All too often, it starts in small towns --- in places where generations of close community ties are subverted by self-interested outsiders promoting extremist ideologies under the guise of moral values. This is what happened in rural Watson, Louisiana, in late summer 2022, when a seemingly routine local public library board meeting turned toxic and soon gained international traction. That event resulted in the timely but difficult creation of THAT LIBRARIAN: The Fight Against Book Banning in America.

The writing of it emerged through more than a year of social and mainstream media hell launched against first-time author, schoolteacher-librarian, wife and mother Amanda Jones. Her “crime” was to deliver a short and measured speech against a semantically sanitized motion by a faction of library board members to restrict books that appeared to threaten the moral safety of young readers. She easily saw through it as a blunt move to ban and/or censor children’s books --- which was intended to eliminate anyone whose story or characters wasn’t exclusively white, straight and, preferably, evangelical Christian.

"With the organized dedication of a true librarian, Jones meticulously documented every incident, every message, every article, every reference made to her, about her or against her. She became inextricably identified with a cause bigger than her own ego and sometimes fragile emotions..."

By opposing and exposing the thinly veiled threat posed by Watson’s far right so-called “Christians,” Jones and her supporters immediately became targets for abuse, ranging from social media mockery, to in-person shunning, to actual death threats. But as THAT LIBRARIAN reveals from beginning to end, the target was anything but “soft.”

Jones --- who was brought up to be feminine, quiet-spoken, socially compliant and “nice,” in the traditional white Deep South way --- fought back. She learned with every painful step how to become something she had never been before: an outspoken and effective social activist and word-warrior. What triggered her fighting spirit was a lifelong passion for reading --- voraciously, eclectically, even dangerously. Despite an otherwise conservative upbringing, Jones’ parents left her to navigate the infinite universe of books on her own, and she reveled in their lack of restriction.

When Jones became a middle-school classroom teacher and later the school librarian, she refocused her personal love of books on her students. Through books, their young lives grew far beyond the confines of their small town, better equipping them to resist the alarming rise of polarized ideologies that are drowning out critical thinking throughout the western world.

THAT LIBRARIAN follows a grueling and persistent campaign on Jones’ part to bring the main perpetrators of the defamation campaign against her to justice (a process that is still ongoing). But the real strength of this history-making memoir lies elsewhere. Jones realized early on that success or failure in court was becoming less important against a growing wave of national and international public support for the greater cause of keeping reading itself accessible to people of all ages.

With the organized dedication of a true librarian, Jones meticulously documented every incident, every message, every article, every reference made to her, about her or against her. She became inextricably identified with a cause bigger than her own ego and sometimes fragile emotions, one for which she was determined not to drop the ball. And she didn’t.

Along with a small but mighty tribe of supporters, Jones captured and preserved numerous social media posts before they could be taken down. In THAT LIBRARIAN, she reproduces the most damning of them, names names and reiterates the truth at every opportunity. She has to do it over and over again because --- as any good teacher will tell you --- deep learning can only happen with persevering repetition. And a lot of learning needed to happen in Watson, Louisiana, not to mention across the entire country and even an entire continent.

The story that powers THAT LIBRARIAN is far from over, but it stands as a momentous reversal of far right pseudo-religious hate into a potential triumph for the universal public freedom to read, learn and know.

The only sad thing about Amanda Jones’ prodigious and personally costly effort is that those who most need to read her persistent, frank and wise words are those who adamantly refuse complex knowledge in favor of intellectually cheap and dangerous ideologies. Unfortunately, such book-deniers often climb into powerful political positions where one can only hope they will be voted out before they can do any more damage to libraries and their users.