A group of Texas residents are suing their county and several of its officials for banning a wide array of books from local public libraries, NPR reports.
The group of seven residents, all patrons of public libraries in Llano County, filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, claiming the county officials violated their First and 14th Amendment rights.
The plaintiffs claim that the county started purging books from the county’s three public libraries last summer, and have banned titles including Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents, and Tillie Walden’s Spinning.
“Publicly, Defendants claim to be on a hunt to eradicate ‘pornographic’ materials,” the suit reads in part. “This is a pretext; none of the books Defendants have targeted is pornographic.…Privately, Defendants have admitted that they are banning books because they disagree with their political viewpoints and dislike their subject matter.”
While book challenges and bans have spiked across the country over the past few years, Llano County has drawn nationwide attention over the removal of books from its libraries. Last month, Suzette Baker, the head librarian at the system’s Kingsland location, said she was fired after declining to remove books from her library’s shelves.
One of the plaintiffs in the suit, Leila Green Little, told the Washington Post that the group decided to sue because they “had no other remaining avenue to pursue change.”
“We attended meetings, made comments, wrote letters and pleaded with the county to stop the censorship, and they never changed course,” Green Little said.
“The censorship that Defendants have imposed on Llano County public libraries is offensive to the First Amendment and strikes at the core of democracy,” the plaintiffs argue in the suit. “The right to publish and receive ideas—even politically unpopular ideas or ones that some find offensive or distasteful—is enshrined in our Constitution.”
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
