Missouri lawmakers are trying to defund public libraries. What can you do about it?
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If you’ve been watching the news, you know it’s been a tough week for libraries and librarians, as book bans, censorship, and right-wing efforts continue to gain traction across the country.
One important story we’re tracking is coming out of Missouri, where this week, Missouri lawmakers stripped all funding for public libraries from the proposed state budget.
Lawmakers in the House of the Missouri state legislature have approved a budget that strips all funding from public libraries, and that proposed budget now goes to the Senate. Why?
Because librarians in the state have been getting organized and fighting back against censorship efforts.
Republican House Budget Chairman Cody Smith last week cut the roughly $4.5 million in public library funding from the budget, citing a lawsuit by two library groups to overturn a new Missouri law that bans sexually explicit material in school libraries.
The ACLU, the Missouri Association of School Librarians, and the Missouri Library Association in February asked the Circuit Court in Kansas City to find the law unconstitutional or clarify how and when it applies.
Smith has said the state shouldn’t subsidize the lawsuit by giving public libraries money.1
Despite the dubious constitutionality of this effort (state funding for libraries is guaranteed in the Missouri Constitution) and the outright lie that state funding is subsidizing the lawsuit (it just isn’t), this effort from right-wing lawmakers is an acceleration in the wave of efforts we’ve seen nationwide to restrict access, ban books, and defund and destabilize public libraries.
From Intellectual Freedom Workshops to Book Bans
Librarians in Missouri have seen the writing on the wall. Beginning eight years ago, Colleen Norman and other Missouri librarians developed a workshop and led efforts to train library workers on how to handle book challenges, based on the principles of intellectual freedom.
“We were asking frontline library workers to have these conversations, and we hadn’t talked to them about what to say,” said Norman, who is also the former chair of the Missouri Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee. “We created this training that walks through what intellectual freedom is and what it means,” she said, “and then we talk about how to have a conversation when someone comes in with a concern.”2
The training worked locally, and it became wildly popular, expanding rapidly through Norman’s own library district to a statewide offering at the Missouri Library Association’s annual meeting.
But no matter how effective and popular and widespread that training was, it couldn’t compete with right-wing efforts. In 2022, Missouri passed a state law banning “explicit sexual” images in school materials, including library books. As a result, libraries across the state pulled hundreds of titles off shelves.
Many of those books were written by or about minority or LGBTQ individuals, but also include many graphic novels, human anatomy books and Holocaust history books. The law has exceptions for art, anthropology and health, but librarians said they didn’t know where to draw the line.3
The ACLU, filing on behalf of the Missouri Association of School Librarians and the Missouri Library Association, has asked the circuit court in Kansas City to find the law unconstitutional, and librarians are continuing to push back against this unjust law.
This Attack on Public Libraries Is Just Getting Started
This lawsuit is the challenge that Missouri lawmakers cited when they voted this week to strip funding from public libraries, presenting a false claim that state money was funding the effort.
In response, the Missouri Library Association reiterated that the ACLU was handling the case pro bono, and that no state funding was or had been involved in the effort.
But we all know that this isn’t about the facts. Spurious concerns about the lawsuit are a smokescreen, a convenient justification for one more right-wing effort focused on privatizing and destroying public libraries.
“The new piece is the national organizing around challenges,” said Joe Kohlburn, past chair of MLA’s Intellectual Freedom Committee. “The right has chosen the library as an easy target, a place where people can stand and protest. The project for these training sessions now is to make us a harder target.”4
That’s where you come in.
Whether you live in Missouri or in other states where censorship efforts are targeting libraries, we need you to step up. Workshops and organizing and lawsuits like we see in Missouri are critically important, but they can only be part of the answer. We need people on the ground in every state, in every community, to get involved, get political, and get into the fight.
Want to help but not sure where to start? We’ve got you covered. Take these two easy steps right now:
Register for our April 15th teach-in to learn about how to get involved in your local public library system.
Sign up for our Research Support effort to help us collect good, accurate information that will help field strong candidates for library boards across the nation. You can provide info about your local system or sign up to research multiple systems!
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:
Did you catch our March 21st conversation with incoming ALA President Emily Drabinski? Watch it (or watch again) here:
For even more on the assault on libraries, check out Emily’s conversation on the podcast Citations Needed:
