North Texas School Librarians Who Faced Criminal Investigation Speak Out

Earlier this month, PEN America released its annual report on the state of book censorship in the United States, and Texas claimed the second spot for the most book bannings in the country. With nearly 1,800 books banned from Texas classrooms, the free speech advocacy group warned that “systemic removals” of literature from school libraries have reached never-before-seen levels, a trend that began ramping up in the years following the pandemic. 

It was in the first school year following the COVID-19 pandemic, 2021-2022, that three librarians from Granbury ISD found themselves the targets of a criminal investigation into the contents of their libraries. Those librarians are now speaking out in a documentary titled The Librarians, which explores the Granbury investigation, the broader effort to censor books in classrooms, and the educators who are pushing back. 

“Those librarians said to me, ‘We’re the canaries in the coal mine,’” Director Kim A. Snyder told the Observer. “And it was so prescient, because here we are four years later, and what started as an attack on them and on school libraries I think has not only spread geographically, but it’s seeped into so many sectors of society, be it museums and public libraries and colleges.” 

At least one of the librarians left the district as a result of the criminal investigation, and Snyder said months of building trust were pivotal to being able to “tell their story.” Prior to being spotlighted in the documentary, the librarians declined interviews with NBC News’ investigative team, which helped bring attention to the criminal investigation.

One of the documentary’s subjects, librarian Audrey Wilson-Youngblood, will join a Q&A panel at the Texas Theatre following a showing of the film on Oct. 14. Other panelists include Laney Hawes, a co-founder of the Texas Freedom to Read Project, and Courtney Gore, a Granbury ISD school board member who has disavowed the conservative platform she ran on after reading through district curriculum that doesn’t fit “the narrative” that schools are indoctinating children.

The documentary’s release coincides with the growing number of attacks on free speech from state and federal officials. Snyder said she hopes the movie can serve as a warning.  

“Censorship is so fundamentally un-American because it is so antithetical to freedom and everything that this country has been built on,” Snyder said. “A lot of people are feeling like they don’t have agency, but I think the courageous librarians in the film show us that if you’re willing to not succumb to operating from a place of fear …  you can actually affect change in your own town.” 

The Librarians was named best documentary feature film at the Dallas International Film Festival. 

What Happened in Granbury?

The inciting crackdown on school libraries came in 2021, when state Rep. Matt Krause published a list of 850 titles that he believed had the potential to make students “feel discomfort.” Schools were asked to report whether their libraries stocked any of the books, which largely targeted narratives centered around LGBTQ+ characters and themes of race and racism. Gov. Greg Abbott then went a step further, calling for the “immediate removal” of “pornographic material” from school libraries. 

Granbury’s path to book banning began in January 2022, when District Superintendent Jeremy Glenn instructed librarians to remove books that contained descriptions of sex and LGBTQ characters from the shelves. In a recording obtained by ProPublica, Glenn said: “I acknowledge that there are men that think they’re women and there are women that think they’re men. I don’t have any issues with what people want to believe, but there’s no place for it in our libraries.”

A district committee eventually voted to remove three titles from its libraries, but some residents believed there should have been more. Records obtained by NBC News show that two mothers approached Scott London, a chief deputy constable with the Hood County Sheriff’s department, with claims that “pornography” was being distributed to minors in Granbury ISD schools. (The women told NBC News they’d been asked by London to file the complaint.)

They flagged 11 novels, which London then read and annotated before launching a full-out investigation into three of the district’s librarians. A draft of a criminal complaint, which was never filed, accuses each of the librarians of engaging in the “sale, distribution, or display of harmful material to minors.” The complaint also alleges that students who were younger than 18 helped distribute the content in their roles as library aides, which London believed was grounds to ramp up the charges to a felony level. 

The complaint names six books — Fade by Lisa McMann; Gone: A Teacher, A Student, Crossing the Line by Kathleen Jeffie Johnson; The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison; and the A Court of Thorns and Roses trilogy by Sarah J. Maas — as material that should not have been offered in Granbury libraries. 

“After reading each of these books personally in their entirety,” London wrote in a letter to the local district attorney, “I cannot fathom any scientific, educational, governmental, or other similar justifications for some of these books.”

Interestingly enough, the complaint includes excerpts from each piece, many of which (especially the pulls from Maas’ romance-fantasy series) are explicitly sexual in nature. That is to say, somewhere that same Hood County district attorney was forced to read through (this is not a joke) seven pages of faerie smut to consider whether or not it amounted to evidence that a crime had been committed.

For the librarians being investigated, though, this was a witch hunt. Body camera footage reviewed by NBC News shows that London regularly entered their schools to take photographs of content on the shelves of their libraries and to attempt to interview them. Even though charges were never filed, it was a traumatic experience that only seems more likely to happen again. 

As of 2024, 17 states were considering legislation that would waive longstanding qualified immunity protections that shield librarians from prosecution, such as London’s. The protections acknowledge that a student checking out a book that includes sexual content isn’t the same thing as giving a minor a porn magazine, but without that shield, librarians, sexual education instructors and other educators could face criminal prosecution. 

“I think one of the reasons the film is striking a nerve with people across the country is because it really deals with a sense of integrity, of standing up for what you think is right,” Snyder said. “That’s really very hopeful, that we see small town people who have everything to lose who are saying courageously, ‘No.’”