The Librarians, Our Unlikely Heroes

In a documentary airing soon on PBS, we meet people who risked their jobs and their safety to resist the wave of reactionary book-burners.

When Americans of the future look back on this disgraceful period in our national history — assuming the republic survives — they will need artifacts from our time to help them understand the villains and the unlikely heroes who resisted the slide into fascism. The Librarians, a 2025 documentary directed by the Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Kim Snyder and airing beginning Feb. 9 on PBS, may well be one of those period pieces they turn to make sense of this upside-down moment.

Through the eyes of nine school librarians, this surprisingly gripping documentary chronicles the wave of book censorship across the United States to its contemporary swell in right-wing and Christian nationalist organizations such as Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education. It might just convince you that, in our moment of peril, it was the librarians of our nation’s public schools who helped save the day. At the very least, it will make you marvel at the courage and tenacity of a diverse group of ordinary, not very political people whose line of work is generally imagined to involve nothing more dramatic than an overdue book. Like so many of the people of Minneapolis in recent days, when the chips were down, the librarians stood up for what is right.

Starting in 2021, an especially noxious form of the culture war virus erupted in public school districts across the country. Parents stormed school board meetings with lurid claims that, thanks to “woke” liberals, school libraries were stocked with pornography intended to groom young children for exploitation and abuse. Books were banned and, metaphors be damned, sometimes burned. Among the offending titles were a graphic adaptation of the diary of Anne Frank (partial nudity of Greek statues), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaids Tale (for describing patriarchy in a future theocracy), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (allegedly written to make white children feel bad about themselves), a history of the KKK, and a long list of others that touch on sex education or LGBTQ themes. The book-banners, evidently as unfamiliar with practices involved in curating books as they are with their contents, soon began to blame the school librarians for plotting to pervert the nation’s children.

In The Librarians, we meet librarians, one after another, who risked their jobs and even their personal safety to resist the wave of reactionary book-burners. Many librarians were fired. We meet Courtney Gore, who received multiple threats after doing some research and discovering that the pornography and “obscene” content she had previously warned other parents about was not, in fact, being taught in schools. We meet Suzette Baker, a former U.S. veteran who lost her job, and Julie Miller, who received death threats. We meet Amanda Jones, the 2021 National School Librarian of the Year, who wrote a book, That Librarian, detailing her experiences as a target of right-wing conspiracism and hate. Some of the librarians’ voices are disguised and their faces hidden.

We know that they are fighting for principle, but, as these librarians tell us, they are fighting for the kids, too. “To attempt to take Black history and take a lot of our stories away from children is one of the most evil things I think a person can do,” says the Rev. Jeffrey Dove, who pastors the St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church in Clay County, Fla.

One of the film’s poignant sequences shows us the extraordinary tale of Weston Brown and his mother, Monica Brown. When Weston, who was homeschooled with his eight siblings, came out as gay, his family disowned him and he left town. His mother campaigns to ban books that she regards as gay pornography from the school. In a wrenching scene, Weston returns to his hometown after a four-year absence to testify against the book bans, while his mother, still evidently refusing to acknowledge his humanity, spoke in favor the ban.

The most important aspect of this film is that it shows us the story behind the story. The sudden eruption of conservative outrage in the nation’s school districts was not the spontaneous upwelling of concerned parents that it pretended to be. It was organized and funded at a national level for thoroughly political purposes. Moms for Liberty, the group behind much of the book-banning, isn’t a group of reactionary PTO moms. It is a well-funded front group for an alliance of demagogues, billionaires, and theocrats who want to take down public education and replace it with publicly funded, privately managed, highly profitable operations dedicated to religious and right-wing indoctrination.

“Is the agenda to gain power and money? Or is it to make our country a Christian theocracy?” asks one librarian, whose appearance is hidden in shadow, at the film’s most politically profound moment. “Or are they one and the same?” A good question indeed.

What makes the film special, though, is not its characterization of the villains but what it reveals about the heroes. In a way that only film can do, it shows us just how ordinary — in a good way — these librarians are. These people are not culture warriors. They are not partisan political actors. They represent a diversity of religious perspectives. They are army vets, pastors’ wives and daughters, red-state bibliophiles. They absolutely are not purveyors of child pornography. They are just as averse to social conflict as you would expect from a group that took up a line of work where people are supposed to use their indoor voices and spend most of their time in silence.

Over and over again in the film, these women remind us that they are trained professionals, that they have studied library science, and that they are committed to using these skills to serve their communities. They are a salutary reminder that the nation still has an immense reservoir of people just like this, trained not in some crazed ideology but in the work of a modern, reasonable, society dedicated to the idea that all people are equal.

If our country does manage to save itself, it will be because people just like these librarians say enough is enough. We the people have a right to read what we want, and no billionaire or self-appointed prophet will take that right from us. “Please do some research as to our Founding Fathers. Their biggest fear was that we become a theocracy,” says Marie Masferrer, a librarian from Manatee County, Fla., who is herself a devout Catholic. “I see this as the civil rights fight of our time.” Watch this film: You will never think of a school librarian in the same way again.

Katherine Stewart is an award-winning author and journalist who has covered politics, religion, and the rise of the anti-democratic movement, for over 17 years. Her New York Times bestselling book Money, Lies, and God is on Foreign Affairs’s list of Best Books 2025.

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