How marching as the books you love and want to protect may build the pro-democracy movement
Saturday evening in Doyleston, Pennsylvania, a group of residents put on clunky pasteboard outfits each depicting the cover of a different book: Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison, All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson, The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. They were out as part of Banned Books Week, a nationwide campaign to insist on the freedom to read that is pushing back against rising efforts to ban books or limit access to them because they address sexual or racial topics in ways that conservatives want to suppress. In addition to marching, organizers also collected dozens of copies of targeted books and distributed them to Little Free Libraries around the region.
I love it. Those of us who are worried about the future of American democracy have been looking for ways to act tangibly and positively in response to the rising wave of antidemocratic fervor in the country, and these Doyleston marchers may have found a great new tactic. Walking as the books we want to protect is a wonderful way to visibly say what we are for. It takes the conflict over the freedom to read into the public square and it does so in a way that is easy to replicate. And anyone can do it: you don’t have to be a famous author speaking on a panel about banned books, you can just be a reader devoted to what books represent.
On top of that, collecting banned books and spreading them to Little Free Libraries is a great way to reinforce a little-noted piece of civic infrastructure that, like community fridges stocked with free food, embody inclusion and generosity and helps to counter intolerance and closemindedness. The Little Free Library movement was started in 2009 by Todd Bol, a former teacher, who believed that setting up and stewarding mini-libraries could bring neighbors together. His initial goal for the little boxes was 2,150 — the number of Carnegie Libraries in America. Now there are more than 150,000 Little Free Libraries around the world.
It’s not a perfect movement — there are definitely more of these little boxes in and near affluent communities than poor ones. The nonprofit started by Bol tries to address that imbalance by offering grants to stewards in less well-off areas. And we shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Like regular libraries, each Little Free Library can be an organizing hub. That’s what Linda Davis did when she used her Little Free Library to highlight Banned Books Week by adorning it with “Caution” tape and stocking it with the books on the American Library Association’s “most challenged” list.
Other Little Free Librarians added signs reading “Book United Us — Censorship Divides Us.”
But the key move here is not the stocking of Little Free Libraries as a response to regular libraries being pressured to hide or remove controversial books; it’s the organizing and mobilizing that happens when people march together in public. The Doyleston march didn’t come from nowhere; it was organized by a local civic group, Advocates for Inclusive Education, that arose in response to the fierce struggle for control of local school boards that has erupted in recent years over issues ranging from COVID mask mandates to “critical race theory.” It’s high time we paid more attention to these kinds of efforts. And walking through the streets of your town is important: Doing so can attract new people to the cause in a way that sitting at home and donating money cannot. So at a time when things look dark and may be getting darker, I’m hoping that this kind of local action may spread.