That librarian, p.1
That Librarian, page 1
Praise for That Librarian
“Book bans are spot fires breaking out all across the country, and bold-faced lies alleging prurient sexual content in children’s literature are the accelerant. Lucky for us, debut author Amanda Jones has embraced the role of town bellringer, warning our national village of impending disaster and calling for the bucket brigade to fight these fires and douse these flames.
With book challenges in America multiplying at a dizzying rate, That Librarian is not only timely, but essential. Jones, a veteran classroom teacher and award-winning librarian, is uniquely suited to separate fact from fiction when it comes to what age-appropriate books are actually on school and public library shelves accessible to children and young adults, titles designed to help—not harm—the youngest library patrons. Here, she breaks down the politics behind the bans, and the library policies already in place to protect readers of all ages.
As an author who has devoted 45+ years to crafting such titles, it heartens me to know that Amanda Jones is fighting to keep my picture books, poetry, middle grade, and teen novels on the shelves where young readers who want or need my stories can find them.
Book banners really poked the proverbial bear when they came after Jones for daring to speak out against censorship at a public library board meeting in her Louisiana hometown. The personal and public smear campaigns and death threats that followed—and that persist—have been brutal. But like most librarians, Jones has turned out to be a badass, and this is a memoir of grit and grace. This is a rallying cry for the protection of intellectual freedom. And about that much needed bucket brigade: Tag! We’re it.”
—Nikki Grimes, author of the frequently banned memoir in verse Ordinary Hazards
“As an author whose novels have been banned in hundreds of school districts after falsely being cited for explicit content, I have been waiting for a book like this one. We writers are well aware that the foot soldiers in this spreading civil war are librarians, who are threatened personally and profoundly by those who call for widespread book bans. Amanda Jones clearly outlines how we got here, who’s leading this false charge against qualified educators, media specialists, and authors—and most importantly, she explores the steps we all must take to make the voice of truth and reason louder than their caterwauling.”
—Jodi Picoult, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“Deeply important and compelling, this book about one heroic librarian’s fight against book bans will help all of us who care about books and our freedom to read.”
—Ellen Oh, author and CEO of We Need Diverse Books
“Read this absorbing book to understand the conspiracy-driven war on public education—from inside the schoolhouse library. Amanda Jones takes us into the trenches and offers deft portraits of the people and organizations waging this war on democracy—as well as the heroes standing up for freedom and education.”
—Katherine Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers and Money, Lies, and God
To Jason and Josie—because they are my everything
To Judy Blume and Michelle Obama (in the unlikely event that they read my book)
To my parents (in the likely event that they would disown me if I dedicated this to Judy and Michelle but left them out)
For the librarians. Invictus.
CONTENTS
1: Liars and Buzzards and Trolls, Oh My
2: How We Got Here
3: Here, There, Everywhere
4: WWJD: What Would Judy Do?
5: (Wo)man in the Mirror
6: Hell Hath No Fury Like a Librarian Scorned
7: The Battle Begins: Initial Court Proceedings
8: Are You There Michelle? It’s Me, Amanda: It’s Hard to Go High When the Haters Go So Low
9: The Mob Song
10: Some People Are Ride or Die. Some People Aren’t.
11: The Longevity of Hate
12: Think of the Children
13: It’s Raining Sin, Hallelujah
14: It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times
15: What You Can Do in Your Own Community
16: Don’t Let Anyone Dull Your Sparkle
My July 19, 2022, Speech to the Livingston Parish Library Board of Control
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
A Note on the Author
Chapter 1
Liars and Buzzards and Trolls, Oh My
Amanda, you are indoctrinating our children with perversion + pedophilia grooming. Your evil agenda is getting print + national coverage. Congrats. Continue with your LGBT agenda on our children cause we gunna put ur fat evil commie PEDO azz in the dirt very soon bitch. You can’t hide. We know where you work + live.… you have a LARGE target on your back. Click, click … see you soon …
[DEATH THREAT RECEIVED ON AUGUST 14, 2022, SUBJECT LINE: ALPHABET AGENDA]
When I opened this email on August 14, 2022, my hands started to shake and I immediately began gasping for breath. The absurdness of it also crossed my mind, and I had the fleeting thought that my preteen students could write better emails than this. But there is nothing funny about receiving a threat on your life. I began again to wonder what possessed someone to send another human being such an email. Sadly, I’d been spending a large portion of the previous weeks pondering why random strangers go online to put down, troll, threaten, and defame people who they’ve never met. Do they wake up and think to themselves, “I wonder who I can ruin today to make myself feel better to fill the hole in my life?” I believe that anyone who does this kind of thing suffers from some type of trauma, or that something elemental is missing from their lives.
