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“A lot of people in power view knowledge as dangerous,” says organizer Mariame Kaba. In this episode of Movement Memos, Kelly Hayes speaks with Kaba and organizers Alison Macrina and Katie Clark about why public libraries matter, not just as places to borrow books, but as vital public infrastructure. They discuss libraries as spaces where people can gather without spending money, learn together, and build the kind of shared intellectual life that authoritarianism seeks to destroy. The conversation explores book bans, censorship, austerity, AI, political education, and the bipartisan defunding of public goods, while making a powerful case for libraries as sites of struggle, possibility, and collective survival.

Music: Son Monarcas & Jobii

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to Movement Memos, a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are going to talk about public libraries, their role in public life, and what is at stake in the fight to defend them in this fascist moment. Libraries are one of the few public institutions where people can simply exist without being expected to purchase something, where we can access information and ideas, learn together, and participate in shared intellectual life. They are part of the public infrastructure that makes free thought, knowledge, and inquiry possible. And yet, these beloved institutions are frequently targeted for devastating cuts, including by Democratic mayors, rather than the investment and expansion that our collective well-being actually requires.

Today, we’ll be hearing from Alison Macrina, Katie Clark, and Mariame Kaba about libraries as public infrastructure, contested political terrain, and spaces of possibility, and about what it means to fight for them in this moment.

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KH: Alison, Mariame, Katie, welcome to Movement Memos.

Mariame Kaba: Thanks so much, Kelly, happy to be here.

Alison Macrina: Yeah. Delighted to be here, Kelly. Thank you.

Katie Clark: Really glad to be here. Thanks.

KH: I’m so glad to be in conversation with the three of you today. To start, I’d love to have each of you introduce yourselves and tell us a bit about your work.

AM: So I’m Alison Macrina. I use she/her pronouns, and I lead Library Freedom Project, where we’re working on political education and community building with library workers, particularly focused on issues around information democracy, tech justice, access to information, anti-surveillance, and free expression. We work within libraries because we feel like it’s the best way to reach a broad and diverse public.

KC: Hi, my name is Katie Clark. I am an elected library trustee here in the Greater Los Angeles area. I serve on the board of the Altadena Library District. We are an independent special district with two branches that serves about 43,000 people. We serve the unincorporated community of Altadena, which may be familiar to many of you because it was one of the most heavily affected communities in the Eaton Fire in January of 2025, so we’re both doing regular library stuff and then library in a post-disaster context. So I have been an elected trustee there since 2018, and we do all the range of things that you would normally expect, but because we’re an independent special district, we’re really the only public agency that serves specifically our community in an elected capacity. Everything else happens through Los Angeles County.

I am also, along with Mariame, of course, a member of the steering committee for For The People: A Leftist Library Project, and my particular focus For The People has been on our library trustee candidate training program. So we have developed an original 12-week curriculum that we have offered to cohorts of folks who are seeking elected or appointed positions on their library boards, and we are in the beginning of our third annual cohort. We have an incredible group of folks across the country who have gone through that process and are serving their libraries in a really wide range of amazing ways.

MK: My name is Mariame Kaba. I use she/her pronouns. I’m an educator. I’m an organizer, and I also went back to library school in 2020 in order to be able to learn more about archives and archiving and librarianship, and so that’s been really fun. I am part of For The People: Leftist Library Project along with Katie, and I’m sure we’ll talk more about that project moving forward. I’m also part of the New York City Public Library Action Network here in New York City. We call it NYC PLAN, and we are trying to move on getting our libraries more money in their budgets and also for those budgets to be stable along with a few other things that we’re also moving on. So that’s kind of my library affiliation.

KH: So libraries are often described as places where people borrow books, but in practice, they function as a much broader kind of public infrastructure. They are places where people access information, use the internet, learn new skills, encounter new ideas, and sometimes they simply are a place where people can exist without being expected to spend money. From your perspective, what role do libraries actually play in community life?

AM: I mean, you said it, Kelly. It’s so many essential functions of community life, and I think in particular, in this moment where the public sphere is being robbed of its last few coins by the ruling class that libraries are in this position where they’ve been sort of forced to step up and take on new responsibilities as other areas of public life have been defunded. But one thing in particular that you said I think is so important [is] that it’s a space where people who can’t purchase something are allowed to congregate. We have so few of these spaces where you’re not expected to make a purchase or that really, in the library, there’s almost no purchase you can even make. In this way, it also means that it’s a space where all kinds of people within your community can mix with each other.

Another really essential part of community life for libraries is that it’s a space where trans people are defended and celebrated, especially trans children, both in the sense of materials and programming that is welcoming and celebratory of trans people and also a space where a lot of trans people work. So trans library workers have this visible community role. And so, I think that one of the big reasons that there’s been such a reactionary backlash against libraries is that it’s a space where queer adults and queer children can be together and show not just that it’s okay, but necessary.

KC: I think so many of the things that Alison has underlined are absolutely essential and a reason why libraries are so dear to the hearts of so many of us. I think that we could talk for hours about what libraries do, and in some ways, I think it’s also important to think about what they are not, especially in this moment. Libraries are not a place of transaction in the capitalist sense, right? They’re not a place where you have to spend money. Certainly, they are a place where we devote our common public resources ideally to the common good, but you don’t have to make a purchase. It doesn’t matter what the number is in your bank account. It doesn’t matter what your housing status is. It doesn’t matter what your immigration status is.

Now, this is the ideal, of course. We do not see this articulated in every library or those ideals carried out in every library in the way that we want them to, but I think in the highest and best expression of the public library that we all strive for, you are there simply as a human being, as a neighbor, as a member of your community, and you have intrinsic value. You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to perform anything. You don’t have to have a reason for being there. You don’t have to be productive. You can just exist, and there are very, very few spaces in our public life, certainly, where that remains the case today.

