The First Amendment Lives in The Library

A Tennessee library director was fired for refusing relocate dozens of children’s books to adult sections. But history and legal precedent suggests she was right to resist.

Luanne James has led a career in public service for over 25 years and has served as the Director of the Rutherford County Library System (RCLS) in Tennessee since July 2025. But when she refused to comply with a board decision she argued violated “the community’s right to information” and constituted “a direct infringement on the principles of free speech,” she was fired. Her colleagues championed her as a “patriot,” “inspiration,” and “hero” for standing firm.

James was protesting a March 16 majority vote by the RCLS board to move 132 children’s books into the adult sections of its libraries in Murfreesboro, Smyrna, and Eagleville. Board Chairman Cody York identified the majority of the titles for relocation, which he argued could promote gender confusion and violence in children.

This was York’s second attempt to limit books containing topics related to gender, sex, sexuality, and LGBTQ+ subjects. These include The Airless Year by Adam Knave, flagged for “female empowerment,” Jyoti Rajan Gopal’s Desert Queen, flagged for “strongly” promoting “gender equality, female empowerment, following one’s dreams, and challenging rigid social roles,” and David Levithan’s Answers in the Pages, for “classroom discussions of book bans and censorship.” In 2025, he led a vote to “remove material that promotes, encourages, advocates for or normalizes transgenderism or ‘gender confusion’ in minors,” and later asked the board to rescind due to legal challenges.

Since 2021, localized campaigns have targeted these types of books at the school library and classroom level. These efforts have put the number of book bans in the U.S. at an all-time high, with nearly 3,392 attempts to censor books between 2021 and 2024. In 2023, these numbers peaked, and challenges were brought against more than 9,000 titles.

Of books banned in two or more school districts, 39% contained LGBTQ+ characters, and 57% included sex-related themes or depictions, yet nearly 60% of these were written specifically for young adult audiences. While legitimate to restrict children from accessing books that contain graphic descriptions of sexual acts or pornographic images, the directive from the RCLS board targets a far broader category of works that do not contain this content, including books that promote disfavored ideas. Now, challenges to these books have only escalated, driven by organized advocacy groups, a growing patchwork of state laws, and public officials like York — and the focus has shifted from classroom shelves to public libraries.

In 2025, 55% of challenges to books were directed towards public libraries. As titles on these topics have already disappeared from several schools, any restriction on those ideas in public libraries threatens to further limit their availability outside the school.

James’ story is just one of several examples of librarians and school teachers around the country who have faced aggressive backlash and professional consequences for resisting these attempts. Yet, there are strong legal precedents indicating that the RCLS boards’ directive may have been unconstitutional. Empirical evidence also shows that increasing restrictions on children’s books carries serious risks for young individuals’ cognitive development and psychological well-being.

Librarians as Defenders of Intellectual Freedom

Depriving people of ideas deprives them of their ability to recognize injustice, critique the status quo, and enforce accountability. These abilities are critical to democracies, and largely contingent on a free marketplace of ideas that contains even those concepts that authorities might deem threatening, dangerous, or provocative.

Yet, in the late 1940s and throughout most of the 1950s, during a crusade against the spread of communist ideas known as “The Red Scare,” panic took priority over liberty. Similar to the movement against library books today, organizations and committees branded themselves as patriotic and pressured libraries to expunge materials deemed radical or inflammatory from their collections. Eventually, the American people pushed back, and in the process, squarely placed librarians as essential defenders of intellectual freedom.

In 1948, the American Library Association amended its Library Bill of Rights to explicitly call on libraries to resist censorship “in maintenance of their responsibility to provide public information and enlightenment.” Librarians, as guardians of the venues in which people exercise their rights to free inquiry, have an obligation to ensure their facilities embody the diversity of thought that that freedom intrinsically requires.

History has often situated librarians as one of the first lines of defense for this freedom, a duty that James sought to fulfill. Retaliating against them for doing so will have consequences far beyond a single library and could shake one of the most important pillars of democracy. This is why courts have continued to treat libraries as distinguished warehouses of knowledge, where the removal or restriction of books must be carefully considered to avoid infringing on these freedoms.

Libraries and Legal Precedent

In Island Trees Sch. Dist. v. Pico by Pico (1982), the Supreme Court ruled that public school boards cannot remove books from their junior high and high school libraries simply because they disagree with the ideas in them. This would violate students’ First Amendment right to receive ideas, “a necessary predicate to the recipient’s meaningful exercise of his own rights of speech, press, and political freedom.” Removing books because of their content is a viewpoint-based restriction on ideas that students are entitled to hear.

