Chief Deputy Constable Scott London has spent two years pursuing felony charges against three school librarians in Granbury ISD who were investigated for allowing access to literature that purportedly contained obscene content.
London reviewed roughly 200 pages of community complaints about the allegedly offending books in the Granbury ISD libraries.
One such book in question was The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.
The book is about the experiences of a young black girl living during the Great Depression. The book touches on themes like rape, incest, domestic violence, infant mortality, racism, and alcoholism. The main character, Pecola, is a person who believes blue eyes and white skin equate to beauty while black skin is equated to ugliness.
London also secured subpoenas for Follett School Solutions, the software used to manage the library collection in Granbury ISD, to record the dates and times certain titles were checked out, reported NBC News.
He reviewed 11 titles and, over the course of several months in 2022, concluded that there were numerous passages with allegedly obscene content.
London ultimately submitted a case file to Ryan Sinclair, the Hood County District Attorney, in 2023. He argued that the librarians were distributing harmful materials to minors.
Almost a year later, Sinclair ultimately rejected the felony case, citing insufficient evidence that the librarians used minors to “distribute, exhibit, or display harmful materials,” per NBC News.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, Dallas ISD also makes books that purportedly contain obscene content available to students in its campus libraries.
Tami Brown Rodriguez told DX that she and other parents and community members have been attending Dallas ISD school board meetings to voice their concerns and demand the removal of the allegedly obscene materials, but to no avail.