In the last five years, conservative politicians and activists on the local, state and national levels have ramped up attacks against books about race, diversity, LGTBQ identity and American history. One of the most visible battles took place in the Texas Hill Country, when white Christian nationalists came after books in the Llano County Libraries. These culture war battles made national news, and a legal challenge to this censorship went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Leila Little was one of the plaintiffs in that case. She has spoken out against censorship, served as an advocate for community libraries and librarians, and ultimately decided one of the best ways to continue the fight was to earn a master’s degree in library science. Leila continues to be a powerful voice of resistance, even (with her husband) running for office to replace a central figure in Llano’s book-banning controversy. I’m grateful for her work and for her willingness to talk about it.
Greg Garrett: How and why did you get involved with this fight against library censorship?
Leila Green Little
Leila Green Little: I had a previous career before I became a full-time volunteer advocate. I used to be a speech language pathologist at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Then my husband and I decided to start a family and moved back to Llano. We live on the cattle ranch that’s been in the family for 140 years. This is our home.
In October 2021, this group of people started showing up and making public comments about the libraries. My friend Jeanie went to that commissioner’s court meeting. It was a problem for me to have those voices be so loud, so organized and unchallenged. I drafted a public comment speech, my little 3-minute talk, and just asked the commissioner’s court to reconsider the wholesale removal of books they don’t like.
When I started showing up at Commissioner’s Court making speeches in December 2021 is when I understood that was not going to be effective.
I got an email sent to me from Jeanie, and it was from one of the women who was speaking up in favor of removing books, and she was talking about me: “Oh, I can’t forget to tell you that that lady who tried to call censorship at that meeting, she tried to request a meeting with the county judge and he told her there was no need to meet. So we’ve got to thank him for that at the Tea Party meeting.”
When I saw that email, I knew I wasn’t on a level playing field and I knew my little Pollyanna ways weren’t going to do anything. That’s when I reached for the first line of defense for the First Amendment, which is journalists.
“I knew I wasn’t on a level playing field and I knew my little Pollyanna ways weren’t going to do anything.”
We did not enter into litigation lightly. We didn’t file the lawsuit until April 2022, after we had written letters and made phone calls and made speeches and tried to get seats on the newly constituted library advisory board and none of it was working. We had evidence that censorship was happening and that there was a lot of wrongdoing, so we knew we had to keep fighting it, otherwise this was going to become a propaganda center and not a public library.
GG: So you took the county to court in April 2022. I saw things in national papers about the Llano and Kingsland libraries. Most of the librarians I’ve interviewed have not been willing to talk to me on the record. A big part of that is that they have felt like they’ve been exposed to an incredible amount of abuse, their families have been endangered. Could you tell me a little bit about what you faced and why you made this decision not to back away, but actually to dive deeper into it?
LGL: Well, first, I’ll just acknowledge the incredible amount of privilege I have. I’m a white, straight, financially comfortable woman. If our situation were different, you might not be talking to me because I may have decided, ‘You know what? Feeding our family might be more important than taking a stand.’ But it wasn’t. It was after a great deal of thought, because my husband and I, we’re from here. We may not have known what the whole story would look like, but I knew there would be some social consequences for sure. We saw those pretty quickly, and they have evolved over the years.
I’ve been incredibly fortunate compared to some. While there’s a lot of vitriol directed at me from organizations or publications like Texas Scorecard, I don’t get a whole bunch of emails sent directly to me. My life hasn’t been threatened. I’m very, very lucky in that regard.
Now, has it been awful? Is cyberbullying disgusting? The real-world things like my husband’s political sign being vandalized with the word “pedophile” on it in town? Those things hurt. And ask me if I would do it again. Yeah, I would, because it’s important. I’m in a unique position to be the person to bear the yoke of this fight.
My mom always told me growing up that I could read whatever I wanted to read. There were no limitations on what I was allowed to read. And it’s something I didn’t understand other people didn’t have or share. And that’s a freedom I’ve given my own children as well. All reading is good reading, so that’s a family value.
“If I wouldn’t have pushed, none of this would’ve made news.”
Another piece of it is we found out one of the books they censored was In the Night Kitchen. That was a book we checked out, that my children read. This was a direct effect of the county’s actions.
If I wouldn’t have pushed, none of this would’ve made news. Books would’ve just been quietly removed, and it wouldn’t have been a big deal. But they picked the wrong lady.
GG: Little v. Llano County was filed in 2022. It moved on up through the court system and was in front of the Supreme Court.
