In a worrisome trend, Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa apparently became the latest Black authors silenced over news rules that ban books and classroom discussions about systemic racism.

Two days before the event at Memphis’ Whitehaven High School, organizers banned Samuels and Olorunnipa, authors of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book His Name Is George Floyd, from reading their book to students or talking about systemic racism, NBC News reports.

The two journalists suspected Tennessee’s book-banning laws and restrictions on how race is discussed prompted the prohibitions, which included the organizers banning them from distributing the book to students.

“I was thinking about the great disservice that they’re giving these students who deserve better,” Samuels told NBC News.

Memphis Reads, a community reading program based at Christian Brothers University, organized the Oct. 26 event. The journalists shared their personal stories with the Black students since they were restricted from discussing systemic racism and other themes in the book.

Samuels added, “I thought about my personal disappointment and feelings of naïveté that despite all the work Tolu and I had done to make sure the book would be written in a way that was accessible to them, a larger system decided that they were going to take it away.”

Samuels and Olorunnipa planned the event with Justin Brooks, the university’s Center for Community Engagement director. The authors said Brooks told them of the restrictions, but they did not communicate directly with the school district.

The event organizers told Chalk Beat Tennessee the school district gave them guidance on complying with Tennessee law that they relayed to the authors.

Whitehaven High School and its Memphis-Shelby County Schools district are predominantly Black.

School district officials blamed “miscommunication” for the situation, denying that they restricted what the authors could say and read to the students, but they did prohibit distribution of the book, which involves a lengthy review process, according to NBC News.

Each year, Memphis Reads selects a book that “engages Memphians in issues that are relative to daily societal topics and themes.” His Name is George Floyd was a perfect fit because it reveals to readers “how a man who simply wanted to breathe ended up touching the world.”

A viral video in 2020 showing White former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on the handcuffed George Floyd’s neck during an arrest, suffocating the Black man to death, ignited a nationwide racial justice movement that became global.

In 2022, the Tennessee legislature passed a measure that gives the state control over what books schools can offer and grants authority to local school boards to veto and alter curriculum decisions, USA Today reported. The new rules ignited rebellion from free speech advocates, including the Nashville Public Library, which launched a Freedom to Read campaign.

Gov. Bill Lee enacted a law in 2021 that restricts what public school teachers can discuss about racism, white privilege, and unconscious bias.

What happened in Memphis is far from unique. This scenario is increasingly playing out in school districts across the nation.

From July 2021 to June 2022, PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans listed 2,532 instances of individual books being banned, affecting 1,648 unique book titles – 659 of them containing prominent characters of color, the nonprofit’s analysis found. By mid-2022, the organization counted 338 banned book titles (21 percent) that address issues of race and racism.

According to The New York Times, “a rapidly growing and increasingly influential constellation of conservative groups” is behind the wave of book challenges.

These groups work at multiple levels – from school districts to state capitals and in Congress – to ban certain books. They justify the book banning as an attempt to defend parental rights. The organizations are increasingly interconnected, well-funded and politically influential.