Audrey Wilson-Youngblood never expected to be in the vanguard of the anti-book-banning movement in America.
“That’s a significant shift in the profession,” said Wilson-Youngblood, a librarian in Texas. “[Librarians] tend to be in the background; we want to help our communities, but we don’t necessarily want to be out front taking the credit. We don’t have any choice now. It’s beyond the survival, I believe, of our profession, and it is to the survival of our democracy.”
She is one of the librarians fighting for open access to information for her community and around the country, and one of the subjects of a new documentary, “The Librarians.”
Director Kim Snyder said she started looking into the subject of book bans back in the fall of 2021 after learning about former Texas state Sen. Matt Krause’s list targeting 850 books and about a group called the Texas FReadom Fighters. She and her team began spending more time on the ground in Texas meeting with librarians, some of whom had been verbally harassed, threatened with physical violence or even fired for doing their jobs.
As Snyder gathered material for the film, she said attending community meetings in these small towns in Texas was eye-opening.
“I would come back to New York City where I reside and say, ‘Boy, if you want to know about what’s happening in America right now, you really should go to a school board meeting in the heartland,’” Snyder said.
It was these gatherings that convinced Snyder to expand the documentary from just a Texas-centric story to one including librarians working in other parts of the country, like Florida, Louisiana and New Jersey. And that showed Snyder that this book-banning effort was much more organized than she initially thought, with groups like Moms for Liberty pushing for bans and supporting pro-book-banning candidates for local office.
The film uses archival footage from educational videos, movies and history to illustrate lighthearted and chilling moments.
“I wanted ... to remind people of the archetypal image we all, I think, grew up having of our beloved librarians in small-town America,” Snyder said. “And to juxtapose that to this idea of criminalizing them simply for distributing books and doing the job that they’re trained in. I really wanted to pay homage to that injustice and just how incredulous that was.”
Although the film centers on book bans today, the archival footage also includes other times when the United States and other countries have banned books, including clips paralleling the book-burning campaigns of Nazi Germany with a recent book-burning in Tennessee.
Although the themes of “The Librarians” are heavy, Snyder says she hopes the film inspires audiences, and other librarians, to join the fight against book bans. Snyder says since the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, audiences around the country and in Europe have said they feel emboldened to take action in their own communities — a notion Wilson-Youngblood echoes in her hopes for people who see the documentary.
“I want them to become involved in whatever sphere of their community they feel that they can have an impact,” Wilson-Youngblood said. “And use your public library card! The number-one way to ensure our public libraries survive is if our public uses them. Get to know your local librarians, and just ask them, ‘What do you need, and how are you, and what can I do for you?’”
“The Librarians” is screening later this month at the Globe Docs film festival and in select theaters in the United States and Europe. Click here for more information.
Guests
- Kim Snyder, award-winning and Oscar-nominated director of “The Librarians”
- Audrey Wilson-Youngblood, librarian in Texas
