Librarians unite to combat book banning, defending intellectual freedom on democracy's frontlines amid unprecedented censorship in Texas, Florida, and beyond.
Book banning is as old as public libraries, but the battlegrounds are freshly polarized and the stakes as high as ever, as witnessed by Oscar®-nominated Kim A. Snyder in her paean to librarians, and the parents and students who flank them, on the frontlines. In Louisiana, an award-winning librarian, heartbroken by the loss of alienated teens in her midst to suicide, defends books featuring queer lives and accurate historical accounts of slavery, while withstanding death threats from her own parish community. In Texas, a zealous parent seeks to criminalize librarians for keeping LGBTQ material on shelves, while her estranged son (who is gay) testifies against her at a school board meeting. In New Jersey, a librarian exposes the dark-money-connected Moms for Liberty as a major book-banning engine; while in Florida, an African American pastor and a public school librarian (a minister’s wife and daughter) join forces to defend libraries as places of historical truth and intellectual freedom.