Like many public service workers across the United States, librarians have found themselves in the crosshairs of the far right’s widespread efforts to censor material written by and about people of color and the LGBTQ+ community. In The Librarians, a documentary which premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, Oscar-nominated director Kim A. Snyder centers the voices of librarians, teachers, and students who have become crucial defenders of the First Amendment.
Snyder started covering local efforts to protect freedom of speech and expression in 2021, after former Texas lawmaker Matt Krause asked school districts across the state whether they possessed titles from a list of 850 books, many of which deal with racism, sexuality, and U.S. history, that he said “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.” Over the course of three years, Snyder explored the local and national layers to this issue, compiling the stories of multiple different librarians into a tightly edited ninety-two-minute documentary.
The film places contemporary censorship in the context of assaults on free expression throughout the twentieth century, featuring harrowing footage of Nazi book burnings during World War II and U.S. Senate hearings during the McCarthy Era, during which books and news media that featured communist ideas were banned.
“If you can control the library, you can control the community,” an anonymous Texas librarian says over archival footage during the film, “because if you can control the flow of information, you can control the ideas, you’ve got it—you’ve got everything.”
Snyder’s film is urgent and captivating in its humanization of the librarians who find themselves at the center of the book bans that have dominated local and national headlines for several years now. Many librarians are featured on the record, though Snyder also blurs out one subject’s face for fear of retaliation.
Brooky Parks, a public librarian from Colorado, speaks candidly in the film about the consequences she anticipates facing after promoting programs focused on anti-racism and LGBTQ+ history. “I know they’re going to fire me,” Parks says. “I know they’re making a case to fire me. I know it’s coming, but I’m not going to shut up. I’m just not gonna do it.” Parks was eventually fired from her library job, though she later won a civil rights settlement, which found that her termination violated anti-discrimination laws.
Also featured in the film is Terri Lesley, a former public library director in Wyoming, was also fired after advocating for LGBTQ+-themed books and refusing to remove these books from the Campbell Public Library system. “I don’t regret standing up for the First Amendment in any way, but it was kind of a brutal process to experience it, to have it be such a contentious issue, and for it to be across the country and be called things like a ‘pedophile’ or a ‘child groomer,’” Lesley told The New York Times earlier this month, after receiving a $700,000 settlement.
Julie Miller, a high school librarian from Clay County, Florida, was quietly fired from her post after simply asking why she had to remove forty-one books from the library’s shelves. “They’re going to say it’s because I was refusing to follow directives,” she explains in the film. “That’s not the case at all—it’s really just because I kept pushing back.”
A large portion of the film lets the hypocrisy of these fascist book bannings speak for itself. Snyder compiles footage from school board meetings across the country, during which parents assert the need to “protect” their children against what they allege is pornography, citing religious beliefs and using death threats to intimidate librarians and media specialists into staying silent. In choosing which books libraries can offer, parents and board members force their religious beliefs on the general public, while claiming that authors and librarians are engaging in coercion by offering books about marginalized identities. Censoring books is a way to suppress critical thought, which reading a variety of texts and perspectives can encourage from a young age.
The film focuses in particular on the conservative group Moms for Liberty, which has seen the likes of Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis speaking at their rallies. Snyder exposes groups like Moms for Liberty and Patriot Mobile Action, a political action committee created by Christian cellphone company Patriot Mobile, which infiltrated four Texas public school districts by pouring money into crucial school board races. The organization funded far-right candidates and sent thousands of political mailers warning the targeted communities about the dangers of critical race theory and “woke” ideology.
As The Librarians illustrates, libraries are more than just the sum of the resources they provide—they are harbors of community with particular value for those members, such as LGBTQ+ youth, who may be yearning to see their experiences reflected and validated. The Librarians is the rare documentary that is infuriating and inspiring in equal measure. Through a wide range of sit-down interviews, historical footage, and school board meeting recordings, Snyder continually returns to the importance of freedom and community, both of which have been placed under attack at local libraries.
The documentary ends by celebrating a win in Llano County, Texas. Despite high-profile attempts to censor library offerings and close the entire library system in the rural county in central Texas, a judge ordered banned books be returned to the shelves and county commissioners opted to keep the public libraries open.
In the film, a queer, transfeminine person speaks at a board meeting for the Livingston Parish Library in Louisiana, about the importance of representation in targeted books like Queerfully and Wonderfully Made: “Books like this say, ‘Hey, you are loved. There’s a community that will be there for you.’ ”