Singers: ♪ Oh, whoa, whoa, oh ♪ ♪ Oh, whoa, whoa ♪ ♪ Oh, whoa, whoa ♪ Man: Now, you work for a government-funded information organization, do you not?

Different man: Yes, sir.

I do.

Man: What kind of information do you give out?

Different man: All kinds, whatever they ask for.

You mean to tell me that this information was gathered at government expense and you give it out to anyone?

Yes, sir.

Does this organization you work for have a name?

Yes, sir.

It does.

It's called the public library.

♪ ♪ [Squeaking] ♪ Excuse us, everyone.

We're about to open up in about two minutes.

Come on, guys.

♪ Man: Good morning, everybody.

Good morning.

Good morning.

♪ Excuse us.

♪ Woman: No running, please.

No running.

Good morning.

Woman, voice-over: They wait at that gate.

If you're in their way, you will get stampede.

[Chuckles] They come in here like they're looking for some gold or something because it's free.

That's the key.

It's free.

♪ [Indistinct conversation] ♪ Logsdon: Going to the library, it's a rite of passage that many of us share.

♪ Woman, voice-over: When I came to the United States, I didn't speak any English, so at first, going into the library and entering the children's section, it just hit me, the amount of books there were.

I had a pretty good imagination to begin with, but being fed other people's imaginations made me come alive inside.

♪ Logsdon: My own first memory of going to the library is from the early 1960s in New Orleans.

Hurricane Betsy was approaching, and our neighbors were battening down their homes and getting supplies, but my mom decided that we needed books from the library to ride out the storm.

♪ After the power went out, she read us "The Little Engine That Could" over and over again by candlelight.

♪ From that night on, I was hooked, and I've been going to the library about once a week for over half a century now.

Yeah.

Hi.

Ha ha ha!

Logsdon: About a decade ago, I started bringing a camera along to document life unfolding in libraries all across the United States.

♪ Woman: 3 to go.

There.

I'm just practicing on a computer.

I don't have one.

How's it going, fellas?

Thank you, sir.

All right.

How's it going?

♪ Man: I'm researching an unsolved murder... Oh.

from 1923.

Right in here.

Woman, voice-over: It's looking for that aha moment...

Right in here.

Woman, voice-over: and when you see another person have it, it's satisfying.

♪ Man, voice-over: Libraries are not just about books.

They're about people, and they're about stories.

They're about the information that's in those books and how we decide what kind of people we are.

♪ Logsdon: Public libraries bring people together in ways that few other places seem to do anymore... Good morning.

Hi, guys.

Logsdon: but since I began filming, the public library has gone from being America's most trusted and least controversial institution to a battleground in the growing culture wars.

Suzanne Nossel, voice-over: Tensions and polarization.

It's inflaming communities, and that's something we haven't seen before.

Attempts to ban books in the U.S. surged last year.

This is not only happening in Texas, though-- Florida, Massachusetts, across the country about race and issues having to do with abortion.

A Virginia school district is facing backlash after pulling two American classics from its bookshelves after a parent filed a complaint over the use of a racial slur.

Logsdon: In some communities, people are even trying to shut down their libraries altogether.

Man: You are anti-Constitution.

Stand up.

Fight back.

Save our library.

Save our library.

Logsdon: Unraveling the roots of these battles drew me back in time.

[People shouting] Deep in the archives of library buildings, I found fragments of a forgotten American story.

It was inspired by lofty ideas like freedom of information and the power of knowledge, and these places remind me that we have a deep, long tradition of caring for the common good.

Joyce Latham: That vision of everybody gets to know, everybody gets to know.

♪ Crosby Kemper III: When you're in the library, everyone's equal, and you have an equal access to this huge inheritance.

You are an equal owner of that inheritance with everybody else who comes to the library.

Logsdon: In most stories at the library, there's a hero, but in the story of the public library itself, I didn't find one hero.

