A North Carolina school board told a pastor the words he wanted to read were too nasty for a public meeting.
Those same words sit on a shelf at Lake Norman High School right now, free for any student to check out.
The board didn't like hearing its own book read back to it, so it called the police instead.
The Board Chair Shut Him Down Before He Finished a Sentence
Pastor John Amanchukwu Sr. stood up at an Iredell-Statesville Schools Board of Education meeting on October 12, 2026.
He came with a copy of Push by Sapphire, the novel assigned and shelved for students at Lake Norman High School.
The book contains graphic depictions of incest, rape, and child abuse, written in explicit detail.
Its teenage narrator is raped by her father and becomes pregnant by him twice, described on the page in the exact language Knight called too nasty to say out loud in that meeting room.
Board Chair Dr. Doug Knight warned him before he started that if he was going to "read nasty words," it would not be allowed.
Amanchukwu pushed back, and at least one board member reportedly agreed the chair was violating his First Amendment rights by prejudging his comment before it was spoken.
He kept reading anyway.
Knight declared him out of order the moment the passage turned explicit.
Officers moved in and removed him from the meeting while cameras rolled.
Neither Knight nor the Iredell-Statesville school district has publicly disputed Amanchukwu's account of what happened or said whether the officer involved faces any review.
Amanchukwu says he is suing, and he's posted that the book sat untouched on school shelves the entire time board members had him removed for quoting it.
This Is Not His First Time Getting Thrown Out for Reading a Library Book
A Texas school board had him removed by five officers after he read from a graphic book in that district's library collection.
Wake County, North Carolina, escorted him out in handcuffs during an earlier meeting over the same fight.
Three different boards, three different states, and the same result every time a pastor tries to read students' assigned material out loud to the adults who assigned it.
Fox News covered his earlier removal, where he called school officials defending the material "snowflake adults" too fragile to hear the curriculum spoken aloud.
That pattern matters because it shows these removals aren't about decorum.
They happen specifically when the room has to confront, word for word, what is actually sitting in a school library.
Amanchukwu has built a national platform on exactly that tactic, appearing with hosts like Megyn Kelly to argue the fastest way to win the argument over sexualized books is to stop summarizing them and start reading them out loud.
"The church is called to salt, not sugar," Amanchukwu has said, describing why he reads the ugliest passages verbatim instead of softening them for polite company.
School boards keep proving him right by reacting to the reading, not the content.
A Book Too Graphic for a Meeting Room Is Not Too Graphic for a Freshman
The legal fight over who controls the microphone at a school board meeting has already been settled once, and not in the boards' favor.
A federal judge ruled against Forsyth County, Georgia, in 2023 after that board banned parents from reading passages it considered profane from library books, finding the board's rules unconstitutional and ordering it to pay the parents' legal fees.
Iredell-Statesville just ran the same play against a pastor instead of a parent, with police instead of a letter.
A school board can require students to read Push for an assignment, but the moment an adult reads the same paragraph back to the people who approved it, the room suddenly can't handle "nasty words."
That is not a content problem.
***LANGUAGE WARNING***
It is a visibility problem, and boards that keep calling the police to solve it keep losing in court for the same reason: the First Amendment does not have an exception for material that embarrasses the people being asked about it.
Every parent who sits through one of these meetings now has a template for what happens the moment they read the book instead of describing it, and a federal court decision already on the books if their board tries to stop them.
Iredell-Statesville picked the exact fight a Georgia board already lost, and it did so on camera.
A district that hands a fourteen-year-old this book for an assignment does not get to call the police on the pastor who reads the same page back to the adults who signed off on it.
Sources:
- Margaret Flavin, "Pastor Removed from North Carolina School Board Meeting After Reading from Library Book Available to Students," The Gateway Pundit, October 14, 2026.
- Staff, "Pastor Was Booted from Board Meeting for Bashing School-Approved Book: These Are 'Snowflake Adults,'" Fox News, 2024.
- Staff, "Federal Judge Rules 'Mama Bears' Can't Be 'Censored' from Reading Library Books to Board," Fox 5 Atlanta, 2023.
- Staff, "'The Church Is Called to Salt, Not Sugar,' Says Pastor John Amanchukwu," Church Leaders, 2024.
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