If this month’s cover feels somehow familiar, that was exactly the point.

The January 2020 issue of SLJ also featured a cover by Victor Juhasz (above), who provided an interior illustration as well for a story that looked at the politics and money infiltrating school board elections. The story preceded COVID, George Floyd, and the resurgence of 1950s McCarthy-era book banning. The issues it described were the precursor to the current crisis.

“Increasingly, candidates are pulling in donations not only from nonresidents but also from political action committees and high-profile figures,” Wayne D’Orio wrote in that story. “These donors typically bring a national education agenda, focused on such things as charter schools or teacher evaluations, sometimes making those issues a larger factor in local elections than they would be otherwise.”

From there, a direct line can be drawn from the nationalization and politicization of local school boards to the current battle against censorship, in which conservative school board members take books off the shelves and politically aligned state legislators write laws restricting access to information.

In this month’s cover story, we profile librarians, authors, and free speech advocates who are taking censors to court. Thanks to Juhasz, the stories are connected visually as well.