What Is a Library?

~ In Partnership with Democracy Forward ~

The fight over banned books in Prattville, Alabama is about more than books. Read between the lines and you'll see a fight over the cornerstone of a democratic society.

Words by Wyatt Williams | Illustrations by Cristiana Couceiro

November 1, 2024

In the spring of 2023, Hannah Mann Rees decided that there were books in the library that she didn’t like. Rees lives in Prattville, Alabama, a city of almost 40,000 on the outskirts of Montgomery. The fact that there were books in her local library that Rees didn’t like was not at all surprising; any person can walk into any library and find some reason to dislike some book on the shelf; such is the design of a library. But simply disliking books in the Autauga-Prattville Public Library was not enough for Rees. She decided to compile a list of six books and ask for them to be removed. The director of the library, Lindsey Milam, agreed to meet with her.

As Rees would later tell Jacob Holmes at the Alabama Political Reporter, “I sat down and shared my concerns with [Milam]. I told her about why this is biblically wrong and listed off various scientific evidence and reading I had done on why these books were completely inappropriate for children, and harmful content.”

Following their conversation, Milam offered Rees a “reconsideration of materials” form. Such a form is common to any library. The American Library Association has established thorough guidelines for librarians to use when working through the process of “selection, deselection or weeding, and reconsideration of library resources.” In the case of Rees’ request, the committee that reviewed her form agreed that one of the books should be reclassified and moved to a different section. The rest stayed on the shelf where they were. For Rees, this was simply not enough.

At a Prattville City Council meeting that May, Rees stood up during open comment to read from a prepared statement about the books she didn’t like: “I have taken it upon myself … to seek the process of the library to have these books removed or properly labeled and placed within parental access. … The library has denied removal and relocation for the first six books that we have submitted, but we have a lot more to submit in the future.” At the end of her comment, she requested a formal meeting to address the matter, clarifying that she had now compiled a list of 80 books that she objected to.

Two members of the council, Blair Gornto and Robert Strichik, responded to Rees with reasonable apprehension. Gornto acknowledged that he, too, was the parent of a young child and could imagine how difficult conversations could arise from the books Rees was talking about, but “I’m not sure we should be in the business of censoring what books are and aren’t in the library.” Strichik echoed him directly: “I don’t think it’s the business of the council to be getting into what book is on a library shelf.” He then directed Rees back to the formal review process with the library board. You may already know where this story is going. For Rees, this was simply not enough. A year and a half later, her campaign is still going on.

• • •

To understand the reasons why Hannah Mann Rees waged a campaign for well over a year to have books removed from her local library, it helps to know a little about the books that moved her so deeply to start her campaign.

They include The Pronoun Book by Cassandra Jules Corrigan, which the publishers call a “fun, engaging and empowering children's book … the perfect introduction on pronouns in relation to gender diversity and identity.” Bye Bye, Binary by Eric Geron: “A joyful baby refuses to conform to the gender binary and instead chooses toys, colors, and clothes that make them happy.” Calvin by JR and Vanessa Ford: “Calvin has always been a boy, even if the world sees him as a girl.” You may already be sensing a theme.

Rees’ complaints to the library board had nothing to do with literary merit, nor even the faintest interest in their qualities or lack thereof as books. Her concern was solely based on ideological discrimination. These books were, as she told the library board, “filled with false ideas about gender” that she disapproves of. Never mind the fact that libraries are designed to be places full of ideas and perspectives, many of which contradict or conflict with one another. Rees has worked to make sure that her library shouldn’t carry the ones she doesn’t like.    

Rees is not alone. Across the country, a movement to have LGBTQ+ books removed from both public schools and public libraries has been gaining traction over the past couple of years. Sometimes these efforts are presented as recategorizing books into adult sections, as campaigns against “obscenity” or “pornography,” but they are unmistakably clear efforts to have LGBTQ+ books removed from library shelves. It is an incremental movement in which one “reconsideration of materials” form escalates higher and higher, ensnaring library boards, city councils, and state governments into complicated, protracted fights over what book gets to sit on a library shelf.

Despite the fact that even a couple of city council members in Alabama on any given night of the week could tell you that local governments shouldn’t “be in the business of censoring what books are and aren’t in the library,” that is exactly what this movement is working to accomplish. In many places, it has. New laws have been passed in Iowa, Idaho, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah restricting access to books in libraries.

In Prattville, as elsewhere, this movement has been devastating to the daily normal operations of the library itself. In the months since Rees first filed her “reconsideration of materials” form, the fight she began has ensnared the local library board, many longtime members of which have resigned. Library Director Milam has resigned and was replaced by Andrew Foster.

Rees and a group supporting her efforts, Clean Up Prattville, attempted to withhold funding from the local library through a “contract for services” scheme with the City Council.

