With the American Library Association’s annual Banned Books Week set to begin on Sunday, September 22, a week of events will serve to celebrate diversity in literature and to remind Americans that, in the words of former ALA executive director Tracie D. Hall, “free people read freely.” But for many librarians and educators on the front lines of who have found themselves under fire—and in several high profile cases, literally fired—for defending the freedom to read has come at a steep cost.
For our freedom to read issue, PW recently caught up with five people who are bravely standing up to the censors.
Iris Halpern
Civil rights attorney Iris Halpern has a lot of experience fighting for the constitutional rights of her clients. But she hasn’t represented many—if any—librarians over the course of her career. That is, until now.
In September 2023 Halpern made national headlines when she negotiated a $250,000 settlement for librarian Brooky Parks, who was fired from her job at Erie (Colo.) Community Library in 2021 for daring to promote anti-racism and LGBTQ history workshops for teens. A partner at Denver-based civil rights firm Rathod Mohamedbhai, Halpern specializes in cases involving employees victimized by discrimination. And her client list now includes several librarians and educators, including two librarians with active court cases: Suzette Baker in Llano County, Tex., and Terri Lesley, the longtime Campbell County (Wyo.) Public Library director, who was fired in dramatic fashion last fall for refusing to censor LGBTQ books.
“I’ve had to become an expert very quickly,” says Halpern, when asked about the issues facing the librarians she now counts as clients. But, she adds, it didn’t take long for her to recognize the strategy being used by book banners in libraries and schools across the country, and, maybe more importantly, in state legislatures.
“If you look at all these book bans and all these laws that are passing across the country, none of them are going to survive constitutional scrutiny,” she explains. “So it’s pretty clear that these laws are in fact aimed at scaring librarians and administrators as part of a political power play. They’re trying to have our public institutions send the message out that certain groups are not welcome or are second class, which is particularly pernicious and dangerous.”
While the facts of each of her librarian cases is different, Halpern says they have common roots: legislators and administrators who are trying to intimidate librarians into silence. “And it’s effective. Who wants to lose their job, be pilloried by extremely racist, homophobic fringe elements of the community, sometimes to the point of physical danger, and then have to pay for lawyers?”
Halpern concedes that winning substantial financial awards for librarians who have been unfairly treated would send an important message to community leaders seeking to ban books. But the main takeaway is not the price tag, she insists.
“We certainly hope that library boards across the country will think twice about getting bogged down in years of litigation because they decided to censor based on some discriminatory, hateful agenda,” she says. “But I think the message here is that people don’t want this. There’s a very strong sentiment emerging that people do not want to see the country go in this direction.”
Halpern also acknowledges that, while litigation is an important tool in fighting book bans, there are limits to what it can achieve. That, she says, is why the public needs to step up and support their librarians, teachers, and advocates who are defending their right to read.
“I’m hopeful that these cases will help, but litigation is fundamentally responsive. It’s not proactive,” she explains. “It takes place after someone is fired, after books have been taken off the shelves, after our curriculums and our schools and our programming in our libraries has been suppressed, which we should all be very angry about. We need to organize around that. We need our communities to stand up and do what they can. Because these librarians are very brave, but they cannot do it on their own. It’s extracting too heavy a price.”
Terri Lesley
For 27 years, Terri Lesley was a fixture at the Campbell County Public Library in Gillette, Wyo., the last 13 years as director. “I grew up in Gillette,” she says. “I know a lot of people and have made a lot of connections in the community over many years.” But like so many librarians caught up in this wave of book banning, she didn’t see the end coming until it was too late.
The first warning shots were in summer 2021, when a handful of local activists objected to a Pride Month social media post by the library, and later a transgender magician’s scheduled appearance at the library. From there, things continued to escalate, with one particular family (multiple members of which Lesley is now suing for civil rights infractions and defamation) even reporting the library to the sheriff after finding a handful of LGBTQ-themed books in the teen section. That move garnered national headlines but no charges. And the library board at the time backed Lesley.
In the following months, however, the library would receive nearly 60 book challenges—most concerning LGBTQ content—up from zero in previous years. And then came the big change: a new library board was seated.
