Though not spelled out in the job description, to be a librarian today is to be an activist committed to the principles of free speech, free expression, a free press, and how increasing the public’s reading and technological literacy serves to protect those civic liberties. With the right to read under unprecedented attack across the country, schools and public libraries where most censorship efforts are taking place have been literally caught in the crosshairs of a small but organized faction that wants to suppress constitutionally protected access to information. In 2022, the American Library Association reported that there had been 1,269 efforts to censor books and resources nationwide, doubling the number reported the previous year, with many of these challenges coming from just a handful of small but organized groups.
Though numerous recent polls have shown that the majority of the American public, regardless of political party, believes that censorship is a violation of the First Amendment, librarians (as well as library support staff and library trustees) have become targets of legislation to criminalize the dissemination of books and other reading material. In 2023, five states—Arkansas, Indiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Tennessee—passed laws that threaten library staff with fines or prison time for providing children and youth with reading material considered “harmful” or “pornographic” despite the loose and increasingly ambiguous definitions of those terms. Indeed, by the close of last year, all but four states in the country had seen legislation introduced to ban or restrict specific titles or themes, overwhelmingly those written by authors who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color or LGBTQIA or about the lived experiences of those communities.