Documentary Shows Librarians Fighting From The Front Line

Kim A. Snyder, an Academy Award nominated director and producer, came to Texas in 2021 to figure out what the heck was going on.

In late October of that year, now former State Rep. Matt Krause, a Fort Worth Republican, released a 16-page list of 850 books focused on race, ethnicity, reproductive rights and LGBTQ issues. With the list came a demand to school districts: do your libraries include any of these books that could “make students feel discomfort?”

Among them were Michael Crichton’s debut novel A Case of Need published in 1968 about a doctor defending a colleague who was arrested for performing an abortion, David LaRochelle’s 2005 And Tango Makes Three, and Amnesty International’s 2011 We Are All Born Free.

Suddenly, librarians were the newest targets. Many were subjected to countless accusations, and their jobs were threatened. All these dynamics are explored in Snyder’s latest documentary The Librarians, which screens in Houston on Sunday, October 12 and Dallas on Tuesday, October 14 (with a return run scheduled in Houston in November).

The New York-based Snyder’s documentaries focus on the intersection of social change and development, which she studied in graduate school. She’s directed three documentaries about gun violence in schools, including Newtown (2016), focused on the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, 2020’s Us Kids about the activism of survivors of the Parkland High School shooting; as well as the Oscar-nominated short Death by Numbers (2024).

“There’s a similarity between the gun violence issue and the assault on our freedom of expression. Because first of all, they both fundamentally do not respect a youth,” Snyder said with a laugh in an interview. “A lot of people in those tender years of adolescents in high school don’t want to be afraid of going to school and getting shot or pick the books they want to read.”

When Snyder visited Texas, she headed first to Granbury, a hotbed of conservative politics 40 miles south of Fort Worth. That’s where she met parent and activist Chris Tackett.

“Anybody who was starting to research what was happening in Texas starts in Granbury. And anybody who was sort of starting to research the topic, not just in Granbury and Texas, quickly came to know who Chris Tackett was and that he was a bugle blower,” said Snyder.

Tackett also served on the city’s school board from 2014 through 2017, and he is active on social media. He was regularly posting about the attempted censorship, including one video showing a county constable barnstorming a Granbury ISD library, grabbing books and telling the superintendent he was investigating the librarians for the crime of acquiring books. The district attorney declined to press charges on the librarians.

At school board meetings angry parents began to name books that should be removed. But Tackett, curious about what prompted the investigation into the librarians, filed an open records request. Many of the books under investigation were cited by the parents and on Krause’s list, which the superintendent also cited when berating library staff.

The heightened attacks on public education, LGBTQ people and people of color, he noticed, were tied to nationwide groups like Moms for Liberty, a nationwide conservative group pushing book bans and encouraging members to run for school boards, and the ideology Christian nationalism, the idea the country was founded as a Christian nation.

Those threads made Snyder realize the story she was following in Texas was national.

“I didn't have any reason to think it would be a big story. I thought maybe it will be a short story about this group of amazing librarians. And then you research and meet people like Chris who tell you you can't talk about book banning without talking about school board races and the larger white Christian nationalist agenda,” she said.

Coverage at that point mostly focused on the books and authors. What wasn’t prominently discussed, she said, “was the attack on this profession and who these people represent as the firewall between book bans [and the freedom to read].”

For Snyder, librarians are also front-line workers in the battle for democracy and the First Amendment. And they are winning. Conservative school board trustees have recently lost re-election in conservative cities like Keller and Grapevine-Colleyville in North Texas and Katy, near Houston. Nationally, a Wyoming librarian fired two years ago for refusing to remove LGBTQ-themed books won her lawsuit and was rewarded $700,000.

Since its debut at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, The Librarians has screened on almost every continent. “I didn't know if they would see it as a kind of myopic, ‘Oh, that crazy America,’” she said. “They're not at all, they're terrified because they know that when the United States sneezes, they catch a cold. Everybody's afraid of creeping symptoms of authoritative regimes.”

But there’s some nuance, and that nuance is hope. “On [the] one hand it's an alarm bell and it's super dystopian,” she said, “but on the other hand there’s some hope because there are people like these librarians and Chris who are not afraid to stand up to, to bullies and just stand up for, for what is right.”

The Librarians screens in Houston on Sunday, October 12 from 2-4 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston screening with a post-film discussion with Snyder, executive producer Amber Alonso, and Texas librarians in the movie and moderated by Randall Morton, founder and executive director of Progressive Forum Houston.

The Librarians screens in Dallas on Tuesday, October 14 at 7 p.m. at the Texas Theater with a post-movie discussion with Texas librarians and activists. Snyder will be in attendance.

A full list of screenings is available here.