I am a middle school librarian in a small town called Watson in the southern Louisiana parish of Livingston. I have lived here all my life and have never thought of leaving. I bought the house next door to my childhood home and am lucky to have my parents as my closest neighbors. Watson sits some twenty miles southeast of Baton Rouge on what folks consider part of the Delta. The land is flat and the sky is big and in the summer the air is like a steaming wet blanket. The town isn’t much to look at, and in the flood of 2016 much of it was leveled. Now, that was something. But generally, Watson is a place with few surprises, and that’s a lot of what I love about it. Life has its regular rhythms, and I love those rhythms, love my job, my friends, my family. I take great satisfaction in being a school librarian, which puts me in the heart of the community, all the kids and their families and the rituals of the calendar year. I still feel like Livingston Parish is a good place, but I was not prepared for the surprise it threw at me.
I never imagined that I would receive an email in which someone writes “we gunna put ur fat evil PEDO azz in the dirt.” It put chills down my back and scared me to the depths of my being. Reading a death threat—my death threat—has left me changed. I am scared to open emails from unknown senders. Seeing notifications on social media does not feel the way it used to. The email I opened did not feel anonymous. It felt personal. To mention that they knew where I worked added another layer of fear. The thought that someone might harm a child while coming to attack me made my heart race. Holding my phone in my trembling hand, I felt physically jolted and woozy. I thought I was having a heart attack. I now know it was a panic attack. I think about the words “click … click … see you soon” often. Too often. And I wonder if I am going to be attacked every time I step outside my home.
You might be asking yourself, “Why did Amanda receive this email? Surely, she did something heinous?” My parents asked the same question. My huge crime was speaking out against censorship at my local public library board meeting on Tuesday, July 19, 2022. In retrospect, it was a pretty tame statement, compared with the reaction it elicited.
On the night I spoke up at the library meeting, I was one of almost thirty speakers who registered their concerns about possible censorship and book banning. The meeting was held at Livingston Public Library, not my middle school library. I went as a citizen. The seven-member library board was seated up front, and there was a good crowd of locals. Two men, one from out of town and one local, also attended the meeting, and they are at the root of the attack on me. After I dared to speak, and after the others dared to speak, these two men zeroed in on yours truly. It took a few days, four to be precise, but on that fourth day, a Saturday, I opened social media to a barrage of hate.
I am here to tell you that being on the receiving end of an online hate campaign absolutely sucks. I do not recommend it. Two thumbs down. Zero out of five stars.
The hate started with two posts on social media that were shared hundreds of times. Imagine getting up on a Saturday morning, thinking about all the plans you have with your family for the day, but instead you wake to a full-fledged campaign created to discredit you and your years of service to your community. I did what I normally do during the summer off from my job as an educator: wake up a bit late, prop myself up on my pillow, and open social media to see what everyone is up to. I take a quick look at Facebook and Twitter before getting a cup of coffee and reading the newspaper at the kitchen table. I usually join my husband and child, and we hang out or watch an episode of some half-hour sitcom. Not that morning. That day I stayed in bed crying hysterically, glued to my phone as two men got busy attempting to damage my reputation.
The first post was made on Facebook by a local group called Citizens for a New Louisiana, a group that has wreaked havoc on public libraries across Louisiana. Citizens is led by Executive Director Michael Luns ford. I often think of him as a cartoon villain. Think Boris from Rocky and Bullwinkle, Gargamel from The Smurfs, or a villain from some current cartoon that I don’t watch—someone with no redeeming qualities and instantly dislikable. Thinking of Michael Lunsford as a cartoon villain may be a coping mechanism because what he does is so much more serious than anything you or I would see on a Saturday morning show. Citizens is a dark-money nonprofit group in Louisiana whose director often posts the usual conspiracy theories about “the jab,” hate rhetoric toward the LGBTQIA+ community, and your typical far-right nonsense. But it’s nonsense that is believed by a lot of people. They published my name and said that I was fighting hard to “keep sexually erotic and pornographic materials in the kid’s section” of our public library. They identified me as a school librarian and questioned what kind of nefarious influence I had over six-year-olds. They posted a picture of me with a target around my head. According to them, it’s just a circle, but who are they kidding? Post after post from them left me dumbfounded. How could anyone come to that conclusion from my statement opposing censorship? Sexually erotic and pornographic material in the kids’ section?! Six-year-olds?! What if people actually believed this nonsense?
I started to read the comments to the posts. Maybe I shouldn’t have. But I needed to know if these lies were being believed. I found complete strangers were suddenly experts on what type of person I was and what I had said at the meeting. People were making so many assumptions about me. Everyone in the comments had an opinion, and they were in agreement. According to them, I was some type of deranged miscreant who needed to be kept away from children. I have devoted twenty-two years of my life to the children of our community. So much time outside regular work hours, time that often came at my family’s expense. At that moment those twenty-two years didn’t seem to matter to anyone, including me. Tears began rolling down my face. You see, the people commenting weren’t just strangers. They were people I knew. People I grew up with. The hurt was almost more than I could bear that morning.
