discrepancies even among the legal experts I consulted regarding their interpretation of the relevant sections of the Tennessee Code,” he wrote in a memo to the board. The ban also raised transparency questions. Knox County Schools has reviewed 358 excerpts out of more than 740,000 titles in circulation, resulting in 124 books banned since 2024. “Roots” is the only title to be reinstated.

The review committee looked at an excerpt from “Roots” once before and didn’t recommend removing it. And the district cannot say who triggered either review. District spokeswoman Carly Harrington said KCS does not track or document the original source of complaints.

Knox County Schools takes “Roots” off banned book list, restores to libraries

Nobody can find out who is flagging books for review or why. Johnson said that has to change.

“There should absolutely be complete transparency on how this came about,” she said. “What was the challenge? Who challenged it? And one thing is for certain, before you complain about a book, you had better have read it cover to cover.”

McKenzie agreed, saying requiring disclosure of complaint sources is something he plans to introduce in the next legislative session.

“If someone feels that we should take books off the shelf, a John Doe, this is why I want to do it,” he said. “That to me is a freedom of information act thing.”

Johnson also connected the ban to a broader pattern. In a public social media post, she called it part of a deliberate agenda.

“This isn’t a coincidence folks, it’s the agenda of the white supremacist supermajority working exactly as intended,” she said.

Leslie Gordon, a former KCS teacher, told the board that the law is the problem.

“The rape of Kizzy is sadomasochistic. It is violent. That is the reality of slavery. You cannot support your staff, you cannot support the people who work in your school system, and ask them to make decisions like this and then claim, ‘Oops, we didn’t mean for it to apply to that book,’ and put it back on the shelf,” said Gordon. It’s wonderful that we all recognize the importance of Roots as a work of local and state significance, but this law does not.”

What Knox County Is asking lawmakers to do

The resolution asks lawmakers to make three changes: restore contextual review so books are evaluated in their entirety, weighing historical, literary, religious and educational significance; lengthen the review period from 60 to 90 days to allow for board communication and public input before a removal is final; and establish a grade-band framework so the same standard doesn’t apply across ages.

Templeton was clear about what the resolution is and isn’t.

“I knew that taking (“Roots,” out of the hands of thousands of schoolchildren in Knox County would be a grave injustice,” said Rep. Sam McKenzie, a Knoxville Democrat. (Photo: John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout)

“This is not rewriting the law,” she said. “This is asking them to open up the conversation to say, hey, this law resulted in this outcome. Do we agree with this, or do we not?”

McKenzie said he plans to champion all three of the board’s requests next session.

“I would love to champion those and more,” he said. His bills, HB2434 and the Freedom to Read Act, HB1051 would have kept “Roots” on the shelf while the review was ongoing. He also pointed to the central irony the whole controversy exposed.

“I think the supermajority can get behind these changes, because I do think they have egg on their face in that one of the most conservative members in the House (Rep. Gino Bulson, a Brentwood Republican) passed a bill to make “Roots” a state book,” he said.

The legislature designated “Roots” as one of Tennessee’s official state books in 2024. Two years later, a law the same legislature strengthened got it banned from school libraries.

Johnson said she believes the law should be repealed entirely.

“Knox County already had a great process for challenging books,” she said. “This bill is directed at controlling access.” She also pointed to what she called the law’s contradiction, noting that the Bible, widely available in Tennessee schools, contains passages that would meet the same criteria used to ban “Roots.”

“Based on that law, the Bible would be banned,” she said. “Maybe when these folks realize that means the Bible can’t be in schools, maybe they’ll rethink their ignorance.”