My library card is printed with my account number on the back and the words “I Read Banned Books” on the front. I swapped out my old card for this one in 2022, when the Nashville Public Library launched a “Freedom to Read” campaign in response to the surge in book bans across the country. The special-edition cards were meant to be temporary, but the response in Nashville was so positive that the library made the option permanent.
That’s not how it works in much of the rest of the country, particularly here in the South. One of the most absorbing books I’ve read this year is “That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America” by Amanda Jones, a school librarian’s account of being targeted by right-wing extremists in Louisiana for speaking in defense of diverse books.
Ms. Jones is an exemplary librarian at the Louisiana middle school she attended as a child. In 2022, as president of the Louisiana Association of School Librarians, she was well aware of the book-banning epidemic sweeping the country. When “book content” appears on the agenda of a library board meeting these days, the discussion generally concerns titles featuring L.G.B.T.Q. characters or subjects involving racism.
At the library-board meeting on July 19, 2022, Ms. Jones didn’t speak against censorship in her role as an award-winning school librarian. She spoke as a concerned citizen of Livingston Parish, where she has lived her entire life. She spoke as a passionate reader and as a mother. She spoke as a “defender of wonder,” a phrase she now uses on her website.
Ms. Jones lives next door to her parents, who still live in the house where she grew up. She voted for Donald Trump in 2016 (a vote she now calls “one of my biggest shames”) and lovingly recounts her church-three-times-a-week Baptist upbringing. She is the furthest thing imaginable from the wild-eyed liberal agitator, much less the “groomer,” that book banners in her state accuse her of being.
There are actual groomers among us, a crime Ms. Jones takes care to decry, but the only “crime” she committed was speaking in defense of intellectual freedom at a public meeting. For that she was bombarded with unrelenting condemnation and death threats.
“All members of our community deserve to be seen, have access to information, and see themselves in our public library,” she said when it was her turn to speak at the meeting. “Just because you enter a library, it does not mean that you will not see something you don’t like. Libraries have diverse collections with resources from many points of view, and a library’s mission is to provide access to information for all users.”
Others in the community also spoke in defense of the library’s collection, including one parent who identified herself as a conservative evangelical Christian who teaches a weekly Sunday school class for children and leads a weekly Bible study for adults. “However, my personal convictions are mine,” the parent said, “while the public library is for everyone and is funded by everyone in our parish, conservative, liberal, Christian and non-Christian alike.”
Despite the overwhelming support for diverse books at the meeting, only Ms. Jones was singled out for public excoriation at the whipping post of social media. Only Ms. Jones was accused of being a pornographer fighting to “keep sexually erotic and pornographic materials in the kids’ section.”
She was doing no such thing, but the attacks spread and escalated. Following a national playbook established by Moms for Liberty and other extremist organizations, local groups unleashed increasingly outrageous anti-library propaganda on gullible conservative voters already primed for mania by right-wing media. It doesn’t take much anymore to transform furious citizens into vicious online mobs.
You know something is wrong in America when beloved schoolteachers and librarians become the target of hate groups, and the attacks’ effect on Ms. Jones was profound. She couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t eat. Her hair fell out in clumps. When the abuse didn’t stop, she decided to fight back, suing her tormentors for defamation — these legal efforts are ongoing — and cofounding an advocacy group called Louisiana Citizens Against Censorship.
Across the country, Republicans have shown no sign of abandoning the culture war over gender- and racially-inclusive books. It’s an election year, and such efforts rarely make front-page news anymore, but book bans are alive and well. According to PEN America, a free-speech organization, more books were banned during the fall semester of 2023 than in the entire previous academic year. The American Library Association reports that book bans in public libraries rose 92 percent in 2023 over the previous year — a year that was itself marked by accelerating bans.
Worse, these numbers likely fall far short of a full accounting. Controversial titles are often quietly removed without public notice. And states are increasingly seizing the power of library-collection decisions from local library boards. In July, Utah banned 13 titles from all public and school libraries in the state. The list of banned books includes titles by best-selling authors Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume and Sarah J. Maas.
But Ms. Jones is not alone in fighting back against politically motivated mind control. Black parents are taking a public stance in defense of Black authors and historically accurate depictions of racism. In Florida, arguably the epicenter of the current book-banning movement, a group of students, parents and the authors of the oft-challenged picture book “And Tango Makes Three” sued to force Nassau County to return banned books to school libraries. (The county settled, restoring 36 titles, including “Tango.”) Several publishing houses are suing the state of Florida for limiting access to “timeless classics,” such as “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou, “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston and “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut.
These are political battles, but Ms. Jones — a self-described political moderate — argues passionately that the public library should not be a political arena. For her, defending diverse books in not a political position. She has simply spent enough time with children to know how important it is for young people to see themselves in the books they read.
Here at the onset of Banned Books Week, it’s worth hoping that Americans will heed the advice she offered at the library board meeting that first inspired the firestorm in her parish: If you don’t approve of a book available at your local library, don’t check it out.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
