In Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, protagonist Guy Montag revolts against his profession of incinerating banned books and the homes of their readers. His intellectual awakening sparks a series of events in which authorities scorch his home, robotic hounds hunt him, and his world is burned.
It’s an apt allusion with which filmmaker Kim Snyder begins and ends her documentary The Librarians, which premiered at the South by Southwest festival earlier this month. At a moment when our institutions of learning seem to be engulfed in flames, incited by right-wing witch hunts of diversity, equity, and inclusion, The Librarians reminds us how we got here and reveals, perhaps, how we can get out.
The documentary follows the librarians at the center of right-wing culture war attacks, starting from October 2021, when then-Texas state Representative Matt Krause launched an inquiry into school districts over their possession of books relating to race and sexuality. The 16-page list of 850 books included the children’s picture book And Tango Makes Three, a story of two male penguins who care for an egg together, and other award-winning children’s books. A couple of weeks later, Governor Greg Abbott doubled down on Krause’s reactionary crusade and directed the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, the Texas Education Agency, and the State Board of Education to clear books with “pornographic” content off library shelves. The Texas librarians featured in the film soon find themselves watching crates of books being carted away, their email accounts littered with death threats from ultra-right activists.
The librarians experience an awakening upon realizing they are not alone. From Texas to Florida, Louisiana, and New Jersey, the film reveals how librarians across the country have become victims of a crisis manufactured by national organizations bent on infiltrating and disrupting local school boards.
These librarians are the heroes of the film. They were “not necessarily supposed to be seen and felt,” said Tarrant County librarian Audrey Wilson, but they transform into the Guy Montags of our own dystopian society, risking safety and livelihood to speak up for First Amendment rights, intellectual freedom, and, most of all, for the students who tell them “books have saved them.” This includes Amanda Jones, who was recognized as both the Louisiana and national Librarian of the Year before she started speaking up against book bans. Even after facing death threats, Jones tells library board members that she has “already lost 12 students after they were ostracized because they were made to feel less than.” She vows, “I am not going to be complicit in the death of children.”
In Llano County, Suzette Baker lost her job at her library when she refused to remove targeted books about race in America. And even in the blue state of New Jersey, Hunterdon County school librarian Martha Hickson fights attacks for providing LGBTQ+ young adult novels to teens. Snyder also interviews parents, such as Courtney Gore, who repudiates the right-wing platform on which she won a Granbury ISD board seat, after she discovered no evidence students were being indoctrinated. Gore tells Snyder that “By talking, that’s how I have to protect myself” from the backlash. “I have to be vocal, and when I’m not that’s when they get the power.”
Interweaving black-and-white broadcast news and film clips, Snyder reminds viewers that it wasn’t always this way, nor will it always remain so. The Nazis’ book burnings didn’t last forever. U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s ostensibly anti-Communist persecutions came to an end as well. For centuries, librarians have been respected stewards of knowledge, and they are still fighting as guardians of intellectual freedom. Hickson helped pass the Freedom to Read Act in New Jersey. Baker helped keep the Llano County library open. And Jones chronicles her story in a book that inspires other librarians to fight back.
The Librarians show us that hope can still be found inside this inferno because in the unlikeliest of places—the conservative citadels of Tarrant County, of Clay County, Florida, and the tiny parish of Livingston, Louisiana—there are more Guy Montags than we are led to believe.