New library director Foster responded in the local press by saying, “The way that the library and the library board is set up, it is meant to be an autonomous entity separate from the city and county; that way we are not going to be influenced by politics or otherwise, but for the library to be the best library we can make it. This contract was forcing a lot of autonomy out of our hands. … It’s a document written by nonlibrarians about how to run a library. It completely invalidated the years of education I have and others on my staff have to do our jobs and serve our community to the best of our ability.”

Foster was later fired, which led to a lawsuit and a settlement out of court.

These events might have happened with little notice if not for a number of other Prattville residents who decided to speak up. The same night that Rees first spoke at the Prattville City Council meeting in May of 2023, another resident chose to stand up and speak after her.

Angie Hayden approached the podium and said, “I’m here because I felt it important that everyone know, including the previous speaker [Hannah Rees], that there is more than one kind of concerned parent in Prattville. As a mother of a gay child … I fear we run the risk of letting a very small, loud minority [run the library] who find offense in the fact that gay people not only exist but no longer have to be relegated to the shadows.”

Across town later that week an advocacy coordinator for the Alabama Library Association, Jessica Hayes, watched a YouTube video of the City Council meeting and decided she needed to reach out to Hayden. She didn’t hear back immediately, but she was convinced they needed to work together.

“That's how green I was at this,” Hayden says. “It didn't even occur to me to reach out to anyone for help. All I was doing was just opening my mouth, really. And it kind of snowballed here with other friends, family members.”

Eventually Hayes and Hayden connected and started attending library board meetings together. An impromptu Facebook group, put together to share updates from these meetings, coalesced into an organization called Read Freely Alabama. As the months went on, Hayes noticed the way that book-banning advocates started reframing their objections to queer books as “obscene” or “pornographic.”

“They tried at that time to pivot away from the previous emphasis on gender identity and all that kind of stuff, realizing that they needed to put up their smokescreen,” Hayes says.

“That’s just their smokescreen,” Hayden agrees. “There's nothing obscene about The Pronoun Book. It's literally about pronouns. There's nothing obscene about a book about a little boy whose mom lets him wear a rainbow wig. That's not obscenity. And the problem is, these groups have been so effective at conflating obscenity with anything that has anything to do with being gay, or challenging their worldview, or really anything that they personally disapprove of, which is, you know, just the very definition of viewpoint discrimination.”

Eventually, in the spring of 2024, Rees, Clean Up Prattville, and other groups supporting book bans used a takeover of the library’s board of trustees to set a policy that allows them to assume the power to determine what books the library should carry.

For Hayes, Hayden, and other members of Read Freely Alabama, this was the breaking point. Seven local residents joined together to file a lawsuit against the Autauga-Prattville Public Library’s board of trustees over the policy. In a jointly written op-ed explaining their case, the plaintiffs said, “These policies unlawfully censor and discriminate against certain types of materials and speech. They violate our First Amendment rights to make sure the government isn’t privileging some perspectives over others. Parents, not politicians, should be the ones deciding what books their children read. And the Alabamians we’ve talked to agree: these unlawful censorship policies have no home in our state.”

Considering the time and resources required to mount such a lawsuit, it might never have happened. But Democracy Forward, a pro bono legal organization focused on the protection of democracy, stepped in to represent the group of seven plaintiffs in this case.

Jessica Morton, senior counsel at Democracy Forward, explained the reasoning for taking on difficult, long fights like these. “If someone enacts unconstitutional policy,” she says, “you have to bring a lawsuit to fight it. You might win, and that's great, but it requires resources and time and effort. It requires plaintiffs being willing to stand up and put their names on something that may not be popular in a community, requires bravery and time. What we see around the country with the proliferation of similar [book banning] enactments are people who feel emboldened. They are saying, ‘Call my bluff.’ Is someone going to stand up? Is anyone going to find a lawyer who's willing to do it? And I think that's why it is important to bring those cases and to say: We see what you're doing. We know this is unconstitutional.”

Over the months since Democracy Forward has taken on the case, Morton has been in close contact with the plaintiffs, talking with Hayden and Hayes, and observing the effort they’ve put in. She says she can see it isn’t easy. “Our clients have spent a great deal of time and effort both on this lawsuit, in the process of being a plaintiff, but more importantly, in advocacy efforts, monitoring what is happening on the ground. This has been a huge part of their lives, and it's really, I think, a public service to their community. And this is uncompensated time for them, right? They're choosing to do this, and it's so brave to be willing to take that on. And I'm really inspired by them. It feels like a real privilege to get to work with them, because they're the people who are most affected by this.”

• • •

In the months since that lawsuit has been filed, the library board of trustees has since backtracked and amended library policy in an attempt to make it more constitutionally viable and less explicitly discriminatory. Sometimes such efforts are described as compromise in a fight like this, trying to find common ground between two strong-willed groups. It may seem to an outside observer that compromise is necessary. Rees and Clean Up Prattville certainly feel passionately about their relationship to the library, just as much as Hayes and Hayden and Read Freely Alabama. Doesn’t it sound reasonable, some say, to just move these books to a different section? What about an age limit for checking them out? Can’t we agree that we all simply want to protect children? Who can argue with that?