When I first saw the posts, I ran into the living room to show my husband. Jason, a man who is rarely on social media, had already seen them. He happened to stumble on them on his own that morning because of how quickly the posts traveled. And that meant more people were seeing them than I first realized. As I stood before my husband, my gut reaction was to be embarrassed for him to see them. It might have been irrational for me to be embarrassed, but I was. I had done nothing wrong. Jason knows me. He knows what I stand for and has always been supportive, but I did somehow feel those feelings. Discussing the posts out loud made them real, and I didn’t want them to be real. I wanted them to disappear. I wanted to act like it wasn’t happening. I wanted the posts to go away.
We both just stared at our phones in disbelief. I didn’t know what to say to the man that I had been with for twenty-three years. This wasn’t like anything we had faced before. What do you say when someone is posting lies about you online? We both knew they weren’t true, but that didn’t make it any less painful. Jason has thicker skin than I do, and he told me to ignore it. My eyes narrowed and I stared at him. How do you ignore something like this?
I looked at him incredulously, and he realized that that was not the thing he should have said. I feel bad now for narrowing my eyes and giving him the stare down. In all honesty, I don’t think there was anything he could have said or done to make me feel better, but he did try. He made a joke about the imbeciles posting comments. He told me nobody would believe the lies. He seemed to not understand the full depth of my distress. I think that he, too, was just as confused about what was happening, but his confusion turned the corner to anger when I pointed out to him that it didn’t matter if it wasn’t true. I work with children, and there was a direct threat to my job by these men posting these lies. The pain got to be too much. I looked at him with tears in my eyes, chin trembling as I tried to hold it together, and then I retreated into the dark bedroom and shut the door. I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.
* * *
Right after seeing the post by Citizens for a New Louisiana, someone texted me about another post on Facebook. I received so many texts that morning that I don’t remember who it was that sent the first text. The Facebook post was done by a local named Ryan Thames. Ryan is the type of average middle-aged white guy I like to refer to as a keyboard warrior. He is a self-professed “asshole” who in the same breath will tell you what a Christian family man he is and then turn around and mock someone whom he finds “less than.” Who am I kidding? Ryan doesn’t actually say these things to anyone’s face. He hides behind his keyboard. He has for years.
Ryan posted a meme on this Facebook page he had created that he apparently found quite hilarious. He stole a picture from my professional website and added the words, “After advocating teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds, I had to change my name on Facebook. Amanda McKee Jones now identifies as Amanda Beth.” He also identified my school and mocked the fact that I had won librarian of the year. You only mock people who have awards when you have no real accomplishments of your own.
Again I was flabbergasted. I knew what I had said that night at the library board meeting. At no point did I speak about anal sex. I certainly didn’t advocate teaching children about it at the library or at my school. Where were these lies coming from? What were they rooted in? It made no sense to me then. In the year since, I have spent countless hours looking at where this nonsense is happening to librarians across the country. Sadly, my experience is by no means unique.
The worst part was it wasn’t just him. Many of our community members—people I knew—shared his post. I was upset at the post and the comments, but I was devastated that people believed his lies. I had worked hard to build a reputation as a dedicated educator to my students. Parents of former students who knew me as a professional, who had once talked and joked around with me on field trips and school events, were now helping to spread the lies by sharing the posts. One parent in particular whose child I had helped with getting services for a learning disability was especially vicious. When I taught her child, she told me I was the best teacher they’d ever had. Now I was a person she wouldn’t want around her child. The sense of betrayal was overwhelming. When you live in a small, two-red-light town like I do, everyone knows everyone. People whom I thought knew me, whom I had known since childhood, were suddenly turning on me.
To top it off, Ryan was a moderator of our local Facebook rants page, which at the time had forty-three thousand members. In case you aren’t lucky enough to have a local community Facebook rants page, let me explain. This is a Facebook group where people in the community can share things they love or air their grievances. When you hear “airing of grievances,” you might think of the famous Seinfeld Festivus episode. This Facebook page isn’t that. Instead, it’s all the grievances with none of the humor. Want to express your horror at the baked potato lunch served in the school cafeteria? Rant about it. Want to share the best places to buy horse dewormer because you think it cures COVID? Rave about it. Want to spread lies that the local school librarian advocates giving pornography to children? We have the group for you! Ryan Thames’s meme was shared to that page. The moderators turned off any ability I had to comment in that group, not that I would have, and blocked me from even viewing the post and comments. Then the dogpile really commenced.
At first I laughed, because grown adults weren’t seriously posting things like that about me, were they? It was a hollow laugh that I tend to do when I’m angry, a defense mechanism. My “you’ve got to be effing kidding me” laugh. A laugh that’s filled with anger and sadness, with disbelief, not mirth. Did adult human beings really think that it was okay to completely make up lies about me and post them on social media? But the proof shone brightly on my phone’s screen in the dark of my curtains-drawn bedroom. I became petrified that I would lose my job. Ryan’s claims that I had changed my name for advocating the teaching of anal sex were blatantly false, but I’d seen so many lies get traction in the blink of an eye. Of course I would fear for my future years as an educator.