I found a movement with thousands of unsung heroes, all fighting to create our libraries and make them free for all.

Mary: Good afternoon.

My name is Mary, and I'm calling to remind you that today is an important Election Day for our New Orleans public libraries.

Have you already voted?

Hung up.

[Laughs] Logsdon: This is my own library hero--my mom.

♪ My mom didn't grow up in a house that had books.

Neither did my dad.

My mom and dad were the first in their families to go to college, and they both became teachers in public schools.

They raised me and my sister in the Deep South in the 1960s and '70s, when the middle class in the United States was growing to include families like ours.

♪ Every summer as soon as school let out, We'd pack up our VW wagon and hit the road for months of camping and low-budget adventure.

♪ We traveled along brand-new public highways to magnificent public parks.

[Laughter] ♪ Once we'd set up camp, my mom dragged us to the closest library for temporary library cards and free books.

♪ By the time I was 12, I'd visited over a hundred libraries in almost every state in the union.

♪ These days, the United States has more than 17,000 public library buildings.

♪ I want to uncover some of the stories these buildings hold, including what they meant to my own family long ago.

[Birds chirping] I started in New England with the first big American city to open a public library.

♪ Woman: So if you look at the exterior of the library, we're looking at the goddess of knowledge, and the most important thing is, anybody-- you know, the poor, the tired-- could come into this beautiful building, could borrow the books, and take them home, and that was a wonderful new concept.

[String ensemble playing] ♪ ♪ Abby Van Slyck, voice-over: The idea was that these were palaces of the people.

A palace is both the seat of power and that it's a seat of luxury and it has within it riches that are normally not available to the common man, and it was that kind of radical move that the Boston Public Library was trying to achieve.

♪ Logsdon: To understand just how radical this idea was in the 1850s, when Boston's library opened, we have to take a dip way further back in time because I'm learning that for most of human history, libraries were places that locked the public out.

Books were rare and precious, and they're filled with ideas, and ideas can be dangerous... ♪ so all over the world, the powerful did whatever it took to keep books away from ordinary people.

♪ [Flames rumbling] Things began changing in Europe in the early 1500s, when people demand the freedom to read the Bible themselves.

♪ Lots of these reading rebels pursue that freedom to the Americas, where they start hashing out who belongs, what belongs, and who gets to decide.

♪ Jill Lepore: It's actually tragic to me that Franklin is this sort of icon of capitalist accumulation, is on the $100 bill, and is every kind of bank's icon when really all of his works were public works.

He helped to start the first hospital--Pennsylvania Hospital, the fire department.

You know, he established the post office.

He was engaged in public works for the common good, and the library was one of those.

♪ The first public libraries in the United States are founded in this Franklinian spirit that in this new form of government, in this world where people are to govern themselves, that they need to be educated.

♪ Books are elemental to how Franklin tells the story of his life.

This is how he reads his way out of poverty, and this becomes an American story.

I mean, Abraham Lincoln tells the same story, the first book you have being your ticket to freedom.

♪ What's really powerful to me is who was excluded from that library, that world of learning, in the 18th century.

♪ We forget that in early American history, women were routinely denied the ability to write.

Only boys were taught to write because the reason to read for girls was so that they could be devout and read the Bible and submit to Christ, but writing was unnecessary.

♪ This is also a period in which it is illegal in the slave states to teach a slave to read.

♪ Malkia Devich-Cyril: The nation was founded upon drawing a severe line between people who can read and people who could not, where literacy literally was the line between citizen and slave.

♪ Logsdon: Among the many treasures I found in Boston's archives are glimpses of its early patrons.

Boston's elite was shocked by who was allowed in, and their concerns soon shifted to what this new public might read.

♪ These are some of the titles that were deemed immoral and removed... ♪ but the world of ideas had cracked open, and many controversial books soon made it onto the shelves.

♪ Man, as Douglass: I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.

Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope and a fixed purpose at whatever cost of trouble to learn to read.

