In July 2020, Amy Dodson posted a diversity statement on the Facebook page for the public library system in Douglas County, Nevada, of which she was director.
Like many other statements posted in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, it denounced “all acts of violence, racism, and disregard for human rights,” and also said, “We support #BlackLivesMatter.”
That drew a response from Douglas County Sheriff Dan Coverley, who posted his own statement on the sheriff’s website: “Due to your support of Black Lives Matter and the obvious lack of support or trust with the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office, please do not feel the need to call 911 for help.” He wished her “good luck with disturbances and lewd behavior.”
A community uproar followed. “It picked up a lot of steam on social media,” Dodson told me last week. “The people were very ramped up and angry. It kind of exploded.”
Who were the people angry with?
“They were angry with me.
“People were saying, ‘Defund the library,’ and, ‘She needs to be fired,’” Dodson recalled. “I got death threats, threats to be run out of town, threats of bodily harm to me and my family. It got really ugly really fast.
“And then the library board decided to launch an investigation.”
To her surprise, Dodson said, “They were investigating me. It felt like they were either trying to scare me or get me to leave.”
After she was exonerated by the board investigation, the county launched its own inquiry. “I was exonerated the second time too. It was very clear to the people who did the investigations that I had done absolutely nothing wrong, and that I was doing exactly what public libraries should do.”
But it might not have turned out that way. Dodson credits the favorable outcome to a call from Chicago. “Almost immediately after it happened, I was contacted by Deborah Caldwell-Stone, from the ALA [American Library Association] Office for Intellectual Freedom. She called to tell me about resources available to me, the LeRoy C. Merritt Humanitarian Fund being the most significant.
“I was about to be investigated and thought I would probably be fired. I knew I needed legal representation, but didn’t know how I would pay for it. Money from the Merritt fund enabled me to hire an attorney—Maggie McLetchie, out of Las Vegas—and that made all the difference in the world. She was with me every step of the way, from questions from the public, to the investigation, to dealing with the protest that followed.”
Protest?
“About a week or so after the statement was published, there was a protest in the county seat. It was supposed to be a protest by the local Black Lives Matter faction. It wound up being about 20 people from Black Lives Matter and hundreds of counterprotesters who were armed and angry. They literally ran the Black Lives Matter supporters out of town.”
Caldwell-Stone, an attorney who’s been with the ALA for more than 20 years, is director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom and executive secretary of the Merritt fund, which exists to provide financial assistance to librarians who’ve had problems at work because of discrimination or because they’ve stood up for the freedom to read.
Contrary to the stereotype, our “mild-mannered” local librarians are the frontline defenders of our freedom of speech, Caldwell-Stone says. And they’re facing a major uptick in challenges right now—almost a fourfold increase in calls for censorship of books over the last two years.
“About 350 reports of demands to censor books in school and community libraries was the annual average for over 30 years,” Caldwell-Stone says. “Then, in the fall of 2021 we suddenly started getting four, five, six reports in one day—a flood of demands. And we started seeing videos online of groups like Moms for Liberty appearing at board meetings, demanding censorship of books they said were pornographic. Books like Toni Morrison’s [Pulitzer Prize winner] Beloved, which were being read by high school students for English class—not by five-year-olds.
“In pre-COVID 2019 we received 355 reports of demands to censor,” Caldwell-Stone says. “In 2022 we received 1,269, targeting over 2,500 titles.”
The increase in titles was startling—unlike anything they’d seen before. “These were not parents demanding removal of a single book their child was reading,” Caldwell-Stone notes. “Ninety percent of the 2022 reports were challenges to more than one title, and 40 percent were challenging more than 100 different books at once.
“We didn’t understand it at first, but it became clear that a number of groups were conducting an organized political advocacy campaign.
“In the Chicago area, suburban library and school districts like Downers Grove and Lincolnwood have experienced attacks for hosting programs for LGBTQ+ teens or drag queen story hours or simply for having books on the shelf that reflect the diversity of our community,” Caldwell-Stone says. “A very vocal minority is opposed to having any books available to young people that reflect the fact that there is diversity of gender identity, sexual orientation, or that challenge accepted stories about racism and slavery in the United States. They want books on the shelf to reflect their particular moral, religious, or political beliefs. This is the situation that inspired Illinois secretary of state Alexi Giannoulias to advocate for a bill to fight book banning in the state of Illinois.”
On Monday at the Harold Washington Library, Governor J.B. Pritzker signed that bill (HB2789) into law. It requires libraries seeking state-funded grants to sign the ALA’s seven-point Library Bill of Rights (guaranteeing access and privacy to users and forbidding removal of books because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval) or a similar statement. At the signing, Giannoulias said that while other states will prosecute those who stand up to censorship, Illinois knows that “librarians are heroes.”
As many as 15,000 of these heroes will be in town next week, as the ALA’s 2023 Annual Conference and Exhibition (June 22-27) gets underway at McCormick Place. The public can purchase tickets for admission to the conference “marketplace” only, with nearly 600 exhibits, eight stages, and signing opportunities with authors (a three-day pass is $100 in advance; $125 after June 16). Both Caldwell-Stone and Dodson—who left Nevada for northern Illinois, where she now heads the Fox River Valley Public Library—will be there, and the Intellectual Freedom Office will have a booth with information about its Freedom to Read Foundation, the Merritt fund, and the grassroots campaign coming together at uniteagainstbookbans.org.