“The Librarians” begins with a quote: “It was a pleasure to see things burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed.”
Filmmaker Kim Snyder’s illuminating documentary — premiering at the Sundance Film Festival — offers a rattling look at coordinated efforts to ban books. More importantly, it introduces viewers to the everyday and increasingly vital heroes pushing back: the librarians who sound the alarm to both legislative and grassroots attempts to pull books from school and public libraries.
The opening quote comes by way of “Fahrenheit 451,” Ray Bradbury’s dystopian classic about the ways that book burning and censorship are instruments of authoritarianism. The scene that follows that incendiary opener features a woman sitting in a chair, her back to a window, her face in the shadows. She’s the spitting image of an endangered whistleblower or a witness against a cartel. Only, she’s a librarian in a Texas school district targeted by Gov. Greg Abbott.
In 2021, Texas state representative Matt Krause sent a list of 850 titles that he wanted schools to confirm were on their shelves. The list appeared to target LGBTQ books and titles concerned with race and racism. But just in case, Krause added a blanket sentence that sounds mighty snowflake, advising schools to be on alert for books that “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.”
A few weeks later, Gov. Abbott went further, sending a letter to the Texas Association of School Boards stating, “I’m calling for the immediate removal of this graphic, pornographic material.”
The use of that anonymous speaker quickly comes to feel like an unnecessary device, though still an effective one. The librarians featured by Snyder have been subjected to verbal harassment and threats of physical harm. The documentary brims with women who are willing to put themselves on the line, facing legitimate fears for their security. The anonymous librarian at the start is not even the most compelling of these civic stewards of the stacks.
Instead, there’s Army veteran Suzette Baker, who lost her job as head of the Llano County library system, when she refused to remove books from the shelves. Among them “How to be an Antiracist” and “Between the World and Me.” (“I have to show you to the children’s library, because that’s where our porn is,” she says with no small amount of snark.) Amanda Jones of Louisiana even wrote a book that winks at how she’s been treated by adversaries. It’s called “That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America.” When she spoke up at a Livingston Parrish school board meeting, her photo was uploaded to conservative websites.
Although Jones, who’s been awarded numerous prizes as a librarian and a teacher, tries to turn the animosity on its head when possible, her conversations with her mother and father make clear the emotional fortitude and toll it required to advocate not just for books, but for readers.
Much of the film covers local fights in Texas and Florida. But the implications are nationwide, as New Jersey librarian Martha Hickson discovered — or rather uncovered. You’ve got to admire librarians who, among other humbling qualities, do their research. She gleaned a concerted strategy for parents to go after certain titles and followed its trail to the conservative political organization Moms for Liberty, whose mission on their website is to fight “for the survival of America by unifying, educating and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.”
In light of her work, Hickson has been slandered as a pedophile. Labeling queer content as obscene, and the librarians who advocate for those titles as pornographers, comes from the most dogeared pages in the censors’ playbook.
“I couldn’t remove a book because it has ideas we don’t like,” says Bette Davis’s character in a “Storm Center,” a 1956 drama about Communism and book banning. This little scene is among many gems of archival and film images interspersed throughout “The Librarians.”
While the librarians are the leads in the documentary, students and other concerned citizens also speak out against the censorship. There are the high schoolers from the Texas’ Granbury Banned Book Club. Rev. Jeffrey Dove, a pastor in Florida’s Clay County who joined forces with librarian Julie Miller, says “to attempt to take Black history, to take a lot of our stories away from children is one of the most evil things I think a person can do.”
A surprising defector arrives in the spiky Courtney Gore: a Granbury school board member who initially railed alongside a couple of podcast bros against the libraries. But now she’s persona non grata with her former chirping male cohosts. One of them is a former legislator funded by a Christian right billionaire with extreme ideas about LGBTQ+ people.
And while the demographics of library science (and this documentary) aren’t exactly diverse (more than 80 percent of librarians are women and approximately 89 percent are white), these librarians prove that you don’t have to be part of marginalized groups to champion a diverse catalog.
“I do know that our story is still being written,” says Texas librarian Audrey Wilson-Youngblood. “But now it’s everyone’s story.” Wilson-Youngblood, her colleagues and filmmaker Snyder (whose doc short, “Death by Numbers,” was nominated for an Oscar earlier this month) offers a gripping story of what is at stake when curiosity and thinking are endangered.
