She refused to ban books, many of them about racism and the experiences of LGBTQ+ people. And for that, Suzette Baker was fired as a library director in a rural county in central Texas.
“I’m kind of persona non grata around here,” said Baker, who had headed the Kingsland, Texas, library system until she refused to take down a prominent display of several books people had sought to ban over the years.
Now, Baker is fighting back. She and two other librarians who were similarly fired have filed workplace discrimination claims with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. And as culture war battles to keep certain books from children and teens put public and school libraries increasingly under pressure, their goal is redemption and, where possible, eventual reinstatement.
God yes. Librarians are fierce. I’m not even kidding. They are all soft and cuddly until you’re flatly wrong, and then they assault you with unrelenting presentations of correct knowledge until you either tap out or die.
These librarians will NOT give up, they will NOT stop. And I pity the defendants in these lawsuits, because these plaintiffs are like law clerks but mutant: one of their many superpowers is reading the minutiae, and that is what winning cases are made of.
None of this is a joke. I volunteered at a library for a while, and got to see how the sauce is made. Librarians are a special type of being who have found their tribe at work, and quietly hone their superpowers of observation and data collection while the rest of us mortals just browse. They can navigate any type of knowledge, and learn whatever they want, because they already know where to find out what they don’t know. And I guarantee these librarians have already read the entire statute and relevant cases, probably before they even approached an attorney. It’s what they do.
As an aside, have you ever seen two librarians square off on opposite sides of an issue? I have. It is . . . formidable. If the judge they get is even remotely interested in the due application of law (read: non-partisan) then these defendants are SO fucked, lol.