♪ Man, as Walt Whitman: Re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book and dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.

♪ Logsdon: Ideas in books from this era sparked movements for change in the United States.

Several of these movements inspired and intertwined with the free library movement, especially the fight for women's rights.

♪ Woman, as Sarah Grimke: I ask no favors for my sex.

All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks and permit us to stand upright on the ground which God has designed for us to occupy.

♪ ♪ Logsdon: Big change often starts with a simple idea.

Women just wanted to read, and that desire helped power the free library movement for the next century.

[Whistle blows] [Indistinct conversation] Van Slyck: In the 19th century, women's colleges are opening, and women are entering into higher education in unprecedented numbers, and so this is a wonderful moment for women in higher education... ♪ but it's also a moment in which there were concerns that education might also warp the woman's body, that women would become infertile if she spent too much time with the books.

Wayne Wiegand: American public library history is full of incidents where efforts were made to control female reading behaviors.

There was a worry that fiction had the capacity to inflame the female heart, causing physical and emotional problems.

♪ Van Slyck: Librarianship had been a male-dominated field-- very well-educated men, very elite men.

♪ Melvil Dewey is a towering figure in this American library movement.

He was a person of great magnetism, and women liked him, and he liked women.

These days, he's best known as the creator of the Dewey Decimal System.

Dewey wanted to be able to tap into this new, growing group of college-educated women and to lure them into librarianship.

and so he established the first library school, and over 90% were women.

Dewey communicated that sense of librarianship as a calling.

"We're changing the world here, and come along."

♪ Logsdon: Everywhere I go, I see faded portraits of women on library walls.

♪ These are some of America's earliest library advocates.

♪ If women are so key to this history, why don't I know a single one of their names?

♪ Part of the reason is that early female librarians were often required to be single, so they didn't have families who treasured their legacies or archived their papers.

♪ This is Gratia Countryman.

When Minneapolis promoted her to library director, they paid her a third less than the man she replaced.

Then they eliminated the job of assistant director and made her do both jobs.

♪ Mary Ann Shaw was born free during slavery times.

She helped found the first public library in Queens, New York, and she donated her inheritance to keep it running.

♪ Sarah Smith grew up in the Oneida Nation in Wisconsin.

♪ At 13, she was shipped to an Indian boarding school, where she sought solace in books.

Sarah helped start the first library for Native American children and served as its librarian.

♪ Lutie Stearns ventured out into that same Wisconsin wilderness determined to bring books to isolated farming communities.

[Wind blowing] ♪ In researching Lutie's travels, I stumbled across a connection to my own family history.

[Wind whistling] All my family on my mom's side lives in Wisconsin, and we farmed this land for generations.

♪ Christine Pawley: People led lonely, deprived lives, isolated lives in conditions that are pretty unimaginable to us today.

♪ Logsdon: This is my great-grandmother on the family farm.

She's holding her Norwegian Bible, which I'm pretty sure was the one book she ever owned.

The only written traces that remain of my great-grandmother are in this Bible-- the births and baptisms of each of her 13 children and the childhood deaths of 4 of them... ♪ but I'm getting a deeper understanding of what her life was like through records that Lutie Stearns kept as she traveled around rural Wisconsin.

♪ Woman, as Stearns: Isolation is the menace of farm life, and this isolation has a depressing effect for the women on the farm, and 66% of those committed to insane hospitals are from rural districts, and yet the needs of this great, deserving class of humans are as yet almost wholly unrealized by librarians.

♪ Logsdon: Lutie Stearns came from a more educated background than my great-grandmother, but even educated women couldn't vote, and they had no place in the public world.

Lutie, however, forged her own path from an early age.

♪ Woman, as Stearns: I was naturally left-handed, but for the sake of contemptible conformity, I was compelled to change over to the right hand.

It upset my speech, and, to my deep humiliation, I began to stutter.

