“We’re seeing increasing attacks on librarians and libraries, ranging from character assassination and the use of social media to inflame and intimidate, right up to bomb threats,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.
A handful of librarians, like Jones, have turned to the courts to clear their names.
In 2023, a librarian at a New Jersey high school, Roxana Caivano, brought a defamation suit against a group of parents who had disparaged her online and at a school board meeting, in some instances calling her a pornographer and child predator because she stocked the graphic memoir “Gender Queer.” Caivano, who is represented in the case by her husband, had argued for keeping the book on the shelves.
In the fall, the former director of the Campbell County Public Library in Wyoming, who was fired after she refused to remove disputed books from the children’s and young adult section of the library in Gillette, Wyo., filed a federal lawsuit for defamation and the violation of her civil rights. The librarian, Terri Lesley, filed the suit against three community members who accused her of providing obscene material to children, and had reported her to the county sheriff’s office in an attempt to have her arrested.
And earlier this year, Suzette Baker, a former librarian in Llano County, Texas, brought a lawsuit against library officials and the county, arguing that her First and 14th Amendment rights were violated when she was fired after she refused to take contested books out of circulation. All three librarians’ suits are ongoing; Baker and Lesley, who are both represented by the Denver-based civil rights attorney Iris Halpern, have argued that they have been discriminated and retaliated against for defending books that deal with race or L.G.B.T.Q. issues.
A lifelong resident of Watson, a small town near Baton Rouge, Jones, 46, was raised in a politically conservative Southern Baptist household, the daughter of a mechanic and a kindergarten and Sunday school teacher. She met her husband, also a Watson native, when they were in the first grade. She has been a teacher and librarian in Watson for 23 years, working at the same school she attended as a girl.
Read More: From School Librarian to Activist: ‘The Hate Level and the Vitriol Is Unreal’
