The American Library Association conference that ended Tuesday at McCormick Place tends to be a predictably tame six days. The annual gathering of librarians, publishers and information professionals has been happening since the 19th century. The Chicago-based ALA greets librarians from rural towns, big cities, colleges, high schools, libraries in other countries. They eat a hot dog and take a boat tour and, for a week, dig into the latest archiving techniques, discuss methods of bolstering diversity and forecast digital trends.
That was before the book banners.
“We need to fight now!” shouted a librarian from Tennessee during a panel.
“The crazies are tough but we’re tougher!” yelled a librarian from California.
You have never heard a quiet profession clap so hard.
The book banners had always been there, of course.
According to Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, when the group started tracking book challenges several decades ago, “we were hearing about two, sometimes three a week. Fast-forward to 2021, and now we’re hearing about five to 10 a day. That we know of.”
Even in the early 1970s, said Judy Blume — the beloved children’s author who gave the conference’s keynote address — when she tried to donate three copies of “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” to her children’s school library, the principal returned the books. Conservative communities have challenged “Margaret” almost since the day it was first published in 1970, typically because Blume writes about menstruation.
“I felt, if there’s a year to give a keynote,” she said, “this is the year.”
There was the usual head-shaking. PowerPoint after PowerPoint featured graphs that charted a rise in challenges across the United States as red lines of fairly even keel, staying flat for years and years, until 2020 and the pandemic, then those lines blast off.
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