In the ever-escalating national culture war being waged by extremist conservatives against libraries and the right to read, there has arisen in recent years an expanding grassroots movement in defense of those same cherished institutions. Until recently, most of that defense has been waged by small local groups fighting a metaphorical trench warfare in defense of school boards and libraries as well as public libraries and librarians that have been coming under siege, even facing threats of violence.
But that could be changing.
In May 2023, EveryLibrary Institute unveiled a new virtual platform called Fight for the First. EveryLibrary is an advocacy organization whose purpose is to provide resources and assistance to libraries whose funding—and thus existence—is threatened, usually by extremist conservative groups.
According to their website, “EveryLibrary’s vision is that ‘Any library funding challenge anywhere should matter to every library everywhere’. Our mission is to ‘Build Voter Support for Libraries’. Our organizational value system is rooted in access, inclusivity, and empowerment and is expressed by being politically active about funding and policy.”
According to EveryLibrary Associate Director Peter Bromberg, Fight for the First is an online platform by which local activists and grassroots groups work to defend local libraries so they can access national information, resources and connections with people and other groups working toward a common goal.
Fight for the First maintains a list of local groups from across the U.S., some of which contains contact information as well as information on their current efforts. A number of the groups are newly formed; for example, a Philadelphia-based group Phight for the Phirst, has only recently been formed, and is searching for people to get involved.
One particularly beneficial component of Fight for the First is that it lists groups’ pending petitions that people can sign and support. This quite often enables local groups to reach their signature goals much more rapidly than going door-to-door.
Bromberg pointed out that EveryLibrary and Fight for the First are non-partisan.
“We’ll work with anyone, regardless of political affiliation,” he said. “What matters is that they support the common goal of supporting libraries and the right to read. There are conservatives out there who support libraries.”
Barb Brown, a member of the Facebook group We Believe in Blackhawk, worked with Bromberg and used the Fight for the First platform. Brown’s activism centers around the Blackhawk School District headquartered in Beaver Falls, PA.
“Fight for the First was very helpful when my school district had a crazy right-wing majority,” Brown said. “Books were removed from our library based on a complaint by one Mom’s For Liberty school board member. We were able to get the word out with help from Fight for the First. It was election time and critical to make things known quickly.”
Brown went on to say, “We have a strong core group of people working together that started during COVID. This group has changed as the issues have changed—but the book issue really was dividing in our area. The books were removed from the shelf and placed in a locked drawer in the librarian’s office. And while the board had flipped and we have a reasonable majority, the books have not been returned to the shelf. No more have been removed and the new board is working through policy changes prior to deciding how the removed books will be handled.”
“Without [Fight for the First] and other organizations like Red Wine and Blue, the Education Law Center and a few others, I’m not sure we could have flipped the board,” she said. “Honestly, the best help they gave us was the platform for the petition to collect signatures of those who agreed that removing the books was the wrong thing to do. Having access to the names and email addresses as well as being able to send emails to supporters was great.”
She concluded by saying, “Having Peter [Bromberg] and others in that group to reach out to for help and guidance was also not only helpful but also [provided] reassurance that we were doing the right things along the way.”
A similar experience was related by Rebeccah Hoffman, who works with a local group in western Pennsylvania called No Book Bans Here: Pine-Richland. Pine-Richland is a school district in the suburbs of Pittsburgh whose board became dominated in the last election by conservative Republicans. As is frequently the case when Republicans take over a school board, it started efforts to ban books from the school library with LGBTQ+ characters and DEI themes.
Hoffman and her colleagues started organizing immediately to counter the Republican efforts. Hoffman admits that the Fight for the First platform was not only helpful in accumulating petition signatures, but proved to be an invaluable resource for connecting with like-minded individuals and contacts whenever there was a need for a strong showing at school board meetings and the like.
Hoffman also reached out to Fight for the First’s parent organization, EveryLibrary, finding the staff responsive and their counsel invaluable. In the end, Hoffman and her group were able to restore every book that the Republican board had sought to be removed from their school library.
But Fight for the First can also make an outsized impact on the struggles of a single individual.
Martha Hickson is a long-term librarian at North Huntingdon High School in southern New Jersey. For the past three years, Hickson has been subjected to online and personal attacks from extremist conservatives in her school district.
The reason she has been targeted for right-wing ire is because she spearheaded a community effort to prevent the school board from banning a whole raft of books from the school library—mostly LGBTQ-themed. With the resources on the Fight for the First platform, Hickson was able to mobilize enough community support to get all the targeted titles returned to the library’s shelves.
Hickson’s activism naturally made her a target for extremist harassment and scurrilous allegations such as being a pornographer and a groomer who needed to be dismissed. So relentless was the push to dismiss her, a meeting of the school board was set in January of this year to discuss the matter. However, thanks to the network that had been built up on Fight for the First, almost 400 people showed up to support Hickson’s cause. To date, Hickson has kept her job.
Later in May, another school board meeting was set to discuss the banning of another LGBTQ-themed instructional book for teens. Once again, the Fight for the First network kicked into action. Almost 200 residents showed up to support the presence of this book in the school library. Hickson, while still being subjected to harassment and intimidation, she has certainly seen that she is not alone in her struggles.
Hickson’s assessment of Fight for the First’s value was simple: “It’s been a godsend.”
According to Bromberg, scenarios like these have been, and are playing out in local communities throughout the country. As extremist right-wingers continue to ramp up their culture war against libraries, librarians, LGBTQ books—and students—they have shown themselves to be an effectively organized and strategically savvy force. This has often put the grassroots groups springing up in opposition to the extremist agenda at a disadvantage.
However, the tools and organizational resources available on the Fight for the First website, as well as the services offered by Fight for the First’s parent organization EveryLibrary, has begun the process of molding these groups of home-grown activists into a nationally effective counter-force against the MAGA war machine.