MAGA's book bans are coming back with a vengeance

SOUTH CAROLINA

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Mary Wood, a teacher at Chapin High School, at her home.

(Tribune News Service)

"'m not really fearful anymore," Mary Wood told me. Wood, 49, doesn’t dodge uncomfortable topics. But I'm unsure how much to credit this claim.

Over dinner in late November at a chain restaurant near her home outside Columbia, South Carolina, she recalled the “constant state of fear” that enveloped her in February 2023 when she was first accused of wayward thought. Two students in the AP language class that she taught at Chapin High School, a National Blue Ribbon School, had reported Wood, a white English teacher who had graduated from Chapin herself, to a school board recently recast by members aligned with the right-wing Moms for Liberty movement. Wood's offense was showing two short videos about racial discrimination and teaching “Between the World and Me,” a memoir of growing up, and living, Black in America by Ta-Nehisi Coates.