Libraries, Criminalization and Organizing

"Loving" Public Libraries is NOT Enough

I usually lead a couple of walking tours as fundraisers every summer. This year, I’m leading my first walking tour fundraiser on June 21. It is focused on Black Women in Greenwich Village. Space is limited and funds donated benefit the Parole Prep Project. The second walking tour fundraiser is on July 12 and focuses on Radical Black Women of Harlem. Space is limited and funds donated benefit The Brave House. 

I debuted 5 new publications at the #BlackZineFair earlier this month. They are all part of my ongoing Archival Activations series. If you'd like a hard copy of any of the publications, they are only available through Printed Matter at this time. 

Black Zine Fair 2025 - photo by Elliott Jerome Brown

If you are seeking a space where you can reflect individually and with others on your ongoing activism and organizing, feel free to join me on the last Sunday of every month through December on Zoom from 4 to 6 pm ET. The next drop-in session is on Sunday, May 25. This is for people already engaged in some form of activism and organizing. Space is limited. Please only sign up if you are sure you want to drop in.

Over the past few years, I've had a chance to be a guest speaker at the Forge’s Organizers Writing Workshop. This is a six-week workshop for organizers to learn the fundamentals of writing for publication. The instructor will lead students through a series of reading and writing assignments. They will cover how to write pitches, structure arguments and conduct research for opinion articles and personal essays. Participants are expected to attend weekly writing workshops, complete assignments outside of class and come prepared to give/receive feedback on writing assignments. Workshops will be Tuesday evenings, June 17-July 29. Space is limited. Apply by May 26.

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I love libraries. To be more specific, I love PUBLIC libraries.

I have felt this way since I was a child attending story hours at my local branch while my newly-arrived-in-the-US mama took free ESL classes. My mom always said that, through the public library, she was exposed to the best of what the US has produced. Every other institution that she encountered made her feel unwelcome. In the pediatrician’s waiting room or at the local bank, she was treated as an intruder. But at the library, my mom always felt welcome, and so did I.

To share my mother’s positive experience—and my own—is not to ignore that public libraries, like every other institution in this country, were originally built to exclude.

Art by Jonathan Hill

Libraries, in particular public ones, are key sites of struggle. I think that you’ve all seen this playing out across the country over the past few years. It’s important not to romanticize libraries and yet I believe that the public library is probably the last U.S. institution where the word ‘commoning’ still makes any sense at all.

As Emily Drabinski has said libraries are “public goods shared in common and distributed to everyone.”

Public libraries are communal goods - under capitalism those goods are always at risk of being privatized or plundered and extracted. THIS is precisely why they are under attack by reactionary Rightwing forces. On the Left(s), we do not want a commodified public library. We want to refuse the forced conversion of life forms into market relations. We want to encourage and expand (d)emocratic public control over the institution.

Public libraries are institutions that we’ve made together over generations. They offer us a canvas for practicing new worlds while we inhabit the current one. For these and 100 other reasons, public libraries are important sites of struggle specifically for leftists.

The public library does not make anyone any money and it does not have to “make a profit.” Hard to say this about anything at all in the 21st century here in the U.S. Public libraries resist the dominant paradigm of modern life, which insists that what’s bought and sold in the market economy is the only way to provide fundamental meaning and sustenance in our lives. Given these realities, Leftists should and must fight to expand public libraries.

Many people identify book bans as a significant threat to public libraries. They are in fact threats but the bans are a symptom of a larger political project that the Rightwing has been engaged in for at least 60 years in the United States. That project seeks to privatize and to plunder. Our project on the Left(s) must be to contend for power and take the lead in institutional governance.

So in early 2023, I and a few other people launched For the People Leftist Library Project (FTP). We want more leftists to include public libraries in our organizing. One way to do this is for Leftists to seek election or appointment to local library boards. We launched FTP to specifically support with training those Leftists who are interested in taking this on. We have several goals:

1. To recruit and train leftist library board candidates [we’ve already facilitated 2 cohorts of prospective library board candidates in 2024 and 2025. The next one will be in early 2026.]

2. To empower people to self-organize and take local action [see the examples of NYC Public Library Network and the Library Patron’s Union.]

3. To create and provide resources for library defenders

We want Leftists to include public libraries in our budget fights. We want Leftists to insist that library workers are well paid and can unionize. We want Leftists to join their specific local library Friends group and if one doesn’t exist where they are, to consider asking library workers at their local branches whether they think that a Friends group could be useful and if yes, to start one. We want Leftists to organize local People’s Assemblies. We want Leftists to launch their own local patrons’ unions and more.

FTP is interested not only in advancing a leftist analysis of public libraries but to encourage leftists to take power, to make power and to affirmatively move into governance.

The public library is one of the very few remaining public places in this country where you can spend an entire day without spending one penny. You can spend hours studying, working or daydreaming in a library. Then you can leave with an object that has the power to unleash your imagination and transport you into another world, so that you can see clearly that another world is possible. That’s magical and filled with revolutionary possibilities. And that’s why any attempts to cut back on library hours are actually a declaration of war on the commons and on our communities. Libraries are places where people not only connect to resources but with other people.

