Librarian Jeannie Ferriss (center) and teen project coordinators Hope Shockley and Bo Cheuvront select books for the Holocaust Project, sponsored by Humanities Montana.
Montana librarian Jeannie Ferriss knew she’d found a mission when she spoke about the Holocaust to a group of young adults who had never heard of it before. “They thought I was making it up,” the Whitehall Community Library staffer tells me in a telephone interview.
Stunned by this revelation, in 2019 Ferriss launched a library-sponsored Holocaust book discussion group that remains active. Then, in September, the library kicked off a second initiative, a Holocaust study program for twenty fourteen-to-seventeen-year-old students and ten adults. The program will include visits to an exhibition on loan from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., lectures by two local rabbis, and discussions with both a Holocaust survivor and a former soldier who helped liberate the concentration camps. A Rescuer/Survivor fair will also be organized to educate Whitehall’s 1,200 residents about the atrocities committed by Hitler’s regime.
The goal, Ferriss says, is “to get people to walk away knowing what can happen when hate goes unchecked.”
“The right will object to any difficult content. They don’t want to engage. Let’s not talk about race, mental health, or gender. Let’s avoid authors of color and LGBTQ+ authors.”
The tiny Whitehall Community Library is not unique in offering services that go far beyond what’s on the shelves. Indeed, most of the nation’s more than 9,000 public libraries see themselves as community hubs—inclusive, safe, and welcoming spaces for the exchange of ideas and pursuit of information.
Among other things, public libraries across the country serve as summer meal sites for hungry kids and many loan out films, music, and technical equipment in addition to books and periodicals. Computers and WiFi are available to those who lack access, whether to search for a job or to search for the answer to a nagging concern.
In addition, some librarians and library staff are advancing more explicitly political—and often progressive—ideas, from trans rights, to prison abolition, to racial solidarity and anti-racist messaging through displays, lectures, reading programs, and discussion groups.
They’re also forming groups for interpersonal support and professional development.
The Joint Council of Librarians of Color, for example, was formed in 2015 to promote “librarianship within communities of color” and support literacy and the preservation of history and cultural heritage through conferences and gatherings.
Others are mobilizing to protect against the distortion of history. Brooklyn’s Interference Archive collects materials, from buttons to pamphlets to leaflets, from progressive efforts. The New York University–based Tamiment Library is a repository of U.S. labor history, while the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, in Los Angeles County, has amassed more than 90,000 posters and prints. The Lesbian Herstory Archives, in New York City, holds the world’s largest collection of materials about lesbian lives and contributions.
But not everyone has praised these efforts. Since the 2008 recession, many library budgets have been significantly reduced, and the political right has increasingly organized campaigns to challenge library promotion of anti-racist and pro-LGBTQ+ events, whether through Black History Month programs, Pride displays, or speaker series.
This includes disruptions of Drag Queen Story Hour, a six-year-old reading program where drag queens read to kids, to the sabotage of ballot initiatives that would authorize the expansion or renovation of crumbling library facilities, to vocal campaigns against books that address racism, gender identity, or sexuality.
And that’s not all. Model Religious Freedom Measures Protecting Prayer and Faith in America, a fifty-one-page wishlist crafted by the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation and its conservative Christian nationalist allies, includes a sample Public Libraries Parental Review Act. The measure gives religious conservatives the step-by-step tools they need to exert control over local libraries.
Although efforts to pass such acts failed in Missouri and Tennessee—thanks to the work of the American Library Association and EveryLibrary—the Niles-Maine District Library in Niles, Illinois, was taken over by rightwing forces in April of this year.
According to Book Riot, the right won because just 8.4 percent of the eligible electorate voted in the spring 2021 election. The win gave conservatives a four-to-three majority on the board and they wasted no time in announcing cutbacks—ending programs that distributed books to the homebound and people who live in nursing homes; cutting the overnight cleaning crew; reducing the adult services budget by $150,000; and slashing the number of hours the building would be open each week from seventy to fifty-four.
Dave Sutherland, an anti-racist organizer with #SaveNilesLibrary, says the group’s top priority is to protect workers: “Without them, we can’t resurrect the library.”
Although one of the conservatives resigned from the library board in mid-August, and several of the proposed budget cuts—including the shortened hours—were defeated, #SaveNilesLibrary members remain concerned about the still-precarious state of the facility. “This is classic neoliberalism,” Sutherland says. “We have to reckon with it.”
It’s a hefty task.
Sutherland charges that rightwing critics of libaries believe public services should be run like businesses, to the detriment of diverse library users—from people seeking books written in Polish or Spanish to those who check out cameras or other equipment, as well as books, movies, and magazines. “We are working to save the library for them,” he adds, “for the vulnerable people who can’t buy a book on Amazon or go to the store to buy a camera or computer.”
Elaine Harger, a member of the Progressive Librarians Guild, says opposition to the “business model” is what led progressives to form the guild in 1990. “Increasingly, libraries were hiring people with business backgrounds who were only interested in saving money. As soon as they came in, they started going after private funding and naming rights became a thing. Collections department staff were instructed to see how often a book circulated and popular books were ordered in multiple copies, while less frequently requested materials, no matter how important, were discarded.”
