A chilling new documentary at the Sundance film festival examines the phenomenon of book banning in US schools, which flourished in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the ordinary heroes who fight them on the local level.
The Librarians, directed by Kim A Snyder and executive produced by Sarah Jessica Parker, follows several school librarians from Texas, Florida, Louisiana and New Jersey who were either fired, harassed or significantly challenged for their refusal to remove books from their shelves deemed “inappropriate” by conservative state legislatures, school board members or parents. Such banned books, usually branded “pornographic”, typically include African American history, LGBTQ+ friendly children’s books, any book addressing racism in America or classics, such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, deemed in violation of “Judeo-Christian principles”. One librarian in Texas described how she was forced to lock selected books behind closed doors. “Every book that was on that shelf was like telling a student ‘we want to put you behind locks,’” she says in the film.
The effort to remove books from school libraries has put librarians – most of whom entered the profession to be a steward of information, not politics or any ideological agenda – in the crosshairs of social media attacks, job precarity and even legal liability. In 2023, Florida passed a law that made refusal to remove or cover a book not deemed “appropriate” by the state’s board of education a felony. The law criminalizing school librarians’ refusal to ban books was passed under the leadership of the governor, Ron DeSantis, whose administration promised to “protect parental rights” by prohibiting childhood education on gender, sexual orientation and critical race theory.
“The idea of these librarians being in the crosshairs, it felt really scary and wrong and absolutely misunderstood,” Parker told Variety at Sundance. “By allowing [book banning] to take place, we’re allowing something dangerous to happen to all of us. Not just to our children but to us as a community, as Americans. It’s a disaster.”
The film surveys several stories of unassuming librarians whose jobs became a vanguard for access, or who came under threat by school boards demanding certain material be removed – including Ibram X Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and a children’s book depicting a baby penguin adopted and raised by two male penguins. “I never thought that this would happen,” says an anonymous school librarian from Texas at the start of the film. “We felt like everything we did was being watched.”
Libraries are “supposed to be this magical entry into a world of ideas”, says another Texas librarian. Instead, they became a new frontier for the culture wars fostered by Donald Trump, Maga’s donor class and other conservative Pacs. The film particularly investigates Moms For Liberty, a “parents rights” group founded in 2021 by Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice that opposes school curricula on LGBTQ+ rights, race and ethnicity or the conservative bogeyman of “critical race theory”. The group, which has backed several school board candidates in multiple states, was deemed an “anti-government” organization by the Southern Poverty Law Center. As the film explores, Moms for Liberty and other conservative or Christian nationalist groups targeting school curricula have received significant funding from Maga donors and groups such as Patriot Mobile, a Texas-based phone company billed as “America’s only Christian conservative wireless provider” that pours money into local school board races.
The Librarians includes some unlikely subjects, including Amanda Jones, a Louisiana librarian once awarded the School Library Journal’s award for School Librarian of the Year – including a celebration attended by members of the school board – who was ostracized for opposing bans of LGTBQ+ friendly material. Jones received countless death threats and was labeled a groomer, a “pedo”, and a porn-pusher. She sued some harassers for defamation and wrote a memoir-cum-manifesto on the fight against book bans.
But perhaps the most surprising is Kimberly Gore, a far-right radio host turned school board member in Granbury, Texas, who ran on a platform of book banning out of sincere belief that children were being exposed to pornographic materials. But once she read the books, she realized the actual material did not match the Moms for Liberty narrative; instead, they promoted, as she told the Texas Tribune, “how to be a good friend, a good human”. When she spoke up about her concerns, she faced backlash and blacklisting from her former supporters.
Ultimately, as the film explores, some proponents of book bans continue their efforts out of sincere belief that they know what’s best for children – specifically, their children. As American schools face another Trump presidency and the ascendance of a well-funded, well-organized Christian nationalist and conservative movement, the librarians keep up the fight to preserve information access for all children.
“When they go after the books, what they’re really going after are those kids who come into my library looking for a safe space,” says Martha Jackson, a librarian in North Hunterdon county, New Jersey, who was labeled a “pedophile” for defending access to LGBTQ+ material. The ongoing, increasingly visible effort for that safe space is, as another puts it in the film, “the civil rights fight of our time”.
The Librarians is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
