Clockwise from upper left: Amita Lonial, Jessica Anne Bratt, Sarah Lawton, and Amy Sonnie
On July 21, the Movement for Black Lives’ National Day of Action, a team of four public librarians with backgrounds in social justice launched a new initiative, Libraries4BlackLives (L4BL). Jessica Anne Bratt, branch manager at Grand Rapids Public Library, MI; Sarah Lawton, neighborhood library supervisor for Madison Public Library, WI; Amita Lonial, learning experiences manager at Skokie Public Library (SPL), IL; and Amy Sonnie, adult literacy and lifelong learning librarian at Oakland Public Library, CA, joined forces earlier in the summer to create a website that would bring together library-based advocates who want to support the ideals and activism behind the #BlackLivesMatter movement. (Bratt and Lonial are 2016 Library Journal Movers & Shakers; Lawton and Sonnie are self-professed “Shovers & Makers.”)
“This ‘call to action’ unifies library efforts and demonstrates our unequivocal professional commitment to social justice and equity,” the site states. “We publicly affirm our support for the Movement for Black Lives and we commit to deepening racial equity work in our institutions and communities. Join the call for #FreedomNow. Help define the role libraries can play.”
Librarians, library workers, students, volunteers, administrators, and board members are invited to sign L4BL’s pledge to support the Movement for Black Lives. A Resource Guide contains a Suggested Actions list; a collection of links to reading lists, curricula, articles, and other references for advocates; and a space for users to post their own links and ideas. The #libraries4blacklives hashtag has become an active space on Twitter for librarians to trade thoughts.
In addition, the site’s Call to Action asks a few important, actionable questions:
What role can libraries play to address systemic racial injustice and implicit personal bias?
What needs to change within our libraries, campuses and associations?
How can the library serve as a platform for communities seeking to pull back the veil so that we may all engage in social transformation?
SOCIAL JUSTICE ROOTS
L4BL’s founders all have strong roots in the intersection of social justice and public libraries.
Lawton first became involved with community engagement through her participation in the American Library Association’s (ALA) Center for Civic Life and Libraries Transforming Communities. After working with underserved youth in rural communities, she arrived in Madison as city government was beginning to respond to its own long-term racial disparities. Lawton became active with a number of community organizations, including the Government Alliance on Race and Equity, which was working to create a Racial Equity Toolkit to reduce institutionalized racism through local governmental decision-making processes.
“I was very drawn to an approach that recognizes that there’s a lot of individual bias and explicit and implicit racism that we’re all mired in, but that we might be able to find some strategies [to disrupt] the machine,” Lawton told LJ. “Most of my work, and what I bring to this group, is looking at tools that are analogous to an environmental impact assessment…within libraries, but also within other government structures.”
Sonnie came to librarianship after a long career working with social justice movements and causes, including cofounding and serving on the board of the Oakland-based Center for Media Justice, toward the goal of expanding racial, economic, and gender parity for marginalized communities. As a librarian she has put together well-used resource lists and ongoing programming to help the Oakland community engage with similar concerns.
“I believe deeply in learning from history, the civil rights movement and even further back,” Sonnie noted, “engaging new ideas, lifting up hidden and marginalized voices, and amplifying calls for a more free, democratic, and participatory future…. That is why I became a librarian. That is what I think this movement is calling on us to do now, to encourage people to explore these ideas and our interconnections, to provide information and provide space for people who are most impacted by racial injustice…. There’s nowhere better to do this work than in the public library.”
Bratt, an African American who was born and raised on Chicago’s South Side, always recognized libraries as community lifelines for children and adults alike. Early in her career, she told LJ, “I took a youth services position in an urban library setting and the first thing I noticed is that my teens of color didn’t have a good relationship with staff. So I made that my personal goal, to develop a relationship with kids.” That goal morphed into DigiBridge, a partnership between the Grand Rapids Public Library and public schools to put technology in the hands of middle and high school students.
“I got that support to make racial equity happen in an organic way,” said Bratt, and now encourages local organizations to use the library “while helping guide them to learning more about social issues, whether they want to talk about that to the kids or whether they want to come in from the community and have a safe space to voice their thoughts.”
