The comparison

The standard, applied to itself.

Knox County Schools has removed 124 books from its libraries under the Age-Appropriate Materials Act. Here is what triggered the most prominent of those removals, set beside the same statutory categories as they appear in the King James Bible.

On May 14, 2026, Knox County Schools added Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family to its banned-books list. The district’s spokesperson confirmed the decision and offered the operative explanation: the book contained content covered by the Tennessee Age-Appropriate Materials Act, and adherence to state law required removal. The district statement acknowledged the book’s “immense cultural and historical significance,” but said removal was nonetheless mandatory.

Public reporting at the time of the elevation indicated that the book was sent to the district review committee on the basis of a single passage in chapter 84. One passage. Sufficient, under the 2024 amendment of T.C.A. § 49-6-3803, which targets materials containing prohibited content “in whole or in part.” Sufficient to remove a Pulitzer Prize–winning, Tennessee-rooted novel from every school library in the county where its author is memorialized in a thirteen-foot bronze statue.

This page asks a simple, evenhanded question. If one passage in chapter 84 of Roots is sufficient under the law, what does the same law say about a text containing one hundred and forty-seven such passages?

By flagged-content density

Passages meeting AAMA criteria, by title.

A title’s flagged-content count represents the number of passages that, applied evenhandedly, would meet the statute’s thresholds for nudity, sexual excitement or conduct, sexual abuse, or excessive violence.

A Light in the Attic Shel Silverstein · children’s poetry · flagged for “extreme violence”

1

Roots Alex Haley · Pulitzer Prize, 1977 · one passage in ch. 84

1

Maus Art Spiegelman · Pulitzer Prize, 1992 · banned in McMinn Co., 2022

2

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian Sherman Alexie · National Book Award, 2007

~6

Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut · 1969 · sexual content & violence

~5

A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess · 1962 · violence & sexual content

~8

The King James Bible 1611 Authorized Version · public-domain text

147

Note on figures: Counts for non-KJV titles reflect publicly reported committee findings, district documentation, or widely-cited reviews. Counts marked with “~” are conservative estimates drawn from the most rigorous public accounts of each book’s flagged content. The KJV figure is exact, drawn from the catalog of 147 catalogued passages compiled for this project (see methodology). For sources, see the press kit.

The ratio

The Bible contains at least 147 times the flagged content that removed Roots.

“Adherence to state law” cannot mean one thing for Roots and a different thing for the King James Bible. Either both belong on the shelf, or neither does. There is no third option that is principled.

This is the substance of the inconsistency. The 2024 amendment of T.C.A. § 49-6-3803 expanded the law to cover materials containing prohibited content “in whole or in part,” and removed any literary-value safety valve from the statutory text. A faithful reading of that language — applied to the King James Bible — yields the catalog you can read in full on this site. The catalog is not selective. It excludes ritual sacrificial blood, idiomatic phrasing for grief, the death-formula “slept with his fathers,” and metaphorical uses of violence-related language. It is, if anything, an undercount.

Side by side

The same statutory standard, two outcomes.

● Removed

Roots (Alex Haley, 1976)

A multigenerational saga following the descendants of Kunta Kinte, captured in 18th-century Gambia and sold into slavery in colonial America. Pulitzer Prize winner. Adapted into a landmark 1977 television miniseries watched by 130 million Americans. Credited with reshaping the national conversation about slavery, genealogy, and Black American history.

The author spent his childhood in Henning, Tennessee, and his final years on a farm in Clinton, twenty miles north of Knoxville. A thirteen-foot bronze statue of him sits in Haley Heritage Square in East Knoxville.

Flagged content One passage in chapter 84.

District decision (May 14, 2026) Removed from all Knox County Schools libraries.

● Retained

The King James Bible (1611)

The Authorized Version, commissioned by King James I of England and completed in 1611 by 47 translators working from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek source texts. A foundational text of Western literary, legal, and theological tradition. Public domain.

Present in school libraries throughout Tennessee. Subject of pending legislation (HB 1491, introduced January 2026) to mandate Bible instruction in Tennessee public schools as historical literature.

Flagged content 147 passages, 754 verses, all four AAMA categories.

District decision Not under review.

A clarification

What this comparison proves, and what it does not.

The comparison proves one thing, narrowly and precisely: the same statutory standard, applied evenhandedly to two well-known texts, yields radically different counts of triggering content. The Bible contains, by the statute’s own measure, at minimum 147 times the volume of content that was sufficient to remove Roots.

The comparison does not prove that the Bible should be removed from school libraries. It does not prove that Roots should have been removed. It does not assert anything at all about the literary, cultural, religious, or moral value of either text. It does not impugn any reader, any tradition, or any belief.

What it does, and all it does, is establish a record. A record showing that a law described publicly as a neutral, procedural mechanism for protecting children from inappropriate content cannot in fact be applied neutrally without absurd results. A record that any future discussion of the AAMA — in school board meetings, in editorials, in court filings, in legislative hearings — can refer to and rely on.

The use to which this record is put is up to the people who read it.

The record

Read the full catalog.

Every one of the 147 catalogued passages, with full KJV text, category tag, and rationale — in canonical biblical order.

The complete catalog → Download as PDF