I think also, public libraries continue to be resistant to surveillance, resistant to incursions on people’s privacy in a way that many of our other public spaces are not. Again, this is something I think we strive for. We don’t always see that embodied in every public library, but what you look at, what you borrow, the programs you attend, all of that is your business and nobody else’s. I think, again, there are very few public spaces, very few taxpayer-funded spaces, spaces that we all support that can say that.

MK: Yeah. Yes to what Alison and Katie both said. I think something that we need to also kind of maybe nail down a little bit more is at a time in our culture, and Alison made mention of this, where there’s a need for third spaces, a need for actual public amenities in community that people can access, libraries are critical. They are places where you can have public space to meet, where there are sometimes venues in libraries where people go to theater performances and they go to concerts and they do a bunch of things that they can do with other people in common. This is so critical and really important and something that a lot of people have been talking about lately as we’ve descended further into fascism. Where can you go in this country where you can bump into people of multiple class backgrounds, different racial backgrounds, different creeds on a regular basis?

You usually can find that at a public library in whatever city or town you’re in. That’s really important, and it’s not to say that libraries can’t be exclusionary. Sometimes they are because human beings run these institutions, right? But they do offer, still, opportunities for that kind of cross engagement of people that I just don’t know where else you find that today. You don’t often find it in local churches anymore or local synagogues or mosques. You don’t find it. We still have it in some of our public schools, but they’re quickly trying to dissolve those as opportunities for multiple types of people to come into contact with each other regularly. So I do think that that is really incredibly important to think about and to think about libraries as public amenities, libraries as infrastructure in a time when we’re dealing with climate change, places where people usually can find a place that’s hot enough to be heated during very cold spells, a place that hopefully, in many places, has AC. You can cool down. We need to think about libraries expansively in order to understand how important they are in our culture and our society.

KH: Thank you. I really appreciate these points. I think libraries are often missing from our conversations about what it actually takes to resist authoritarianism and defend people’s ability to think, learn, and question freely. Why do libraries matter so much to that struggle?

AM: I think so much of what Mariame and Katie said. It’s just going to be that the whole time, by the way, Kelly. We all agree. We’re three colleagues who are in such amazing community and agreement with what one another is saying. But yeah, what Mariame was saying about these third spaces, I think that the fact of the library being a community space, interacting with people from all walks of life under it’s… Obviously we’re talking about the most ideal conditions, right? Under the most ideal conditions, it can be those things. I think that it’s not only that the library is this infrastructure that’s devoted to free inquiry, but I think that we learn best when we are in those kinds of spaces where we’re introduced to people and ideas that are not like ourselves. I think particularly, libraries are that infrastructure in this current moment when we’re at misinformation crisis levels.

There’s AI slop everywhere. We’re dealing with the theft of our attention from big tech platforms. The library is the most visible institution defending knowledge and truth. Thinking about the way that we as a society decided that that was infrastructure that was important to us in spite of all the other things in the US society that we get wrong, we have libraries in every single community and they are beloved and they literally exist to make free thought and inquiry possible under the best conditions, so it really boggles the mind why they aren’t front and center in these conversations. I see a lot of times when actually, libraries do get centered rhetorically in conversations about resisting authoritarianism, but rarely do people with any power translate that rhetorical reference into material resources.

In particular, I’m thinking about where I live in Philadelphia, our mayor, Cherelle Parker, has extolled the virtues of libraries many times. But when there was the huge cold snap over the winter here just a few weeks ago, the libraries were all required to serve as warming centers, which the workers were so ready and willing to do, but the city offered them absolutely no resources. And so, this way that the austerity sort of takes away from the library even when it’s positioned as something that can meet that moment, it’s really unfortunate.

KC: I think that when we look at the question about the role of the library in defending democracy, the role of the library in resisting authoritarianism and fascism, you’re absolutely right that libraries are usually not front and center. I think it’s also because we have a real aversion to thinking of libraries as political entities, but of course, they are, right? Just like public schools, just like anything else that is part of our political landscape, libraries as public agencies are a site where politics happens. I think we have a very romanticized view of public libraries. Many of us had a whole host of very positive experiences early in life, and we have this sort of rose-colored vision of libraries where you go and you do summer reading and there’s story time. How could that possibly be political? At the same time, we have this idea that politics somehow equals exclusively partisan, exclusively bad, as opposed to thinking about politics for what it really is, which is just the way that we all make decisions and allocate resources together.

So I think those two forces combined, this romanticization of libraries and an aversion to thinking of libraries as a site of politics, often means that we are not seeing either the role that libraries can play or the way that politics is playing out in our public library spaces. And so, a lot of the work that we do at For The People, especially with our library trustees, is trying to get people to shake up that assumption that actually, when we’re making decisions about how library workers are paid or what collection development policies we have or how our physical spaces are accessible or more frequently not accessible to people, those are choices about politics. The way that those choices show up in the fabric and the experience of the public library is, in many ways, a microcosm and a local expression of what we value, what we care about, and how we enact that.

MK: So I 100% ditto everything that’s been said again. I wanted to just also add that last year, I wrote a piece about criminalizing librarians. I wanted to kind of uplift the kind of threats to what librarians are facing in this moment and the realities of libraries in a “democratic society,” but now under increasing fascism. Some of the things that I wanted to kind of bring about in terms of that piece was to remind people that a lot of people in power view knowledge as dangerous. Knowledge is not some sort of kind of neutral thing that you just either have and........

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