LGL: We filed a petition for writ of certiorari for the Supreme Court to hear our case. It takes four “yes” votes for your case to be picked up. Unfortunately, there were not four people who sit on that bench who feel the loss of First Amendment rights for 38 million Americans who live in Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana was important enough to discuss our case. So that’s the end of the line. As case law stands, public libraries can become places of indoctrination, propaganda centers beholden to the whims of the political party that controls the libraries.
GG: You spoke out, you wrote letters, you reached out to journalists, you took legal action. Are you continuing to fight back?
LGL: It’s not just the lawsuit, and that was the end of it. As I learned more during the process. Early on, I got connected to certain people, because again, I was just reaching out. I had done research on my own and learned as much as I could. And then other people are like, “Well, you need to talk with this guy over at PEN America. Well, you need to talk with this journalist who’s covering it. Well, here’s an organization. You need to speak with them and here’s the National Coalition against Censorship.”
So I became aware of all these other organizations. I’ve developed a huge network at this point.
People began to ask me to speak and present and talk about what was going on. In Montgomery County, Texas, there was an issue with censorship at the public library. We wrote a letter, sent it to them. This is back when our court case was still going on. “Listen, we’ve won in court. Y’all are screwing up. This is going to be bad for you. There’s going to be legal action. Please reverse course.”
In addition, it became clear that local advocacy was not going to have an impact if the state legislature was going to pass laws that limit the freedom to read. My first legislative session was in the spring of 2023. I started going up to the Capitol and learning how to speak with staffers, speak with representatives and senators, and testify at hearings. I started doing that, volunteering with the various organizations I learned about, serving on committees and consuming as much information as I could. I felt I needed to have a strong understanding of the existing First Amendment case law theory around library practice.
GG: And are there things you learned in your library science classes that reinforced what you had done as a volunteer and an advocate?
LGL: One of the very first things you learn in intro courses is about Ranganathan’s Five Laws, things like “save the time of the reader,” “every reader, his or her book,” “every book, its reader.” Those three principles really, really spoke to me. What I was seeing is that censorship goes against those principles just automatically.
“It is not a librarian’s job to hide things from the public, to protect people from information.”
People are talking about library books as something that could be dangerous, that children should be protected from. I could understand that a little from a patron’s perspective but switching over and looking at that same issue from a librarian’s perspective, it is not a librarian’s job to hide things from the public, to protect people from information. That’s antithetical to the profession. The job of the librarian is to connect a patron with the information he or she seeks, needs or wants.
GG: What are we losing when books and information are not made available to library patrons?
LGL: The worst part about that question is that we don’t even know what we’re losing because we don’t know what impacts certain books are going to have on certain people. This past weekend, I took my family to the North Texas Teen Book Festival and I was so excited. We got to meet R.L. Stein, the creator of Goosebumps. I devoured those books when I was in elementary school and now my son does too. He was on a panel with author Tiffany D. Jackson, who now writes YA horror and stuff like that. She was talking about the impact he had on her.
She is really, really blazing a trail in her own genre. If she hadn’t had access to Goosebumps, if she hadn’t had access to Stephen King — both of those have been challenged, they’ve been banned — she wouldn’t be the author she is today.
We’re losing joy. We are losing trailblazers. We are losing people being able to see themselves in a book. We’re losing people being able to imagine a different situation than their own.
It’s an incalculable loss.
GG: Where are you finding joy, strength, courage to keep fighting?
LGL: That’s a good question. And it’s pretty easy. It’s my family. It’s my husband. We have been happily married for almost 21 years. He was my high school sweetheart. It’s my two children. And it is last Friday being up at the elementary school when they had book character parade day. And my son dressed like an Egyptologist and my daughter dressed like Pippy Longstocking.
It’s stargazing. Right now, we have the gorgeous bluebonnets here. So it’s little things.
It’s a good book.
It’s also celebrating the victories.
When you deal with awfulness, there’s also some incredible good stuff that comes out of it. Somebody in a place like Llano pokes her head up and says, “Hey, maybe I think a little bit differently than y’all do. Maybe there’s a different thing to do here.” Then you get other people who are too quiet and too scared to speak up and they go, “Oh, well, she did it. I can do it too.”
Greg Garrett
Greg Garrett is an award-winning professor at Baylor University, where he is the Carole McDaniel Hanks Professor of Literature and Culture. One of America’s leading voices on religion and culture, he is the author of 30 books, most recently the novel Bastille Day and The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity. He is currently administering a major research grant on racism from the Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation and finishing a book on racist mythologies for Oxford University Press. Greg is a seminary-trained lay preacher in the Episcopal Church and Honorary Canon Theologian at the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris. He lives in Austin with his wife, Jeanie, and their two daughters.
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