At a Texas public school’s board meeting in 2022, a parent asked, “Literally you have thousands of books. So, what harm is it to let go of some of them?” “The Librarians,” a 2025 documentary directed by Kim A. Snyder, spends 88 minutes answering this question.
The Davidson College Library and the Davidson Public Library collaborated to screen “The Librarians” in the Alvarez College Union on March 18. The film follows a recent increase in attempts to ban books in schools and public libraries.
According to the American Library Association, 2,452 book titles were challenged in 2024, up from an average of 273 per year between 2001 and 2020.
“Every single year the numbers are ticking up and up and up,” said Sydney Adams, Davidson’s outreach and engagement librarian who helped coordinate the screening. “It’s important that students are made aware of this phenomenon and it’s important to advocate on behalf of libraries and freedom of expression.”
The number of banning requests jumped in 2021. “We feel like a lot of causes are because libraries closed; a lot shut-down during [the COVID-19 pandemic],” said Anne Mavian, chair of the North Carolina Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee.
The spike also coincides with the release of the Krause list, a document of 850 book titles that Matt Krause, a former member of the Texas House of Representatives, sent to Texas public schools. He asked superintendents to confirm whether or not they supplied any of the listed books in their school libraries.
“The Librarians” places the Krause list at the center of today’s attempts to ban books. His list included highly commended works such as Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, This Book is Antiracist by Tiffany Jewell and They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera.
Books featuring specific identities and experiences are consistently targeted.
Dr. Shireen Campbell, an English and education studies professor at Davidson, has written about efforts to ban books.
“Nearly 50% of the titles targeted in 2023 were either written by or about black, indigenous and/or people of color or by or about lesbian, bi-sexual, gay, or transgender individuals,” Campbell wrote in her published piece “The Power of Reading: What Books Do – And Do Not Do – To Their Readers.”
Many complaints accuse libraries of circulating pornographic material to children by holding books that have any LGBTQ+ content. “How do we think it’s okay that the librarians would actually facilitate that and deal that like a drug dealer to our kids? Now they’re becoming porn dealers? That’s what our librarians have become?” said one man in “The Librarians.” He was asking the Llano County Sheriff’s Office in Texas to temporarily close all libraries in the area.
Challenges often come from conservative Christian groups like Moms for Liberty. Organized groups account for over 72% of all challenges. “At [Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools], there was one parent who challenged [a book] and she was the president of Moms for Liberty,” Mavian said.
Mavian emphasized that when these challenges come in, libraries give them their due diligence. “We explain why the book was chosen, what standings it has. And our choosing of that book follows a very, very lengthy material selection policy. […] There’s nothing that’s done will-nilly, that’s for sure,” Mavian said.
When faced with a challenge, librarians first talk to the challenger to hear their concerns—the library outlines its policies and procedures during this meeting. Challenges not withdrawn proceed to a Formal Statement of Concern, which is sent to the library director and handled by a committee.
“We’ve never removed a book based on a concern [in Charlotte-Mecklenburg],” Mavian said. “Charlotte-Mecklenburg is really good [at protecting librarians]. And our board is really supportive of us, the county is. I think some of these areas where you’re seeing those kinds of situations, they don’t have the hierarchy that is all on the same page.”
Texas and Florida are vying for the top spot in reported book bannings across the United States. North Carolina is in fourteenth place. “There’s some legislation that definitely has us concerned,” Mavian said. “We’re on the precipice, that’s for sure.”
Adams explained that about 2% of book challenges happen at academic institutions. Davidson College has yet to face a challenge. Even so, Mavian said the state and national landscape is worrisome.
“The people who are challenging things for high school seniors—we’re concerned that they’re going to start going into the college libraries as well,” Mavian said. “And some of the concerns aren’t specifically about individual books at the college level. Some of the censorship concerns at the academic level have more to do with curriculum and the professors and the professors’ freedom of choice with what they do.”
Adams claimed that these measures are symptoms of a larger problem: “It’s just categorically true that it is an issue of freedom of speech and freedom of religion.”
“I totally agree parents should have the right to monitor what their children are reading and have access to, but I want that right for my child,” Mavian said. “I don’t want other parents making those decisions for my children.”