This principle has also been applied in cases involving public libraries. In Sund v. City of Wichita Falls, Texas (2000), a federal court ruled that moving books from the children’s sections of a library to adult sections because of distaste for their content imposes an unconstitutional burden on patrons’ right to receive information.

If a legal challenge to the RCLS board’s relocation directive were brought, it’s likely that a court would raise similar constitutional issues, given that it was explicitly aimed at children’s books containing themes related to gender, sex, and sexuality. Add to that the fact that York expressly opposed books that suggest “boys aren’t really boys” or “girls aren’t really girls” — a specific idea that would constitute a viewpoint-based restriction. Enforcing restrictions on children’s books with the intent to limit minors’ access to a particular ideology has consistently been found incompatible with the First Amendment.

However, in Little v. Llano County (2025), the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals suggested that the state can exercise some discretion in public libraries, ruling that the curation of book collections constitutes a form of government speech. This would mean that the viewpoint discrimination that the Supreme Court determined violated students’ First Amendment rights in Pico would be permissible in public libraries, even if it has the same consequences for patrons’ rights.

But this creates a split with the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which determined in GLBT Youth in Iowa Schools Task Force v. Reynolds (2024) that the placement and removal of books could not be considered government speech in public school libraries because the public would not interpret it as such.

The most compelling argument against the ruling in Llano, however, comes from the dissenting opinion itself. “The logic of the Supreme Court’s school library decision in Pico— that the government may not remove library books with the purpose of denying access to disfavored ideas,” Judge Higginson wrote, “applies with even greater force to public libraries, where the government has no inculcating role over its sovereign, the people.”

While the government has a role in public schools to adhere to educational standards and teach certain values, which could warrant removing or replacing books, it has no such role in public libraries. There is even less reason, then, to deny access to books in these settings. In fact, Higginson added, the dissenting justices in Pico even justified restrictions on books in school libraries, because “the books would remain available in public libraries.” This suggests that the right to receive ideas should have even stronger protections in public libraries than in school libraries.

Restricting children’s access to books solely to deny them access to the ideas in them infringes on their First Amendment right to receive information that the Supreme Court has consistently recognized. History suggests it was James’ duty to protect these rights for the patrons of Rutherford County’s libraries, and firing her for doing so sends a discouraging message to librarians who may confront the same crossroads.

At a time when free inquiry is under siege, and books are collateral damage in partisan conflict, it is more important than ever that librarians are empowered to defend these freedoms. Further research shows that when children’s access to books intended for their learning and growth is restricted, it presents serious risks to their cognitive development and mental well-being.

Educational and Psychological Harms

Research in educational psychology supports a link between access to diverse literature and the development of empathy among children. A 2019 study published in the National Library of Medicine synthesized child development psychology and literary theory to identify the pathways in which children’s books promote cognitive empathy. The findings indicate that the stories that advance empathy depend on challenging children to “understand the perspective of protagonists who are unlike them.”

The part of literature most critical in advancing children’s reasoning skills, which allows them to assess others’ intentions, perceptions, desires, and mental states, is the part that exposes them to unfamiliar points of view. Restricting children’s books out of fear that the ideas in them may somehow corrupt their young readers deprives them of diverse characters and stories that could significantly benefit their cognitive empathy and reasoning skills. Promoting tolerance, overcoming bias, and participating in civic life hinge on these abilities and strengths, which raises the question: Do we want to diminish any opportunity for the next generation of leaders to build these skills?

Banning or restricting books often backfires, drawing more attention and publicity to the subjects they discuss. During “The Red Scare,” the New York City Board of Education enforced a ban on Howard Fast’s Citizen Tom Paine, a book that had attracted controversy over its “Communist” themes. The ban triggered increased public interest, driving readership among high schoolers and sales for Fast.

Books banned in 2021 and 2022 saw an average 12% increase in circulation after the ban, while bans in one state correlated with increased readership in states of different political leanings where the book remained unrestricted.

Instead of restricting books in public libraries, decisions about children’s access to materials should be made primarily by the household. Parents can monitor children’s reading and place their own controls, without setting those boundaries for an entire community, which carries serious legal, psychological, and ethical implications.

What’s at stake isn’t any single book or library, but the bedrock freedoms of a democracy and children’s rights to learn freely. Every restriction on a book threatens to take the stories, perspectives, and people in them out of young Americans’ hands.

If a librarian can be fired for standing against such attacks on ideas, we risk a future where the next generation of leaders are disenfranchised of their right to be wholly informed — the foundation of a democratic citizenry.

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Ashley Haek is a communications coordinator and research assistant at The Future of Free Speech.