Librarians to the Defense: Groupsform to fight a conservative-led attack on libraries'efforts to promote social justice.

• Author: Bader, Eleanor J.

Montana librarian Jeannie Ferriss knew she'd found a mission when she spoke about the Holocaust to a group of young adults who had never heard of it before. "They thought I was making it up," the Whitehall Community Library staffer tells me in a telephone interview.

Stunned by this revelation, in 2019 Ferriss launched a library-sponsored Holocaust book discussion group that remains active. Then, in September, the library kicked off a second initiative, a Holocaust study program for twenty fourteen-to-seventeen-year-old students and ten adults. The program will include visits to an exhibition on loan from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., lectures by two local rabbis, and discussions with both a Holocaust survivor and a former soldier who helped liberate the concentration camps. A Rescuer/Survivor fair will also be organized to educate Whitehall's 1,200 residents about the atrocities committed by Hitler's regime.

The goal, Ferriss says, is "to get people to walk away knowing what can happen when hate goes unchecked."

The tiny Whitehall Community Library is not unique in offering services that go far beyond what's on the shelves. Indeed, most of the nation's more than 9,000 public libraries see themselves as community hubs--inclusive, safe, and welcoming spaces for the exchange of ideas and pursuit of information.

Among other things, public libraries across the country serve as summer meal sites for hungry kids and many loan out films, music, and technical equipment in addition to books and periodicals. Computers and WiFi are available to those who lack access, whether to search for a job or to search for the answer to a nagging concern.

In addition, some librarians and library staff are advancing more explicitly political--and often progressive--ideas, from trans rights, to prison abolition, to racial solidarity and anti-racist messaging through displays, lectures, reading programs, and discussion groups.

They're also forming groups for interpersonal support and professional development.

The Joint Council of Librarians of Color, for example, was formed in 2015 to promote "librarianship within communities of color" and support literacy and the preservation of history and cultural heritage through conferences and gatherings.

Others are mobilizing to protect against the distortion of history. Brooklyn's Interference Archive collects materials, from buttons to pamphlets to leaflets, from progressive efforts. The New York University-based Tamiment Library is a repository of U.S. labor history, while the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, in Los Angeles County, has amassed more than 90,000 posters and prints. The Lesbian Herstory Archives, in New York City, holds the world's largest collection of materials...