Reading Freely

In Victoria, Texas, with support from local government officials, a Christian group has been working for a little over a year to ban books at the local library that portray nontraditional family structures and LGBTQ life. Library director Dayna Williams-Capone has served at the Victoria Public Library for sixteen years, fourteen of those as director. In her 26 years working in public libraries, she has never encountered anything like these efforts before. Over the past year, Williams-Capone has received numerous written requests to take books out of circulation. In every case, she has evaluated the books in question and refused to remove them from the shelves. She resigned this month after the city council and county commission appointed seven citizens who support book banning to the eleven-member library advisory board. She speaks here about the pressures she has faced and the importance of reading widely.

—Molly Montgomery

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Our mayor has made threats to us, to me, to my board. What he’s saying is that he doesn’t want certain types of materials brought into the library, and if the board cannot give him the policy he wants, then he will work out a plan to cut funding for our library materials.

When board positions came up for renewal, or were unfilled because someone resigned, the city council voted in three people that are all part of the book-banning group. And the county commissioners chose four people who either were part of this group, or they would support this group or have political connections to the Republican Party and would be on the side of banning books. I still have about three or four people who were previously on the board. But I think that pretty well sends a message of how they want the board to vote.

When the city council did that vote, I took it as a vote of no confidence in my leadership. My professionalism has been questioned by the mayor in public meetings. My policies that I’ve worked very hard on with my management staff to develop, I was told they’re cookie-cutter by several members of city council during public meetings. I have not been included in executive sessions, because the mayor told the city manager that he knew my point of view on this. It’s a whole game, a game of drama that I don’t want to be involved in any longer.

[The book-banning group] is small, maybe forty people that come in and out. The core group is probably five or ten. It’s very well organized. It was formed out of a church here in Victoria called Faith Family—the church minister’s wife is Joel Osteen’s sister. They’re able through their minister at the Sunday services to coerce their congregations to do things such as sign petitions.

A phrase they use a lot is “protecting the innocence of children.” They love to say that what they’re trying to do is get books out of the library that create confusion. And that they are protecting the innocence of children by doing so. They also have moved on to calling our materials obscene and pornographic. But there is nothing that I have seen in anything they’ve brought up that is obscene, or pornographic. It’s just terms they throw around to shock. I even had a request for reevaluation where the guy said he didn’t read the whole book.

I don’t know where it came from, but someone left notes on a car parked outside my house. And this was back in November, these rambling, crazy notes. So I had police driving around my neighborhood for a couple of months. It’s also been insinuated, through Bible quotes, that I am a sinner, that a millstone needs to be tied around my neck and I need to be drowned. And then I had a woman come up to me at the very first meeting with this group and start being very aggressive, in my face yelling at me. She started saying something about, “Are you supportive of CRT?” She kept yelling, “CRT.” And I was like, at the time, “What’s she talking about, CRT?”

Public libraries serve the whole community. And that community looks very different than people have their views of what it is. We know. We see them every day walk through the doors, we get the questions, we talk to the public.

The best I know to do right now is to try to bring on more people who can advocate for that public. I recently hired someone for a position—it’s called a development and partnership coordinator. And her role is really to help us figure out who are the allies for us? And how do we grow that group? And how do we make them speak out on our behalf consistently on all kinds of topics? The process of working with a focused and organized group who want to remove materials from the public library is tough. It’s really going to push you to draw upon your own strength, what you believe in the profession of librarianship, and who you are as a person.

The importance of reading freely is that it allows us to work with ideas. We need to question our ideas. And really think through what it is we believe, and also be able to see other people’s perspectives that we maybe will never experience. Reading helped me understand and think through why I am who I am. I’m just in disbelief that people don’t want to read, or at least talk with their children, about all the things in the world, all the things they’re going to face, all the different kinds of people they’re going to meet. As if they could keep them in that bubble for the rest of their lives.

Image credit: cigornia, “Books on Hold” (Flickr CC / BY 2.0)