While the other students snickered when I attempted to read, this led to the first signs of the rebel within me and an unwillingness to conform to convention which has persisted to this day.

♪ Pawley: Lutie Stearns was hired to start hundreds of traveling libraries going around the state.

♪ You know, she'd go on horseback if she had to.

She'd go by boat if she had to.

She said she wore out something like 5 bearskin rugs traveling by sleigh with packages of books.

♪ Logsdon: I went back to rural Wisconsin to search for traces of Lutie's spirit.

[Birds chirping] [Singing indistinctly] ♪ Mm, wee wee wee wee ♪ Some people think that-- that there's some kind of, like, tunnel under here and it just goes in there and it's immediately checked in, and it's like, no.

Hi, Jennifer.

How you doing?

Jennifer: Good.

Logsdon: I met this woman when she won the prize for Best Librarian in the State of Wisconsin.

About 3,000 people live in this town.

Timmins, voice-over: Because we're a small community, we know everybody, and we know everybody very well.

Hi, Dan.

Timmins, voice-over: We know what people like, and we save books for them.

We put things aside.

Most popular book?

"Hunger Games," and--I'm not judging or anything-- but "Fifty Shades of Grey."

Woman: Morning, Tom.

Morning.

Hey, Tom.

Hi.

Here for your books?

Timmins, voice-over: We know our people very well.

I saw you here yesterday.

Did you think we were open?

Timmins, voice-over: Someone comes in, and they have a reference question about a medical issue, we're there for them for the entire journey, checking in with them, making sure everything is OK with their family.

We go to their funerals.

We go to their parties.

We participate with them in the ongoing journey of life.

You can tell that I'm her grandmother.

I can.

So anyway, this game is--ha!--named after Abraham Lincoln.

[Laughter] Rebecca Kirchberg, voice-over: Even in my high-school yearbook, I wrote, "I'm going to get married and have 20 kids," and I was very serious.

We have 14 children aged 19 down to year and a half, and then this one's due in 3 weeks, so-- Our family lives outside of town, and we homeschool, so we don't get a lot of the school information, and having that library to really pull us together into the community has been so helpful for us.

Girl: Where is it?

Where's our usual?

"Pride and Prejudice"?

No.

No.

No.

Yes.

No.

Yes.

Kirchberg, voice-over: The library has really influenced us as not just a homeschooling family, but as a faith-filled family that's always looking to learn and explore.

Any page.

Kirchberg, voice-over: If you don't have good information, there's no way you can make good decisions.

Obviously, you're going to have different faiths, different beliefs, different everything.

I'm OK with my kids questioning those.

They should question.

"Why is our religion different?

Should I believe in mine or not?"

They need to question that faith so that they can develop it for themselves.

♪ Logsdon: From what I know about my great-grandmother, there's no way she would have agreed with that.

She worried a lot about sin, and she believed that hard work was what kept sin at bay, especially the sin of laziness, which included lying around reading instead of doing chores, so when Lutie Stearns arrived in their isolated hamlet with a tiny library in a box, my grandpa remembers he had to sneak out to see her books.

♪ Lutie brought with her a different vision of childhood.

♪ Woman, as Stearns: Every child that comes before you has hidden away somewhere in its being a precious capacity for something creative.

When you look upon each as a possible genius, then you will add new dignity to human life.

♪ Good morning.

♪ Timmins: Oh, my gosh, Angel is here.

With a smile.

I'm just an ordinary, typical kid who just comes to the library every day.

I know.

We need to look up because we need those books.

You doing OK in there?

So good.

How many can it take?

Child: Come on!

Oh!

Timmins, voice-over: My philosophy is that I'm throwing a party every day and everybody is invited to the party.

[All screaming] I did not!

Oh!

Oh!

Timmins, voice-over: If they're a nerd or if they're into drama or whatever, if they're into anime, which I personally do not understand at all, I want them to know that that is here for them and it's OK to be yourself at the library.

It's OK to be weird.

