Freeing the Library

Aaron Boehmer writes about community libraries and the importance of accessible archival and literary resources in these times.

By Aaron BoehmerDecember 5, 2025

• Politics

• Cultural Studies

EARLIER THIS YEAR, President Donald Trump continued his attempts to remake our country’s cultural memory in his own image. Without reason, he fired the archivist of the United States, the person who heads the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), along with NARA’s inspector general and other senior staffers. Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Marco Rubio—who is known for his “misreading of history”—was named temporary head of the archives.

Vital institutions, resources, information, and data have since been stripped from the public record or otherwise undermined in order to better align with Trump’s agenda. This has included rooting “improper ideology” out of museums like the Smithsonian—a term that serves as a catchall for anything critical of how race, gender, and class have shaped the American project. “Proper” ideology thus means American exceptionalism, the whitewashing of scientific racism, open transphobia, and the downplaying of chattel slavery and its systemic legacy. The administration has also targeted and aimed to eliminate the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts, thus impeding the ability of these agencies to provide essential support and funding to libraries and museums across the country.

Trump’s attacks on history, knowledge, and the archiving of both is as covert as it is overt. In September, a report finding that right-wing extremists are far more violent and dangerous than any other domestic terrorist group quietly vanished from the Department of Justice’s website. In the words of American Oversight, a watchdog organization founded in 2017 during Trump’s first term, any federal agency (let alone one like NARA that is dedicated to the preservation of cultural heritage) that is “led by loyalists more devoted to maintaining the president’s power than to preserving the truth is one more likely to turn a blind eye to future violations.” Broadly speaking, this reframing of history is exceptionally frightening but also not exactly new; rather, according to American historian Peniel E. Joseph, our political moment is “reminiscent of the age of McCarthyism,” an era when speech in favor of social justice was suppressed.

Perhaps the most succinct way to describe the Trump administration’s vision for libraries, archives, and recordkeeping in general is revisionist, producing an image of American history as flat as it is mythological, as dangerous as it is predictable. The state—especially under such a regime of ideological revisionism—cannot be trusted to preserve history and knowledge in ways that account for nuance and depth. Trump’s weaponization of our national institutions should remind us that libraries and archives have not been and should never be thought of as merely neutral, existing in a political vacuum. According to the 2017 study “Libraries on the Frontlines: Neutrality and Social Justice,” thinking of a library “as a neutral entity limits the work that is necessary to truly provide responsive, equitable, and inclusive access to information, skill development, […] community conversations, and other library services for communities dealing with crises or social unrest.”

Taking up this challenge, a number of small and local archival and library projects throughout the country have stepped into the breach. One example of such an independent project is the Saint Heron Community Library, founded in 2021 by creative mogul Solange Knowles and her studio Saint Heron. This library, relaunched seasonally, curates a collection of rare, out of print, and first-edition titles by Black and Brown artists, available to borrowers for 45 days free of charge.

When Saint Heron relaunched its collection in September, I was able to check out a title. The book was sent straight to my mailbox, wrapped in mylar: Eldorado Ballroom, a 2023 zine cataloging the live performance series of that name, which celebrates foundational contributions from Black practitioners of music, performance art, and creativity in general. (The series’ second iteration took place at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and its third debuted earlier this year at its namesake venue in Houston’s Third Ward.) The zine describes how the audience at Eldorado Ballroom was “contained in togetherness” through performances by the Clark Sisters, Kelela, Linda Sharrock, and more, and it presents photos taken throughout the series’ run—images of performers, organizers, and audience members, “a collective of strangers among familiar faces and sentiments.” As with Eldorado Ballroom, the Saint Heron library itself sets out to organize such a collective, this time to archive and share readings of history that are critical and nuanced rather than monolothic and blindly affirmative.

Saint Heron isn’t alone in its mission of a reimagined model for libraries and archives today. In the face of federal suppression and crackdowns, many groups have affirmed their commitment to political education via expanded access to books and other educational resources, whether in digital or analog form. The Radical Hood Library in Los Angeles, for example, offers a range of titles—from radical theory and history to children’s books—that uplift authors of color. The library, founded by rapper Noname, has also organized a books-to-prisons program and hosts a monthly national book club (October’s pick was Assata: An Autobiography).

The Free Black Women’s Library, centered in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, describes itself as a “Black Feminist archive.” A literary hub, social site, and community care space, it hosts a free store and a myriad of public programming (including reading clubs and workshops, and weekly book swaps). With branches in Atlanta, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, and Richmond, Virginia, the project maintains a collection of more than 5,000 books written by Black women and nonbinary writers.