Like Sonnie, Lonial started out in the nonprofit sector doing direct action organizing. “My first few years as a librarian it felt very theoretical,” she told LJ. “I was [thinking] OK, I know most librarians are down with social justice…but what does that praxis look like? How are we translating that theory into action?” Lonial went on to lead Skokie’s cultural outreach educational program, Coming Together, to provide a wide range of diverse reading lists and programming for all ages. Her colleague Mikael Jacobsen, a 2013 LJ Mover & Shaker, calls her “a social and racial justice warrior with integrity.”
THE ROOTS OF L4BL
Given their dedication to social justice issues, it was no surprise that the four found themselves in long-distance collaborations with one another.
Sonnie and Lonial had gotten to know each other through a national network of community organizers and LGBTQ advocates. Lonial met Bratt at an Urban Library Council meeting at the 2016 Public Library Association (PLA) conference, and met Lawton at that conference as well. After Lonial, Lawton, and Sonnie collaborated on a recent PLA on-demand webinar titled “Engaged and Inclusive: Libraries Embracing Racial Equity and Social Justice,” the three brought Bratt on board to plan some similar material and a possible event at the ALA annual meeting in 2017 in Chicago.
Planning phone calls turned into brainstorming sessions where they shared ideas about the racial equity work each was doing in her institution. Taking inspiration from the Incluseum, an online space devoted to inclusion in museums, Lonial proposed that the four make a public statement as library professionals, ask the community how libraries and library workers were activating nationwide, and create a space where people could begin to have a conversation about it.
“I saw this opportunity to more collectively harness our power,” Lonial told LJ. “I thought it was great that libraries were responding at that local community level—that should obviously be a first priority—but it felt like there was this need…that could go beyond just providing access to that information but really leveraging our ability to create change on a bigger scale.”
Bratt created a simple Squarespace website, and with the addition of the call to action and hashtag, a movement was born. Their goals are twofold, explained Lonial: to capitalize on and leverage the enthusiasm evident in L4BL’s library allies and to support individuals doing the work at the community level.
The response has been strong. At press time L4BL had 107 members, many of them adding comments about the work they are already doing in their libraries and communities. “[People] are so happy that they have ways to start facilitating these conversations, whether it’s frontline staff or middle managers, to show that racial equity is important and much needed in their communities,” said Bratt, “or reaching out to say, ‘Hey, I didn’t have an idea how to get involved or how to help and I really want to, so thank you for providing the opportunity.'”
A number of ALA and PLA committees and task forces have reached out to L4BL in appreciation, and the Black Caucus of ALA (BCALA) has been spreading the word in support of the initiative. The team is preparing to send out a survey to gather input from L4BL’s allies to help define priorities, with the ultimate goal of forming a digital learning space to support participants. “There are dozens of things we could work on,” Lonial told LJ. “We imagine that we’ll be engaging in a discussion about the questions in our call to action, and trying to evolve the list of suggested actions that we put on our resources page, and to compile more resources that are specific to the needs of the folks we’re in contact with. Is it stuff that will make the case to your administration? Is it programming resources? Is it deep training about how to form community partnerships? Is it a space for brainstorming?”
TRUE ALLIES
While the team members work on L4BL independently of their day jobs, all report that it aligns with their libraries’ greater missions, and their leadership has been highly supportive.
In talking to colleagues both within and outside her library, noted Lawton, “I’ve heard from a number of people that the radio silence on these issues is deafening. Not hearing strong support and not seeing our cultural institutions, our civic institutions, those with this reach and power, stand up and stand with people who are being marginalized—for library workers and for communities it feels like a disconnect and a disservice. I think the enthusiastic response we’ve been seeing has been the flip side.”
“The role of an ally, in some ways, can be drawn into part of the role of a librarian,” she added. “The definition of a strong librarian is probably very similar to the definition of a true ally.”
“It’s personal for all of us. Our country is in pain right now,” said Sonnie. “At any given historical moment libraries are a part of civil society, in many ways facilitators of and/or gatekeepers…. I personally believe that our role is to use the spaces that we have, the resources that we have, the skills that we have, to facilitate and enable the kinds of changes we want to see.”
As a person and librarian of color, Bratt said, “it can be daunting and you sometimes feel, ‘if I take a stand, who will defend me?’ It can be a lonely place to be. So it’s been awesome to connect with other librarians and…to have those conversations. To see that has been just revolutionary for me.”