The Librarians and the Censorship of the Black Child

It took me a while to sit and view “The Librarians”, and what I’d been warned about was true: we aren’t there.

The movie opens with reactions to banning from several white women librarians and then narrows to focus on the contention in Texas, Florida, New Jersey, and Louisiana. Most significantly, the movie ends by illuminating the overall context for book banning, how states are infiltrated with outside forces to control what people read and ultimately how they think. Censorship works to remove ideologies and representations from the public and it doing so, it delivers a message about the validity and the humanity of those represented in the stories. It’s not just about the books, it never is. Books featuring the lived experiences of LGTBQIA+ and BIPOC people are the majority of what’s being censored, and I see this documentary replicating that same practice.

My take on censorship goes back to the mid 19^th century when BIPOC children were grossly misrepresented in books. While there was also little to no presence of Latine, Indigenous, or Asian Americans in books at that time, I’m going to center this discussion on African Americans because at that time, they were the largest and most active minoritized group in the United States. Seldom were Black people included in books because it was assumed they were unkept, lazy, and lacked the capacity to of read or write. Images that did exist at that time were deplorable.

In 1967 librarians Augusta Baker and Charlemae Hill Rollins worked to fight against the negative representation of Black children by creating a book list, We Build Together: A Reader’s Guide to Negro Life and Literature for Elementary and High School Use, which contained titles of books by Black American authors that more accurately depicted  Black people.

Blacks continued to be ignored by the Newbery, Caldecott and other ALA Youth Media Awards. To create space for the outstanding contributions of Black creators, Black librarians Mabel McKissick and Glyndon Geer worked to establish the Coretta Scott King Book Awards in 1969.

The 60s, the era of the Civil Rights movement, saw calls for better representation in books for youth and the call was met and implemented through the 1970s. Resistance began mid-decade with a surge in book bans focusing on moral and social issues rather than profanity and obscenity. These actions were a direct response to work by the Council on Interracial Books for Children, a group several librarians joined to improve the quality of representation in books. Challenged titles included Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas; A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich by Alice Childress; and Best Short Stories by Negro Writers edited by Langston Hughes. The books were labeled “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semetic and just plain filthy.”

The quantity and quality of this representation seemed to regress and then flatline until the early aughts when both readers and librarians began to voice concerns using platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs… and there was significant movement once again.

I pause to say all of this growth and change should to be backdropped with both the political and social histories of the times but, I’m not writing a book here, just a blog post. So, I’d suggest to contextualize the ebb and flow of the censoring of Black children in books, you refer to the timelines I’ve created. You might also consult the work of scholar Dr. Emily Knox whose primary area of research is intellectual freedom.

Scholars, including librarian Tiffeni Fontno, became quite wary in the early 2020s when the Republican led legislature began a movement to ban critical race theory (CRT), an over-arching concept that resides in higher ed. These academics saw CRT as low lying fruit for whatever it was planned to come next. That ‘next’ was attacks on youth literature, librarians and educators, and literacy.

The literature in question is predominantly from BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ communities, those who seem to unsettle the all white world of children’s literature. Banning them alleviates their presence on bookshelves, their lives from our – all of our – reading pleasure and thus deems these lives as irrelevant. It reduces the interest of children in the challenged communities to want to read; to be literate. Book bans are one of the most irresponsible things that happen to our children because of the ways it limits their social and intellectual development.

BIPOC librarians in states from Florida to Louisiana, and New Jersey to Texas know this, and they fight for the youth in their communities, often against the silence of their administrators. They rally against school and library administrators, local politicians, invisible groups of white moms and others who want to eliminate intellectual freedom. These librarians know quite well the perpetual censorship of the Black child and they understand the overarching consequences of such actions. While Black librarians weren’t present in this movie, it’s important to know this fight isn’t as exclusive as it was portrayed. Black librarians need to be out front telling the stories that are about them. This fight is one that will only be won if we remember that the oppressive forces of fascism are our enemy and that they will work to divide us so that they can alleviate the power of marginalized people. Allyship is hard, but necessary. We have to recognize our professionalism and the work that we all do.

Do watch the movie, question whose voices are missing and why. How should they be brought out of the dark and made visible? Focus on the parts of the movie that explain the overarching politics of censorship, and consider what might be coming next. The government has banned an entire vocabulary related to race, racism, gender, sexuality, climate change from its documents and is removing historical markers across the country.  A mention of Palestine or Gaza is always done with a sense of courage, regardless how resourceful one may think they are. Media sources have been underfunded and BIPOC professionals in higher education and mass media are being eliminated from their positions. What fears will be attached to voting in the coming election, a true right and privilege in this country, and one of the few things that can save us?

So, what about the movie? It falls short in its lack of inclusion. While it acknowledges the banning of BIPOC stories in our libraries, it has ignored the voices of BIPOC Black librarians. I know it’s not easy for everyone to talk about race, I know too many of us are so comfortable in our own little worlds that we unconsciously forget about the other. That threatens our collective survival and it endangers our youth. We – you and I – are the ones who can accept the discomfort of growth. A more inclusive story pushes growth by bringing light on elements we haven’t even considered. It strengthens us.

Be well and do good.

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