In July 2022, Amanda Jones attended a public library board meeting in Livingston Parish, Louisiana, after learning there would be a discussion about “book content.”
That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America
By Amanda Jones
Bloomsbury Publishing, 288 pages
Release date: August 27, 2024
Jones, the librarian at the nearby middle school she’d attended as a child, gave a short speech about the importance of libraries being “for everyone” and the danger of book policing.
Afterward, Citizens for a New Louisiana posted on Facebook that Jones was fighting hard to “keep sexually erotic and pornographic materials in the kids’ section.” Another commenter accused her of “advocating teaching anal sex to eleven-year-olds.” Both used her name and photo.
Jones, who has received multiple awards for her work as a teacher and librarian, could have ignored these attacks, which bore no relation to the truth. Instead, she fought back, using money raised on GoFundMe to file a defamation lawsuit, which is still pending, against the two men who posted the comments. This drew national media attention—as well as an email accusing Jones of “indoctrinating our children with perversion + pedophile grooming” and warning that “we gunna put ur fat evil commie PEDO azz in the dirt very soon bitch.”
The number of books being challenged and banned in the United States is at an all-time high—the American Library Association recorded 1,269 challenges in 2022, up from 729 the previous year. This is due in part to groups like Moms for Liberty that demand the removal of certain books, most of which deal with LGBTQ+ people and people of color. It’s not just that they don’t want their kids to read them; they don’t want other people’s kids reading them, either.
Bloomsbury Publishing
That Librarian is Jones’s heartfelt and “badass” (her daughter’s assessment) response to such smallmindedness. She describes her own lifelong attraction to libraries and the impact that writers like Judy Blume have had on her life. She explains the policies that libraries have in place to decide whether a book is appropriate for a given age group. She knocks down hallucinatory claims that libraries traffic in pornography or that books with graphic sexual content are placed in the children’s section. (Ironically, while their parents target libraries and librarians, many youth have unfettered access to actual pornography, through their phones and tablets.)
Jones notes that some books in the young adult sections of libraries deal with sex and reproduction, and why shouldn’t they? Many young adults are in relationships. Heck, in Louisiana, they can get married at age sixteen. Moreover, Jones reveals, “teenagers know about sex.” Books that discuss actual relationships, even ones involving sex, are not smut, they’re books. “I understand that some parents don’t want their teens to read about sex,” she writes. “Those parents need to police their own children’s reading and stop policing mine.”
While conceding that some book banners are “well-meaning people swooped up in the hysteria” created by people waging culture wars, Jones admits to harboring hatred for “these assholes who were posting complete lies about me on social media.” She tries to hold her anger in check, but at times it’s overwhelming, and it may give her tale a darker cast than it might otherwise have had.
For example, Jones repeatedly acknowledges that she has received a great deal of support—from the media who told her story with care; from librarians all across the country; and from many friends, students, and colleagues. Yet she dwells on the smaller number of people who attack her or who could have stood by her but didn’t, while making gloomy pronouncements like “our society is devolving into one of hatred and intolerance.”
In fact, this is an issue the librarians are winning. Many book challenges are failing for lack of merit and due to strong opposition. Some of the state laws creating criminal penalties for lending the wrong book have been vetoed or blocked by the courts; other states have introduced legislation to protect librarians.
Toward the end of That Librarian, Jones lists some strategies for combating the book banners, including making public records requests to see what messages library board members are receiving. Another suggestion: Ask those who allege there are sexually explicit books in the children’s section to name one. She might have suggested one other approach: reaching out to the well-meaning people whose minds may be open to change. Maybe she could lend them her book.