This was your chance to see a loud librarian — annual ALA conference in Chicago over the weekend took on book banning
The American Library Association conference that ended Tuesday at McCormick Place tends to be a predictably tame six days. The annual gathering of librarians, publishers and information professionals has been happening since the 19th century. The Chicago-based ALA greets librarians from rural towns, big cities, colleges, high schools, libraries in other countries. They eat a hot dog and take a boat tour and, for a week, dig into the latest archiving techniques, discuss methods of bolstering diversity and forecast digital trends.
That was before the book banners.
“We need to fight now!” shouted a librarian from Tennessee during a panel.
“The crazies are tough but we’re tougher!” yelled a librarian from California.
You have never heard a quiet profession clap so hard.
The book banners had always been there, of course.
According to Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, when the group started tracking book challenges several decades ago, “we were hearing about two, sometimes three a week. Fast-forward to 2021, and now we’re hearing about five to 10 a day. That we know of.”
Even in the early 1970s, said Judy Blume — the beloved children’s author who gave the conference’s keynote address — when she tried to donate three copies of “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” to her children’s school library, the principal returned the books. Conservative communities have challenged “Margaret” almost since the day it was first published in 1970, typically because Blume writes about menstruation.
“I felt, if there’s a year to give a keynote,” she said, “this is the year.”
There was the usual head-shaking. PowerPoint after PowerPoint featured graphs that charted a rise in challenges across the United States as red lines of fairly even keel, staying flat for years and years, until 2020 and the pandemic, then those lines blast off.
Grade school librarians wore T-shirts reading “Librarians Threaten Ignorance.” Plastic bowls offered “Libraries Are Essential” pins, and the ALA offered an oversize cushy chair as a photo-op, which you could climb onto and read passages of banned books.
But beneath pieties and speeches of togetherness was a fresh rhetoric of battle, with eagerness for real action. A handful of panel titles — “Be Fierce,” “Combating Book Bans,” “SOS: Stock Our Shelves” — hinted at this new unwillingness to play the stale role of the meek librarian anymore. Librarians sat in conferences with yellow pads and journals, noting bullet points for strategies in impeccable handwriting, but the urgency was evident — and not just in private but in statements by public officials.
Chris Brown, Chicago Public Library commissioner, compared the moment to McCarthyism, when CPL became the first library system in the country to refuse to remove books politicians deemed “un-American.” Alexi Giannoulias, Illinois secretary of state (and also state librarian), minced no words and referred to book banning as fascist. He spearheaded a new law signed recently by Gov. J.B. Pritzker that made Illinois the first state to “ban book bans,” linking any removal of challenged books to a library’s access to state funds.
Still, with war comes the inevitable fog. During one panel, Sonja Cherry-Paul, who adapted “Stamped From the Beginning,” Ibram X. Kendi’s bestselling history of racist thought, into a children’s version, recalled a librarian recently telling her that she would rather die than remove Lois Lowry’s “The Giver” from shelves. “I said, ‘Wait, you would rather die?’ The woman said yes.” But you don’t teach books, Cherry-Paul told the librarian. “You teach children.” The point being, you’re needed more than any single book.
In line at a Starbucks in McCormick, two librarians spoke in low voices and shorthand.
“Has it happened?”
“A challenge? Hasn’t, but there are rumbles to expect one soon.”
“And?”
“And our policies are tight, and whatever happens happens.”
Beneath these conversations was a resignation that, if a librarian hadn’t received a challenge yet, they would. According to the ALA, there were almost 1,300 challenges against nearly 2,600 titles during 2022 alone — almost double what they saw in 2021. Which led to the next question: What can a librarian do?
Sometimes that question came across as frustration; more often it was an earnest need for concrete ideas. Lisa Bishop, a school librarian in San Francisco, stood at a panel and said: The profession has “a niceness problem. We’re taught to be nice. It’s not what democracy needs now.” After she sat down, another librarian sidled up to her and said: “Well, so, we needed to hear that. That was the best truth I have heard here.”
But that’s more attitude adjustment than action.
Also in the room was Amanda Jones, who has emerged as one of the shrewdest soldiers against book bans. She was the 2020 school librarian of the year in Louisiana and president of the Louisiana Association of School Librarians. Last year, after advocating for LGBTQ+ books during a library board meeting in her small town near Baton Rouge, she became the target of right-wing groups who suggested she was advocating for having sexually explicit and erotic material in a children’s library.
Then it got uglier. She stopped going to her children’s school events after some parents shouted “pervert” at her. After months of this, losing her hair and receiving scores of death threats, she filed defamation lawsuits; one was dismissed (partly on grounds that by speaking at a board meeting she was now a public figure) and has since been appealed.
On the first night of the conference, the ALA gave her an Intellectual Freedom Award. Accepting it, she said she didn’t know if she was courageous; she was just “tired and angry all the time.” Afterward, asked what others were doing about book bans, she told me: “That is a good question.” She noted that groups such as the ALA can help develop networks of support and steer a librarian toward legal information. “But to be honest, most of us were blindsided and nobody at all had a plan to fight this.”