Setting aside the so-called reasonableness of those questions, let’s look at a different example for a moment. A little over a decade ago, the Texas Legislature passed a law requiring abortion clinics to meet the strict building standards of hospitals.

According to Reuters, “The state has said the voluminous hospital-grade standards that abortion clinics must meet were necessary to protect patient safety.” Of course, who can argue with patient safety? Why would we not want to protect the safety of any patient admitted for any medical procedure, including abortion?

These standards included, to name only a few: “minimum corridor width, the spacing of beds, the number of parking spaces, elevator size, building ventilation, electrical wiring, plumbing, floor tiling, the size of patient recovery rooms, the presence of hand-washing fixtures in bathrooms and the availability of liquid or foam soap dispensers” as well as “the size and swinging motion of doors, the material for door frames, the need for washable ceilings, the angle that water flows out of drinking fountains, the availability of waiting areas with toilets, public pay phones, potable drinking water and a reception area.”

When you focus on any one of these details – say, the necessity of soap dispensers in a bathroom – it seems entirely reasonable. And who would argue that a medical facility shouldn’t have a waiting room with drinking water and a reception desk? But to regard any of this as reasonable, or worthy of compromise, is to misunderstand the entire point of such legislation. Those building code regulations in Texas were only ever passed to make the work of running an abortion clinic more difficult, expensive, and, in many cases, impossible. They were enacted to close abortion clinics, not to improve them.

Such is the case with Rees, Clean Up Prattville, and any number of other organizations that are holding our libraries hostage across the country today. The patron who decides there are six books that should be removed this week will inevitably have a list of 80 the following week. As we’ve seen in the chaos that has followed, there is no concern for the basic functioning and public service of libraries in this movement. This movement is designed to break libraries, not improve them.

It is possible, though, that this entire problem comes from a misunderstanding. Perhaps the folks who seek to ban books have never considered what the purpose of a library actually is.

If they did, they might know that the lesson our libraries teach us is not one that any single book can explain. To understand a library, you have to take a step back from any individual book and look at the shelf itself, holding dozens of books. Then turn and look around at the room – the dozens of books on that single shelf will disappear into the dozens of shelves, holding thousands of volumes. From this distance, a library shows us that a book is just one idea, one perspective, one life, one work of art on a shelf of so many others. A library doesn’t say any single book is right or wrong. A book on a shelf in a library simply tells: This is one idea among many.

The library is a mirror to a democratic society.

In the same way that we do not only count the votes we agree with, libraries do not only contain books that agree with one another. I could go through any library in this country and point out books I think are wrongheaded or incorrect or simply bad. (Believe me, there are so many!) Yet, that exercise simply misunderstands the purpose of a library.

Were the advocates of book banning to consider any of that, what a library is, they might reconsider their efforts. But they won’t, because they don’t actually care about libraries. Book banning isn’t really about books. It never has been. Again and again in history, we see that books are banned by people who seek to discriminate, to erode the rights of a group, to diminish their place in society. The movement to ban books today is one that seeks to discriminate against LGBTQ+ folks and diminish their place in society.

Among the many people working for Democracy Forward on this movement is Keonnie Igwe, an education research analyst who is tracking the rise of the book banning movement, along with several other anti-democratic movements. She works from home in Atlanta, with a 2-year-old son often at her side, using sophisticated technology that can track discussions of book banning in videos of city council meetings as they’re uploaded online.

When I spoke with her, she described morning after morning waking up to see new cases flagged across the country. “It's overwhelming and extremely frustrating, because it's a lot of people with a lot of power and microphones and money saying things that are wrong and scaring parents and children. When I'm looking at the tracker, I'm looking across the nation, I'm looking at multiple states, I'm looking at, you know, one organization that's in like eight different school districts in a state. I worry about how we can respond to that.”

She said the work that Democracy Forward is doing gives her hope. Democracy Forward puts their resources behind those lawsuits and plaintiffs to make sure they win their case. But the real hope that she has found, she says, is seeing how many people--local people--are willing to stand up and fight.

Wyatt Williams is the author of Springer Mountain: Meditations on Killing and Eating (UNC Press, 2021) and his essays been published by The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Believer, Oxford American, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review, and others. Prior to his teaching career, he worked at a newspaper as a restaurant critic, in a cat furniture factory building scratching posts, and in restaurants and bars washing dishes and waiting tables. His work has been supported by awards, fellowships, and residencies from MacDowell, Hambidge Center, the James Beard Foundation, and anthologized in The Best American Food Writing. 

Cristiana Couceiro is an illustrator and designer, living in Lisbon, Portugal. Her work has been published by The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, Wired, Le Monde and has been recognized by American Illustration, The Society of Publication Designers and Association of Illustrators.