Vilified librarian meets with Kansas City readers to discuss new book on book-banning
Librarians and educators across the country are grappling with threats to the information they provide to their communities — and Kansas City is no exception.
In the most recent meeting of the Kansas City Public Library's FYI Book Club, community members discussed Amanda Jones' nonfiction book "That Librarian," in which Jones tells her own story of speaking out against attempted censorship at a public library board meeting in her Louisiana hometown and the subsequent right-wing conservative attacks that changed the course of her life.
The book club discussion, a regular collaboration between The Star and the library, included about 20 readers and touched on First Amendment rights, censorship, bullying, school library versus public library policy and more. The conversation took place at the Kansas City Public Library's Central location not long before Banned Books Week (Sept. 22-28) , during which Jones will be speaking at a public event at the library .
The group's overriding concern was distilled by reader Maria Robertson, who said she seemed sure that those intent on banning books are against education.
She quoted the author Jones: "Education is about knowledge, facts, truth, and what they're pushing isn't about these things. ... It's a belief system based in nostalgia, a longing to turn back the clock to a time when Christianity was more universal, when whites ruled society, when women were subservient to men, and when gay people stayed closeted."
This month's FYI Book Club gathering was different from past meetings in that several participants were librarians or educators including Kansas City Public Library staff members, deputy director of youth and family engagement Crystal Faris and director of programming and marketing Steven Woolfolk.
Woolfolk made news in 2016 for standing up to a possible First Amendment violation. He attempted to stop the arrest of an audience member during the Q&A portion of a library event. The speaker was a Middle East expert and diplomat, and a patron asked him a series of challenging questions.
When private guards and off-duty police officers at the event moved to arrest and remove the patron, Woolfolk interfered, which led to his own arrest. He was later found not guilty by a Kansas City municipal court.
Woolfolk wondered if the ordeal was a true First Amendment issue or if it was more about someone in a position of authority censoring a member of the public; the distinction is murky and is also one that Jones grapples with in "That Librarian" (Bloomsbury, $29.99).
Woolfolk said that the questions he returns to, and the ones he posed to the FYI book club group, were: "Does it matter if it's a violation of the First Amendment or if it's just a matter of routine censorship? Are we committed to the text of the First Amendment simply because that is the rule of law we live by, or is our commitment to something bigger than that and to the free exchange of ideas?"
For him, it's the latter. He said we have to be willing to be confronted with new information and willing to change when that new information contradicts established thought.
"None of that happens in a world where we actively seek to prevent voices from being heard," Woolfolk said.
While the removed voice at the 2016 library event was literally a voice, in most cases, challenged voices at libraries are in written form – and they come from specific communities.
The American Library Association found that 4,240 unique book titles were challenged in 2023 — the highest level ever documented by the organization. Missouri was one of 17 states where there were attempts to censor more than 100 books.
In "That Librarian" Jones notes that of the titles challenged, "the vast majority were written by or about members of the LGBTQIA+ community or by and about Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color."
Jones called the effect of those attempts on our education system "chilling," but said fear wouldn't stop her from serving students who "deserve to see themselves and their families represented in the books on the shelves of our school and public libraries."
Kimberley Kreicker witnessed fear determining content when she was a teacher in the Parkhill School District.
She said that district administrators checked the school library for "offensive" images. She recalled one book that they removed for a drawing of a character's bare breast.
"The teachers always have classroom libraries that they pay for themselves, and everybody just shut down their own classroom libraries," Kreicker said. "Teachers did it for self- protection."
A major theme in "That Librarian" is refusing to be cowed even when many are. Jones wrote that shortly after the online bullying and harassment began against her, she had a large number of intellectual freedom supporters.
However, as the harassment and threats intensified, fewer and fewer people defended the position she'd taken.
"Nobody wanted to speak out if it meant becoming the next target. If they could take the first steps to completely ruin my reputation with just a few online posts," Jones wrote, "they could ruin anybody's. People told me outright they were scared to speak up and support me publicly for fear of retribution."
Faris, the library's deputy director of youth and family engagement, told the group she's been called names for speaking out against censorship, but she won't let that get in the way of doing her job either.
"I respond a little bit more than some people in Missouri only because I have a more secure place, shall I say, than some of my colleagues in the state. And so I can help them out a little bit," Faris explained. "My professional responsibility is to the children and teenagers and to secure their rights to have access."
She echoed Robertson's concerns saying that censorship in education is about far-right legislators and radical groups wanting children to believe what they're told to believe rather than grow up to be their own people.
And what's really baffling, reader Margaret Turner said, is that so many challenged stories seem in no way offensive. She's thinking of a story that the head of San Francisco's library system, Michael Lambert, read after the 49ers lost the most recent Super Bowl to the Kansas City Chiefs.
As part of the two library systems' Super Bowl challenge, the losing city recorded a banned book storytime. Lambert chose to read "Sofia Valdez, Future Prez" by Andrea Beatty.
Turner says, "It was just a lovely story about a little girl wanting to build a pocket park in her city for her grandfather. I kept going down a rabbit hole trying to figure out what was wrong with the book."
She eventually discovered that a supporting character has pinned to his hat a tiny pink triangle – a symbol of the LGBTQ community.
The room was quiet for a moment until reader Kate Butler asked the librarians in the room if "people who grew up loving books and going to the library have a different point of view from someone who has been told books are bad?"
The author, who zoomed in for about half of the discussion, answered.
"I've never met anyone that is pro-censorship that grew up a reader. The people in my town, the people that harass me, they don't have library cards," Jones said. "We've got some extremists installed on our library board, and they don't even have library cards."
After another silence, Robertson responded: "I think it's disingenuous of them to say censorship attempts are about protecting children. They want to protect a way of life, right? They want to dumb down America."
Meet the author
Amanda Jones will speak at 6 p.m. Sept. 25 at the Kansas City Public Library, 14 W. 10th St., during Banned Books Week. The public reception begins at 5:30 p.m. RSVP at kclibrary.org/events.
Join the club
The Kansas City Star and the Kansas City Public Library present a book-of-the-moment selection every few months and invite the community to read along. To participate in the next discussion led by Kaite Stover, the library's director of readers' services, email