“I’ve had so many great library boards,” Lesley says. “Even before I was director, we always had caring board members who loved literacy and loved lifelong learning. And in the first year of controversy here, I had a great board. But they’d been under attack for about a year. And so, when people reached their term limits, they didn’t re-up. At which point our county commissioners, who had their own agenda, were able to appoint new board members who would go after the books.”
For months Lesley resisted the new board’s directives to remove books from the library. Then in July 2023, the board called a public meeting and fired her. According to reports, the room was filled with Lesley supporters who criticized the board in their public comments, and greeted the board’s decision with a one-finger salute. Lesley left the room to a standing ovation.
Working with Halpern, Lesley has filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint, in addition to a lawsuit. But those actions, she concedes, don’t make up for the loss of a decades-long career in a community she loved—even though right-wing activists made the last two years of her directorship “pure hell” for her and her staff.
“This attack in Gillette was particularly ugly,” Lesley says. “Activists were making it really hard on the staff. It got so hard for them that on some days I would come into the parking lot and see a staff member and she’d start crying. There were a lot of tears and a lot of stress. At one point, I brought in counseling for the staff so they could talk about what was going on if they wanted to. That was maybe the hardest for me, not to being able to protect my staff from this.”
As for her future, Lesley is unsure. “I would love to work for a library, but I’m in a small town in Wyoming that doesn’t have a lot of library opportunities,” she says. “When I first went to work for the library, I didn’t know that I was going to love it. But I did. I just love to help people. And when you’re around so many people who are so appreciative of the work that you do, what a lucky thing it is.”
Suzette Baker
For Suzette Baker, former head of the Kingsland Library in Llano County, Tex., being a librarian was her dream job. As ex-military, she found purpose in serving. She loved making fun, quirky book displays. And she understood the importance of the work she was doing.
“If you look at a country and you look at their libraries, the freedom that exists in the library reflects the freedom that exists in the country,” she says. “So, if freedom is what we want in our country, then freedom is what we must have in our libraries.”
But in 2021, as a politically organized book-banning movement was gaining steam in Texas, Baker found herself on the horns of a dilemma. An employee at the Llano branch of the library had found a copy of the illustrated guidebook It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health wrongly shelved in the children’s section. But instead of alerting the library director about the mistake and handling it professionally, this employee (who left the job soon after) brought it to the attention of local political groups.
As Baker recalls, things “steamrolled” from there. Local officials responded by ordering the removal of books they unilaterally deemed “pornographic” from the library, the bulk of which were by or about the LGBTQ community. Baker resisted, and spoke out, setting in motion a series of events that quickly led to her dismissal and sparked a wave of litigation. Not only is Baker suing the county for wrongful determination but a group of concerned citizens in Llano County is also suing the library for breaching their constitutional rights.
Baker now works in a hardware store. “Honestly, I’ve had a lot of difficult days, but it’s worth it,” she says. “Because this fight is for all of us. As librarians, this what we do, this is what we love. You know, writers write the books, but librarians, we connect those books to the people who need them. And that is seriously emotional work. It can be very intense. And to have somebody tell you that you can’t do that—that you can’t connect people with what they need? It’s awful.”
For her courage in fighting book bans in Texas, Baker was honored in June at the Authors Guild’s annual gala in New York City with the inaugural Champion of Writers Award, which was presented by banned author George M. Johnson. And on August 27, a federal court handed Baker an important victory, denying Llano County’s bid to have her lawsuit dismissed. Baker concedes that she has sacrificed a lot by refusing to give in to the book banners in her community. But she also understands the importance of staying strong, winning in court, and finishing the mission.
“I’m 57 years old,” she says. “This is where I was planning to be, doing a job that I absolutely adored, until I retired. Now I’m a cashier at a hardware store, and in another county because I can’t get a job in Llano. But, if I can fight back and I can win, it means that every librarian has the power to stand up and say no. It means that every librarian can fight back and win.”
Brooky Parks
Today, Brooky Parks works as a business and economics reference librarian at the University of Denver. But from 2019 to 2021, she served at northeastern Colorado’s Erie Community Library. “When I was in grad school, I didn’t want to go into school libraries, because I thought I’d have to deal with more censorship,” Parks says. “I decided to go into public libraries. But it’s not safe there at all.”
In Erie, Parks organized an LGBTQ book club for teens, and youth anti-racist programming. But after a handful of patrons complained, the High Plains Library District canceled her projects. When she protested, the district fired her.