Not Lisa Varga.
If Jones is a soldier, Varga, stone-faced and intimidating, would make a clever general. As executive director of the Virginia Library Association, she recently faced a challenge to 16 books in a school library. Then the possibility of 100 more books challenged. Then the group submitting challenges provided free beer and child care to parents and, in one day, filed enough paperwork to “reconsider” 400 more books.
Varga figured there “couldn’t be real weight” behind most of these challenges, and following her hunch, she filed Freedom of Information Act requests and learned that most of the books had not been read by those challenging them. She turned this information over to a judge when the group sued the library. Because challenges were made partly on the argument that tax money was spent on inappropriate books, she figured how much it would cost the library to reconsider so many books. She calculated for overtime and salary, and then submitted an invoice to the school board for $5 million, requesting a bill be drafted to raise taxes to pay for the extra work. Plus, she added the name of the most prominent book challenger to the bill.
“To remind everyone who would be responsible,” she smiled.
Then frowned.
“Look, (librarians) have done great siloing ourselves, and that’s made us vulnerable,” she said. “But we do have the law and First Amendment on our side and we have to set about emphasizing those things. These people who do this, often in bad faith, they get great clicks when the videos of them at board meetings show up across social media. But their logic tends to break down. I don’t think they ever expect librarians to fight back.”
Indeed, even other librarians describe the response from their profession as suffering from a mix of naivete and well-meaning rationality in the face of coordinated groups with goals often having little to do with a book’s content and more to do with weakening legal protections and defunding libraries entirely. Some were even surprised that hard-right nonprofits — namely, Moms for Liberty, the most fervent challenger of library books — would avoid traditional library protocols and appeal directly to conservative library boards and politicians, appearing at meetings waving matching signs and wearing matching uniforms.
Solutions have been scattered “partly because the profession, the job, and experience of librarians in any given library district, is so decentralized and different,” said Heather Hutto, executive director of Oklahoma’s Bristow Public Library. But a few tactics that have been used: Speak up at board meetings. Identify allies and rally them at meetings. Make a flow chart for the staff on how to react in case of a book challenge. Reach out to organizations such as the ALA and Freedom to Read Foundation for legal assistance. Build a network of supporters.
Last year, Chicago Public Libraries were declared “book sanctuaries,” dedicated to protecting and collecting challenged works; the initiative has since been replicated in hundreds of libraries nationwide.
Still, during a panel with the ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, a librarian asked how to respond when the executives above her bosses were the ones challenging a book.
There was a beat of silence.
Then an ALA officer offered his cellphone number and help after the meeting but was also blunt: Sometimes the only thing librarians can do is hold on to their job and serve their community.
The lack of a clear counterattack or obvious rallying point was the thought behind the ALA’s “Unite Against Book Bans” campaign, which launched last year to offer tactics. Some of what it offers sounds very last century (write a letter to the editor), and some is thoughtful: If enough librarians and supporters join Unite Against Book Bans, by using ZIP code-targeted emails, the ALA could rally support quickly in a community where a challenge is happening.
The ALA is also far from the only library group offering support. On the exhibition floor was Rene Leyva, library director for the Fossil Ridge Public Library District in rural Will County. He’s a board member of RAILS, Reaching Across Illinois Library System, a networking initiative both practical (book sharing) and philosophical. He said his own libraries receive challenges fairly regularly now, and that the state’s ban on book bans is “a good start,” but some of his job has become recognizing the community a library is serving. He doesn’t remove controversial books; they’re always on his shelves. But he doesn’t display them.
Compromise, in other words, can work.
It could head off a potential book challenge before it goes too far. Some librarians find this appeasement. But what do you do when a parent comes to you and doesn’t want a book removed but they don’t want it shelved in an area they think is inappropriate? A librarian asked Hutto this during a panel discussion.
“I’m not going to lie,” Hutto replied. “This is tough.”
She suggested they take off their “librarian hat” for a moment and relate to the person as a person, maybe as a parent themselves. She asked the room how many came here from rural libraries. About half the hands went up. Yeah, Hutto said, people don’t realize most libraries in this country are rural libraries, and rural libraries, often in conservative districts, are less prepared than most. Staffers at rural libraries might not even be trained as librarians, she told me later. “You could have a person who just worked at the dollar store, saw a library opening, now they’re here, and there’s a challenge and they have no idea if the law is on their side.”
She had a challenge in her Oklahoma library two months after becoming executive director. She called her state library association and felt no support; she asked to hold a rally and was told it was “illogical.” She was at the ALA conference on her own dime. She didn’t even feel supported by the ALA.
At least, not at first. They were slow to act, she said, like everyone else.
These days, one of the ways she fights back is by having her staff drill, drill, drill. She role-plays as a woman named “Karen Umbrage” who walks into the library, knocks over displays and eventually asks for books to be pulled. She walks the staff through how they should respond. They do it once, then again, then again.
Does it make her feel less vulnerable?
“I’m a librarian in Oklahoma. I’m vulnerable. But I’ve also decided to hold the line.”
