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.”