Parks says she was offered $5,000 “to help bridge the gap in between employment,” on the condition that she sign an agreement not to sue. Instead, she filed an anti-discrimination lawsuit. With the help of Halpern, Parks negotiated a $250,000 settlement in September 2023.
The legal victory made headlines, but the money has done nothing to ease the feelings of loss over being forced out of her job. “It’s hard not to take it personally,” Parks says. “It feels very isolating.”
Recently, Parks connected online with fellow librarians who, she says, also “understand what it’s like to be betrayed by your institution and sacrifice your dream job.” Those outside the profession may underestimate the pressure librarians are facing. “I see posts all the time of librarians saying, ‘I woke up in the middle of the night with a panic attack.’ And we’re like, ‘Hey, we get it.’ ”
Parks is happy to be working, and she feels grateful for her University of Denver position. “I’m still helping people find the information they need and seeing that light bulb go off,” she says. “You feel like you’ve made a difference to someone.”
While she maintains her ideals about libraries and public service, her experience has left her wary. “I’ll be very careful before I accept another job in public libraries,” she says.
When she guest-lectures in DU classrooms, she tells aspiring librarians to “find out the inside scoop” before accepting a position. “You can tell from board meeting minutes whether the district is going to have your back. Look at their procedures. What’s their collection development policy and reconsideration policy?”
Parks has also discovered that her DU job has provided her with a platform. And she feels duty bound to speak to legislators, and to tell her story at conferences. Recently her testimony helped get Colorado’s anti-book-banning law (SB 24-216), the “Standards for Decisions Regarding Library Resources,” signed into law.
“I don’t have to pick a research agenda,” she says of her work protecting the integrity of libraries. “It picked me.”
Martha Hickson
Martha Hickson, media specialist at North Hunterdon High School in Annandale, N.J., was among the vanguard fighting for the freedom to read when, in 2019, a superintendent demanded she remove Alison Bechdel’s memoir Fun Home from library shelves. “I refused, and a protracted battle ensued,” Hickson recalls. “I thought that fight was the worst thing that ever happened to me. Little did I know what was to come.”
In 2021, administrators again went after Fun Home, this time along with Juno Dawson’s This Book Is Gay, Jonathan Evison’s Lawn Boy, George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue, and Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer. Hickson again defended the books.
“All of the books that have been challenged at my school have been associated with LGBTQ+ content,” she says. “The book banners in my area of the world understand that it’s not a good look to go after racially based content, but for whatever reason they have no problem being accused of being homophobic.”
To fight her battle, Hickson gathered resources from the ACLU and EveryLibrary, and rallied her neighbors. “I reached out to community members, mainly parents of students, and that little nucleus grew into what we’ve called the North Hunterdon-Voorhees Intellectual Freedom Fighters,” she says. Though librarians are “efficient problem solvers, you cannot do it alone.”
Ultimately the school board voted to retain all five titles, and positive recognition followed: Hickson received the ALA’s 2022 Lemony Snicket Prize for Noble Librarians Faced with Adversity. She was also named the New Jersey Library Association’s 2023 librarian of the year. And when a similar challenge arose in Pennsylvania, members of the Pennsylvania School Librarians Association looked to Hickson’s strategies to establish a rapid response protocol against book bans.
But the victory was hard-won. “I was one of the first librarians in the country to be attacked and to go public with my experience,” Hickson says, adding that the stress has taken a toll on her health and career. “I would not have survived the last five years without my husband’s constant support.” And she befriended more than a few “foxhole buddies” who’ve grappled with censorship too.
Alas, this summer, Hickson submitted her paperwork to retire, effective October 30. “Retirement became an attractive option when my daily work life became untenable,” she says, pointing to continued “active hostility” both inside and outside the school. “I’ve loved the work, especially working with students, but I’ve come to loathe the workplace.”
Still, Hickson vows to stay engaged in defending the freedom to read, including in efforts to pass New Jersey’s own anti-book-banning bill, S2421, dubbed the Freedom to Read Act. And she will continue to help build a coalition to support the freedom to read.
“The majority of people across the political spectrum oppose censorship,” she says. “What we need are mainstream voices to stand up and say, ‘This is wrong.’ ”
