A South Carolina school board meeting, in which community members railed against an African American culture writer’s award-winning memoir about racial injustice, featured a special guest appearance: Ta-Nehisi Coates, the famed author in question.

On Monday evening, the Lexington-Richland District 5 School Board met to discuss the outrage concerning Coates’ 2015 nonfiction bestseller, Between the World and Me, which has repeatedly caused political literary mayhem among reactionary right-wing communities and been placed on book ban lists.

In February, after getting approval from higher-ups, an AP Language teacher at Chapin High School conducted a lesson involving Between the World and Me. The book, written as an essay to Coates’ son to prepare him for the life he will live as a Black man, details personal accounts of Coates’ life and his first-hand experiences with racism. However, the lesson was shut down and the book was removed from the course after students filed a complaint claiming the book made them feel “guilty for being white,” local news outlet CBS 19 Columbia reported.

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According to footage obtained by CBS 19, a slew of people wearing blue rallied in support for the book and for academic freedom during the board hearing. And Coates sat in the back of the room next to the teacher who assigned the book as a sign of solidarity.

“What matters most to me is that my students have the ability to hear six or seven opinions on one topic and come up with their own thesis, supported with evidence, and come up with an independent conclusion,” said Superintendent Dr. Akil Ross. “Sometimes there’s going to be topics you agree with, and there’s going to be topics you disagree with. Academic freedom says even if you disagree, there’ll be another opinion presented to our children. Our democracy needs that.”

PEN America, a literary human-rights organization, called the book’s removal “an outrageous act of government censorship and a textbook example of how educational gag orders corrupt free inquiry in the classroom.”

“We cannot become critical thinkers without being uncomfortable in some way,” one student declared while directly addressing the Lexington-Richland board. “If students can’t learn these things in a safe space, like school, how are they—we—meant to make good decisions and think critically?”