I like to remind people that from 1929 to 1939 [during the height of the Great Depression], the Central Building of the New York Public Library (NYPL) was open 365 days a year, 9am-10pm Monday-Saturday, and 1pm-10pm on Sunday. And yet in most cities and towns across the U.S., libraries are constantly subject to budget cuts. It’s important to understand that closing libraries is a form of capturing and restricting public space. It’s an attempt to take over the commons spatially, informationally, and socially. We must do everything in our power to protect the time that people are able to spend inside libraries.

While it remains important to underscore and struggle against the carceral tendencies of libraries— after all policing for example can be carried out by anyone and has been carried out by library workers too —we absolutely MUST expand access to public libraries. They are indispensable infrastructure for making resources that we need to make available to everyone. We have to fight to EXPAND that infrastructure. This is a vision worth fighting FOR at a time when we’re mostly fighting to stop things from happening.

As I’ve said, public libraries are important sites of struggle. Everything about them is political. My grounded love of libraries is rooted in the certainty that were people to say in 2025 that we should build places in rural and urban areas across the country where people can come to learn to read, use computers to apply for jobs, enjoy free cultural programming, collect seeds they can use to grow their own food and information on how to do so, check out office supplies, musical instruments, artwork, cake pans, snow shovels, and sometimes even prom dresses, borrow passes to local museums & other local cultural institutions, receive resources and assistance to connect with their family and local histories —all programs that public libraries offer—not to mention taking home books and audiobooks and dvds for free, they would be considered heretics—or at the very least naive and unrealistic.

As a prison industrial complex (PIC) abolitionist who is committed to a vision of a restructured society and world; A world where we have everything we need: food, shelter, education, health, art, beauty, clean water and more, I promise you that I know something about being called heretical, naive, and unrealistic. And I know something about who is served by calls to propriety and a limited concept of what is “realistic.”

Under late stage capitalism, our imaginations have been colonized and occupied so that we’re conditioned to believe that everything must be monetized & that only a few are deserving of living with dignity. In this context, the idea of a place where you can receive and access invaluable items without spending any money is preposterous and cause for mockery. Public schools and public libraries are our last lines of defense against full privatization of the commons. And we’ve all seen how diligently and relentlessly the very idea of public education has been and continues to be attacked and eroded (and not only by the Right).

Abolitionist writer and filmmaker Brett Story has said that people don’t have a vocabulary/grammar for the commons anymore - so what’s been lost is the commons as a way of thinking of “how we belong to each other.” Public libraries can help us to rediscover *a grammar* for the commons. Something that we desperately need as we build towards what must be for me an abolitionist horizon.

Follow and join our work at For The People. FTP is a volunteer-led grassroots formation that is funded through t-shirt sales. It’s a five-year project and we are currently in year three. If you are in NYC, you’re invited to join the NYC Public Library Action Network (PLAN). We are organizing to increase funding for NYC libraries. I also recommend watching this new documentary about public libraries that premiered recently on PBS.

Criminalization and Libraries: Some Resources

In October 2023, I co-facilitated a virtual teach-in with my comrades Megan Riley and Bean Yogi. The session covered the various intersections of libraries, library work, and criminalization, including surveillance and privacy issues, retribution against library workers, social work and social services, and more. On March 27, 2025, the gang got back together to facilitate a criminalization 202 for information workers. The session was not recorded but we shared some resources with participants.

While in library school, none of the courses that I took substantively discussed the intersections of criminalization and libraries. While I have spent a couple of decades thinking deeply about prisons, policing and surveillance, it’s not until the past few years that I have delved into the specific ways that public libraries are part of the web of criminalization. This is an emerging area of research and writing in the field of information science. So I thought I would share some of the writing that I’ve been engaged in over the past few years.

In 2023, my friend & fellow librarian/archivist Sarah Cuk and I published Criminalization and Libraries as a resource for the October virtual session that I referenced earlier. We conceived the publication as a jumping off point for discussion and as the beginning of a mapping process to identify intersections between criminalization and libraries.

Just this year, I published two new resources.

Art by Micah Bazant

In this new zine, Arrested At the Library: Policing the Stacks, readers learn about a history of police in libraries, as well as tales of librarians who have been targeted by law enforcement and those who have resisted policing the stacks.

Libraries and law enforcement have been intertwined throughout their entire existence. The ballooning of carceral systems and police power has affected libraries, which are increasingly pushed to police patrons, and have more and more options for doing so. With books, libraries, and library patrons under threat, the zine explores histories of resistance to policing inside libraries and the calls to action going out today. Download and read the zine here. It was beautifully designed by Micah Bazant.

Libraries offer the possibility of knowledge and self-empowerment to all. Because they are at least potentially a force for equality, and because those in power often view knowledge as dangerous, libraries have sometimes been seen as dangerous themselves.

Most often, attacks on libraries focus on books—various interest groups have tried to remove a wide range of books from library shelves. Sometimes, though, librarians who take the egalitarian mission of the library seriously have also become targets of their communities or of the state.

Another new resource, Criminalizing Librarians: Threats and Realities, walks readers through a [short] history of assaults on librarians—including librarians persecuted during Red Scares and the violence against activists desegregating libraries during the Civil Rights Movement—contemporary threats, and examples of library workers pushing back as we continue the long haul struggle of protecting our libraries and the people who work in them. Check it out here. Designed by Cindy Lau with illustrations by Erik Ruin and research support by Noah Berlatsky, I hope that this publication will offer introductory information that might be of interest to library science students [who aren’t being exposed to these ideas] and also to library patrons.