[Indistinct conversation] Kind of like Spitfires spitting out fire.

Gracie, voice-over: I'm interested in the megalodon, which is the great white's ancestor around during the dinosaur time.

They can fit 10 fully grown men in their mouth and eat it in one bite, so they're pretty big animals.

[Squeaking] Logsdon: What do you want to be when you grow up?

I'm really thinking about something with animals... like--I don't know-- shark expert, which I already kind of am.

OK.

I got to build double wings.

Child: I love it.

Angel, voice-over: I would like to be a masseuse or a chiropractor.

My back was kind of tense.

So was my neck and my legs.

I went to the chiropractor, and I felt, like, perfect like magic, not kidding.

Child: Oh, yeah.

That was maybe... Whee!

Come on, scooter, like the wind.

What's the most important thing?

Love... Lots of.

and pizza and Minecraft.

And pizza and Minecraft?

Yes.

Ha ha ha!

There's a Minecraft book, too.

Really?

Yeah.

Can you get it?

♪ Logsdon: For so many people I meet, the public library is a childhood refuge from troubles in the grownup world.

♪ For my own dad, it was an escape from violence on big-city streets.

♪ ♪ On my dad's side of the family, our library history is urban, from immigrant neighborhoods much like this one.

♪ This is my grandma Theresa not long before she died.

She's teaching me and my sister how to make family recipes from her Slovak village.

Theresa: And I said to my mother... ♪ Logsdon: My grandma came to the United States alone as a teenager.

She was poor and decided to escape home after her uncle from America came to visit in fancy clothes and slipped her the money for steerage passage.

She landed in New York City, then took the train to her uncle's Chicago tenement.

There, instead of wearing fancy clothes, she worked washing them for rich people.

♪ My grandma had never set foot in a library back home in her village.

When she went for the first time, she didn't believe the librarian, who told her she could take books home for free.

On the Lower East Side of New York City, the Seward Park Branch Library has been serving new immigrants like my grandma for over a hundred years.

[Telephone rings] Woman: First floor.

[Mouths] Thank you.

Kathryn Bonn: How are you?

How are you?

Women: How are you?

How do you say it the New York way?

How are you?

How are you?

How are you?

How are you?

Where are... Where are... you from?

you from?

Where are you from, Garret?

I'm from Bulgaria.

Good.

"I'm from Bulgaria."

We're in the library-- we together, our class.

Mario Pacitti, voice-over: Viviamos en Venezuela, pero la situacion en Venezuela no esta muy bien en estos momentos, y nos vimos forzados a salir.

De repente.

OK.

Uh... Pacitti: Los talleres y de una todo el mundo me recomendo, "Ve a la biblioteca, que dan algunos talleres."

All right.

Baya, where are you from?

I am from Honduras.

Honduras.

Good, Danielle.

We have the H sound-- Honduras.

Yeah.

Her name is... Bonn: Chung.

Shung.

She's from Shina.

Good.

"Ch," strong "China," "China."

Shina.

Good.

"China."

"China."

"Ch."

"China."

Good.

China.

Good.

Um... Logsdon: This building has its own archive documenting the branch's long service to the waves of immigrants who've passed through the neighborhood.

I discovered that one of its first librarians was a woman named Ernestine Rose.

♪ I'd been intrigued by Ernestine Rose ever since I read about her personal papers being fished out of a dumpster.

♪ In many ways, Ernestine fit the mold of a typical librarian of her time.

She grew up privileged on a country estate and was accepted into Dewey's library school, at least in part, because of her background.

Dewey opened the profession up to women but only a certain kind of a woman.

♪ Van Slyck: They tended to be white, Protestant, middle class, unmarried.

♪ Logsdon: When Ernestine Rose graduated from library school in 1904, she headed straight for New York City and the freedoms it promised.

♪ For Ernestine, those freedoms included not having to get married and sharing a home with her female companion.

