Posted on March 21, 2022 at 8:45 AM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek
A Texas librarian says she’s been fired for refusing to remove books from the shelves.
Suzette Baker told TV station KXAN that a group of people asked the Kingsland Branch Library to pull books they described as "inappropriate" or "pornographic" from the collection.
Baker refused, even when her supervisor told her to do so; county officials didn't respond to the station's requests for comment, and the county HR department said it had no comment.
One patron who spoke to the TV station said she was concerned about decreasing transparency in the library system and said she's counted twelve books that have been removed from the library, but without having followed established procedures to do so.
The Kingsland Branch Library is, of course, far from the only book battle site.
The American Library Association reports that more than 330 unique books were challenged from September through November in 2021 — twice as many as the entire year before that.
Freedom-to-read advocates say this isn't coincidental — there's a bigger organizational effort behind it.
But they, too, are working to coordinate their activism; NPR spoke with the founder of and participants in the national Book Ban Busters campaign to learn more about its efforts.
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Categories: Today in Books