The guild, Harger continues, wanted to be more than an anti-austerity organization. “The American Library Association had a social responsibility roundtable that was established in the 1960s and people were part of feminist, LGBTQ+, peace and justice, or other roundtable taskforces,” she says. “No one was bringing all the social justice initiatives together until we formed the guild.”
Although Harger notes that the guild is presently in a “lull,” she is enormously proud of its work. This has included the publication of forty-eight issues of its Progressive Librarian journal, with coverage of themes as disparate as censorship, librarianship in Palestine’s occupied territories, and the commodification of knowledge.
It has had an impact. Younger activists credit the guild’s founders—many of whom are retired or nearing retirement—with inspiring them to create spinoff groups. Among them, Critical Cataloging, known as CritCat, which calls itself “a movement of cultural heritage workers who work to bring social justice, radical empathy, and outreach work into their everyday practice.” A more recent spin-off, says member Dani Rowland, an academic librarian from Washington State, is Library Workers Against Racism, and their most recent project is a “tool kit” for library staff called Confronting White Nationalism in Libraries.
“White nationalists have targeted public libraries because they are public spaces,” Rowland says. “They have organized against Drag Queen Story Hours. In King County, Washington, a local group recruited Proud Boys to attend a library board meeting. Our tool kit covers the differences between hate speech and free speech, and offers suggested approaches for what to do when white nationalist ideas are invoked. We also now attend all library board meetings to speak out about the importance of diverse programming.”
Patrick Sweeney, political director of EveryLibrary, agrees that community involvement and oversight are key to making sure that public libraries serve broad constituencies. Since 2012, he says, EveryLibrary has advocated for both public and school libraries.
“Libraries often lack the resources to fight back when faced with budget cuts or community opposition to a program or materials display,” Sweeney says. “Unlike police and fire departments, libraries don’t have an advocacy staff, and while some ‘friends of the library’ groups exist, they often don’t have a budget.”
This has given an opening to the better-funded right—including the Koch Foundation–funded Americans for Prosperity. Sweeney says this group has moved into numerous locales to attack library expansion and increased staffing as unnecessarily expensive.
In Plainfield, Illinois, for example, Americans for Prosperity opposed a voter referendum that would have raised $25 million for the renovation and expansion of the inadequate town library. “They called it a property tax and paid for robo-calls to urge people to vote ‘no.’ The strategy worked and the bond failed,” Sweeney says. “People like the Kochs never say, ‘I hate libraries.’ The message is ‘I hate taxes’ and it resonates. They’ve also dragged librarians into the culture wars and have presented libraries as centers of indoctrination to be opposed.”
Young adult author Nikki Grimes knows first-hand what it is like to be on the receiving end of the right’s animosity. The winner of the American Library Association’s 2017 Children’s Literature Legacy Award, Grimes’s Ordinary Hazards was one of nine books pulled in August from use by schools in the Leander, Texas, Independent School District as “inappropriate for children.”
Grimes describes the book as “a memoir in verse, a book that is ultimately about triumph over darkness, the power of faith, and the power of the written word.” Since the book’s removal, she says, libraries and schools across the country have been ordering extra copies and encouraging teachers to use it in their classrooms. She has also received many supportive messages.
“Who knows why they think the book is inappropriate,” she says. “My assumption is that the right will object to any difficult content. They don’t want to engage. Let’s not talk about race, mental health, or gender. Let’s avoid authors of color and LGBTQ+ authors.”
Grimes’s impatience with such attacks is obvious. Nonetheless, she says, “I can’t let it bother me. I have books to write and stories to tell.”
Defending free speech and protecting writers and their work is the raison d’être of the American Library Association; its Office for Intellectual Freedom has zealously opposed censorship for more than fifty years. The office’s director, Deborah Caldwell-Stone, has seen conservative book-censorship priorities shift over the past few years. Prior to 2020, she says, the books that were most frequently censored addressed sexuality, gender, and gender identity—Heather Has Two Mommies by Lesléa Newman was a particular lightning rod—especially when they were geared toward elementary school-aged readers.
Today these books are still opposed, but the furor has been tamped down. Now the right’s most pressing concerns are about books that discuss race or assert that the United States was built on a foundation of racism. Their targets include works by Laurie Halse Anderson, Alex Gino, Ibram X. Kendi, Harper Lee, Jason Reynolds, Toni Morrison, and John Steinbeck.
But censorship is only one of the bugaboos that librarians must contend with. They are also increasingly responsible for maintaining patron privacy.
“Research databases often ask for user data and when libraries contract out to a marketing firm to help them grow their donor base, the company typically wants details about library users,” Caldwell-Stone says. “This is an area with deep implications for the right to read and maintain [one’s] privacy.”
Then, of course, there are boards to deal with, budgets to juggle, patrons to satisfy, and programs to schedule.
Despite the challenges, the American Library Association, EveryLibrary, the Progressive Library Guild, #SaveNilesLibrary, and librarians, library workers, and patrons nationwide agree that preserving public libraries as citadels of free thought and intellectual freedom is imperative, and doing so comes down to something basic: community organizing.
“Individual people in a community can make a huge difference,” Caldwell-Stone says. “If you care about libraries, get to know the head librarian. Know when library board meetings are and go to them. Join your Friends of the Library group. Be engaged, pay attention, and show up for local elections.”