♪ By the dawn of the 20th century, immigration had turned the Lower East Side of New York into the most crowded neighborhood in the world.

When Ernestine Rose arrived, the neighborhood both shocked and excited the sheltered young woman.

Woman, as Rose: I work in a library patronized by Russian and Oriental Jews.

My paperboy is Greek.

My grocer is a Hollander, and my bootblack is from Syria.

Disappointed immigrants ask us, "Where is the promise of America?"

If we are honest, we shall admit that the answer is yet to find.

♪ Logsdon: Library leaders like Melvil Dewey believed it was their mission to Americanize these foreigners, and they told librarians to give them books like this.

♪ Lepore: What's going on culturally is a concern about a sort of mongrelization of American culture and that people who are different from Anglo-Saxons need to be taught to conform.

♪ Logsdon: Ernestine Rose and her cohorts were trained in this philosophy and then marched out to help open hundreds of brand-new branch libraries in American cities.

♪ These libraries were paid for by a man who was once a poor immigrant himself.

♪ David Nasaw: When Andrew Carnegie arrived in United States from Scotland, he had to work to support his family, but he was hungry for knowledge, and he wanted to join the only library in town, and they said, "You got to pay a dollar a week."

He said, "I don't have a dollar a week."

They said, "Well, sorry.

Good-bye," and that was the beginning of a lifelong attraction to the public library, and he became the richest man in the world, building a fortune in steel.

♪ At an early age, Carnegie knew he was gonna give away everything... ♪ but to do the greatest good, he needs the greatest amount of money, and how does he get that?

By squeezing it out of his workers... ♪ 6 days a week, 12 hours a day, at the smallest wages he could get away with paying.

♪ Logsdon: Andrew Carnegie was America's first mega philanthropist, and he started his philanthropic career by building libraries in his company towns.

This was the first one to open, in Braddock, Pennsylvania, a year after he'd crushed the union there.

♪ Just a few miles down the road is the Carnegie Library in Homestead.

[Men shouting] Logsdon: He broke the union here, too, in what remains one of the bloodiest labor battles in American history.

♪ Nasaw: This is a man of contradictions.

At the opening of his library in Pittsburgh, Carnegie got up, and he addressed the crowd, and he said, "I note, all the way in the back," he said, "I see some working people," and he said, "I know what they're thinking now.

"They're thinking to themselves, 'Why didn't he give us a living wage?'"

and Carnegie looked to the back of the gathering, and he said, "What would you have done "with an extra couple of dollars a week?

"You maybe would have fed your families "better cuts of meat.

"You maybe would have bought more drink, "but that's not what you want.

That's not what you need."

♪ "I know what you need."

♪ Logsdon: In his early libraries, Carnegie added fancy amenities that he'd learned to enjoy as a man of wealth, like going to the theater, playing billiards, swimming.

♪ In the basement, he built bath houses so workers could wash up before they touched the books... ♪ but how did his exhausted workers have time for a library?

Most of them were immigrants from Eastern Europe like my grandmother.

♪ After years of domestic labor, she'd gone to work in a factory like millions of other immigrants who were transforming the United States into an industrial powerhouse.

My grandmother worked in a Campbell's Soup factory that I imagined looked a lot like this one.

♪ These are images I found in the New York Public Library archives taken by the documentary pioneer Lewis Hine.

♪ Hine and his colleagues used photography to expose the brutal conditions of immigrant life.

♪ ♪ ♪ Logsdon: Soon after Ernestine started working on the Lower East Side, she created a stir that made the papers by ordering hundreds of books in Chinese and Yiddish.

♪ Then the photographer Lewis Hine showed up to see what was happening inside these new neighborhood branches.

♪ I think this is Ernestine.

These images and captions bring alive her reforms.

This one's called "Joining the Library"... ♪ telling a story to Russian children in their language... ♪ Italian boys listening to "Pinocchio."