The Inside Books Project is an Austin-based organization that sends more than 30,000 free books each year to people incarcerated in Texas prisons. Founded in 1998, the project consists of volunteers who field request letters from prisoners and then select books that fit those requests. Once packaged, sent, and received, the books become the property of the recipients, thereby building out the personal libraries of thousands of incarcerated people and thus expanding their access to knowledge.

In 2023, writer Amarie Gipson founded the Reading Room, an independent reference library in Houston that aims to increase access to Black art and culture by way of a collection of over 700 books (Eldorado Ballroom included), a selection of which is available to browse only at the library’s in-person space. Gipson describes the Reading Room as a “new model for librarianship and public institution building.”

Ebony L. Haynes, who was appointed global head of curatorial projects at David Zwirner earlier this year, operates a similar model out of her gallery, 52 Walker, in Tribeca, Manhattan. The library at 52 Walker consists of reference books related to its research-based exhibitions. “How great to have an archive, not just things related to the shows here but to the ideas in the shows—an archive of ideas and influences,” Haynes told me. “I hope that after someone engages with the library, they’ll feel more connected to an artist they’re interested in, or to a show, or that they learn something new.”

After you apply to 52 Walker and receive a library card, you gain in-person access to the collection, some of which is available to check out, take home, and return on an honor system. “I liked the idea of coming into the space to get a book,” Haynes said. You have to physically visit the gallery in order to check out a book because “the shows that you’re in are the genesis for the lists developing.”

Like a traditional library book, each title has an index card in the back that gets stamped with borrowers’ names and due dates. Haynes said that when the library launched in 2022, she wasn’t expecting as much engagement as there has been. “I don’t think anyone, including myself, was expecting a big crowd,” she said. “I was surprised by it all. I was pleasantly surprised to see dates and names on the backs of those cards.” And those cards are all created manually on a typewriter in the gallery’s basement, a practice that exemplifies the library’s old-school draw.

Haynes’s library also hosts an in-house book series, collectively titled “Clarion,” which releases a new edition for each of its exhibitions that expands on the artist’s ideas. The first nine volumes have a uniform appearance so that, if arranged together on a bookshelf, they look like a set of encyclopedias. “I wanted them to feel like reference books, to feel usable and accessible, and not something that got put on a coffee table for guests,” Haynes said. “Everything was chosen to feel like you could throw it in your bag and bring it with you as a reference. There’s a page in the back that says ‘notes’ because I want people to have a place to write while they’re reading. It’s durable; you can wipe the cover clean since it’s faux leather.” Such durability and ready access are also through lines for how Haynes approaches archiving and librarianship. “I want to wrap this in mylar because I think it’s important,” she said of the books at the 52 Walker Library.

With such care comes complexity. “I want people to understand that there’s no such thing as a monolith of any experience, position, or identity,” Haynes said. “There are likenesses but there’s no monolithic Black mode of thought. There’s no monolithic feminism. You have to have room for dissonance.” A book on one of 52 Walker’s reading lists might “make you more angry, but that should be okay.” It’s about allowing that dissonance to settle in, prompting curiosity, discussion, and further engagement.

Taken all together, these various archival projects trace a network of care, extending the possibilities of what a library can achieve, how it should function, and whom it should serve. Preservation can, when led by artists and community members, become as much an act of imagination as one of maintenance.

No matter the resource, though, a free library is not a lucrative business. “It’s not a business at all,” Haynes told me. She lends some of her own books to the 52 Walker Library so her team doesn’t have to buy them. “Nobody has stakes in the library being successful or not,” she said. The project of local libraries such as the ones surveyed here requires more people to get involved so that they can continue to function and meet the political moment—a moment plagued by the flattening of history, identity, and experience by the power of the federal state.

These local libraries gesture toward a different kind of recordkeeping that is grounded in community stewardship rather than state authority. They model what a more collectivist, holistic account of history and knowledge might look like: alive and participatory, driven not by profit or prestige (or the whims of a fascist) but by loving care. As the authors of “Libraries on the Frontlines” put it in 2017, while discussing the responsibility of archives to stand for Black lives, “if libraries are to remain relevant in the next century, cowardice is a luxury we cannot afford.”

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Featured image: 52 Walker Library, 2023. Photo: Kerry McFate. Courtesy of 52 Walker.