General
Librarians are under attack across the country. The following is taken from a speech I gave last week to a group of them.
I’m gonna be honest, I just came here for the porn.
But I can’t find it. I guess that Rep. Mooney must have taken it home.
(That was a joke)
I’m honored to talk to you all. I love librarians. Librarians are the best readers – which does not mean they are the easiest to please. They keep me on my toes and tell me when I’m wrong and point out my lack of respect for grammar sometimes. But I love it.
I probably do what I do because of librarians.
In my head I can still see the illustrations on books librarians pointed me toward as a kid. There was one with bears drawn in brown ink, and a little boy with a gun, and what I think were maple trees. It smelled like my grandmother’s attic. And that was a wonderful smell.
I wish I could remember the name of that book. But then I’m terrible with proper nouns. If you ask me the name of an author or a title I just go blank.
Y’all ever do that? If somebody asks me a name or a book I just freeze. I’m like ‘what’s the name of that book the Christians claim to read?’ Oh, the Bible.
My wife has to whisper to me at family reunions to tell me my cousins’ names.
And I love my cousins.
I know I’m better at my job because of you guys. You taught me how to look up the things I forgot. You taught me to love the stories and respect the works as a child. You taught me the value of knowing things I did not know I wanted to know.
As an adult you taught me how to use microfilm and dig through archives, to find context in broad history and specific moments. You taught me that looking deeper, reading further, searching for things other people rarely dig for is the difference between ordinary and extraordinary.
You are the keepers of knowledge in a world where it is fleeting.
There is nothing in the world like poring over a document in the archives of a library, reading something you guys curated and guarded, and finding that thing that opens your eyes to something you didn’t know or hadn’t thought about.
Those are moments that changed my work and my life.
Reading witness statements from investigative files after the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, and other bombings that were never solved. The hair stood up on the back of my neck.
Reading accounts, on old note cards in a library basement, of every police shooting in Birmingham for decades, realizing that almost every one was a Black man, many shot in the back, and that almost all were ruled justifiable. The hair stood up on the back of my neck. Again.
Reading FBI files and investigative notebooks from the pursuit of serial bomber Eric Rudolph. I was on that trail in 1998, but reading those documents in a library again made the hair on the back of my neck stand. Which is always my sign of something good. We’re working on a podcast about that now. Stay tuned.
I could go on. But what I want you to hear, more than anything, is that what you do matters.
I hope you know that. I really hope you know that.
You are the protectors of our ideas and our thoughts and art and history and possibility. You allow us to see our mistakes and plot better futures.
But we live in a world where small minds can’t handle that. They can’t handle the magnitude of possibility.
Diversity is not our strength, they say. Equity and inclusion are bad words. Reading about it must be bad, too.
So you are under attack from those who see censorship as the American way.
Who see intolerance as strength and ignorance as security.
Who see liberty as something that is limiting.
You’re gonna have to keep fighting off the hoards of those Moms for Liberty. I said hordes, H-O-R-D-E-S. If you heard something different that’s on you.
You’re gonna see more bills like the one from Arnold Mooney, that want to hold you responsible for ideas that make somebody uncomfortable.
I can’t say that guy’s name without hearing Dr. Seuss in my head. Arnold K. Mooney would you please go now.
I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. They’re stacking library boards and putting unqualified people in jobs they don’t respect and can’t do. We’ve done to libraries what they seem to be doing to the federal government right now.
Im gonna be honest. I don’t know what to tell you to do. I can tell you what a lot of people are doing.
They’re accepting it all as inevitable.
They’re questioning their own moral positions.
They’re weighing their beliefs against what’s good for their families.
And I get the temptation. There’s a geyser of crazy every day. Even my wife has turned off the news and just slides under the covers with an old Nero Wolf book or something to try to distract her from what’s real.
But I can’t do that.
We all can’t do that.
Because we have seen what happens, over and over again, when people of conscience and good will and reason sit quiet.
People get hurt.
I am the son of a deeply religious preacher who was the son of a preacher who was the son of a preacher who was the son of a preacher. I didn’t inherit a lot of the religion, but I guess I did get the preaching.
I wrote a book a few years back that questioned my dad, the best man I’ve ever known, for not using his pulpit during the civil rights movement in Birmingham to speak with more authority against segregation and violence and the horror that was Bombingham.
I kept hearing the words of Martin Luther King’s letter from a Birmingham Jail – which I read for the first time in the Birmingham Library – when he excoriated the white church for failure to act.
King said he thought the white preachers would be the strongest allies, but found “all too many have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.”
That struck me, because my dad was a thoughtful man, a committed man. Not a timid man. But he was too silent in those years.
When I asked his friends and peers about it they said he had to be silent to protect his livelihood and his family. Because of me, they said, which didn’t make me feel better.
They said I could not understand the pressure or the times. And that was true. I could not.
I couldn’t imagine white mobs spitting on kids trying to enroll in schools, beating people on buses with the tacit permission of the cops, blowing up churches to stop us from living together and learning together and being together.
I understand now. Look around. I understand now.
You may say comparing civil rights atrocities to censorship of books in the library is going too far.
But history has shown us time and time again that control of ideas is the first step toward controlling, and discounting, and hurting people.
That’s why politicians are so afraid of you, and blame you for ideas.
So remember you matter. Please remember you matter. And it matters that you do the things you do, in the professional way you know they should be done. Every single day.
I was struck talking to all those preachers from the 50s and 60s. Some of them admitted they stayed silent and said they lived comfortable lives for that very reason. Some of them spoke out against inequality and hypocrisy and were fired or moved to small churches or worse.
Every one of those who stayed silent and comfortable wished they had done more. Some cried.
Every one of those who spoke out and suffered claimed that moment as their proudest. They wouldn’t change a thing.
So it becomes, to me, an issue of strategy.
You can’t do things to alienate your allies. You can’t get so angry you lose yourself.
You can’t convince anyone to do anything by calling them an idiot.
You can’t win by being predictable, or violent, or hateful, or loud.
And no. I’m not telling librarians to hush.
You’ve just got to keep on being who you are, and believing you are important.
I’ve been thinking a lot about John Lewis lately. Looking over the course of his life I am struck by all his ups and downs.
Lewis was of course the son of an Alabama sharecropper who couldn’t even vote. He was beaten at Selma and roughed up elsewhere, spurned by his own group as SNCC was wrested from him because he was too nice, too committed to peace and nonviolence.
He lost elections and saw friends killed, won big and lost big and died a hero who talked about loving people at the end as much as he did at the beginning. Love and work and work and work.
These things are true:
Strategy is everything.
Change is never permanent.
Sometimes you’re gonna get beat up.
But you have to stand for what you stand for. When it’s easy and when it’s hard.
And that’s the way. No matter the moment.
This is your moment. And you matter.
John Archibald is a columnist for AL.com. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
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