♪ Van Slyck: Librarians like Ernestine Rose actually begin to look at the community and think, "What do they need that we can provide, even if it's stretching us beyond what we have traditionally done?"

Logsdon: Men working on baskets... ♪ rooftop reading.

♪ Van Skye: The library was really spacious, particularly in comparison to the sort of very small, overcrowded tenement apartments.

They were well-lit.

They had tall ceilings.

They were clean.

♪ Logsdon: Yiddish mothers club.

Woman, as Rose: One of our librarians gave a large part of her busy day to the agonized mother of a lost child.

Do not tell me that she should have been sent to the police station, a Russian Jewish woman with bitter memories of the old Russian police.

To call in police is the obvious, easy step, but it's also the one to stir up antagonism and to separate us from the hearts of our neighbors.

♪ We show, if we can, what patriotism really is so that the ideals of America may be realized.

♪ Logsdon: By the 19-teens, the fight for women's rights had surged into the streets.

Over 10,000 women marched in the Great Suffrage Parade of 1913, including a large contingent of librarians.

♪ Then women helped drive Melvil Dewey out of the profession because he'd been sexually harassing female librarians for decades.

Van Slyck: More and more women are college-educated, and after college, they want to continue to read.

They want to continue to learn, and so they established women's clubs, and many of the earliest public libraries were actually an outgrowth of the women's club movement.

The transcontinental railroad has been built.

Towns are springing up all throughout the West.

It's not at all clear that they'll all survive, and so in many towns, the women's club decides that they will start a library, and it is a challenge for them.

They are often strapped for cash, and so sometimes they are on the upper floor of a grocery store in town, and they often started their book collections simply by asking for donations.

Logsdon: Wisconsin library pioneer Lutie Stearns was a leader in the women's club movement.

She knew that their struggling small-town libraries needed more than local charity to survive.

They needed public funding, so she urged women to write to Andrew Carnegie.

Van Slyck: Andrew Carnegie makes it known that he will give grants to build library buildings to any community that will agree to tax themselves to support the library.

The town had to provide the land on which to build, and then they have to provide this library tax that will pay for books, their staff," that will keep the building heated in the wintertime.

♪ When one town got a Carnegie library, all the other towns in the area knew about it, so it very quickly spreads across the country.

♪ [Klaxon honks] There's lots and lots of postcards of these libraries so that you can send them to your friends and say, "This is this beautiful town that I live in.

"Here's our library.

You should move here, too."

♪ Gray Brechin: Those buildings are trying to speak to us.

In many cases, they will have inscriptions on them reminding us of what they were meant to do... ♪ and they represent aspiration of how you could become a complete human being as well as a citizen.

♪ Logsdon: I have so much nostalgia for these old library buildings, but nostalgia can paper over pain.

By the late 19-teens, the library movement had helped welcome millions of Americans into fuller democracy.

♪ In all these welcoming mottoes over its beautiful new buildings... ♪ for millions of other Americans, they stung.

♪ Woman, as Frances Harper: You white women here speak of rights.

I speak of wrongs.

Are there not wrongs to be righted?

♪ Woman, voice-over: My grandmother was an avid bookmobiler.

That was the only way she could get books.

When she was young, my grandmother was a patron of the Black bookmobile.

We had a Black bookmobile and a white bookmobile, much like many other places all over America, but our Black/white bookmobile lasted for a long time.

♪ Doo doo doo doo doo doo ♪ Sometimes you just got to take your way through.

Ha ha ha!

Thank you.

I love to drive the bookmobile.

It is fun times.

When people see it, they smile.

I've been going down the street, and people honk at me and be like, "Hey!

Can I throw my books at you?"

and I'm like, "No."

People are very forgiving of the bookmobile when I make, you know, like, driving errors and, like, I almost kill us.

Yeah.

I'm thinking we can probably get here.

♪ And then you put the answer to the question in there, the date of birth, your monthly income, and all of that.

♪ Roby, voice-over: You always need libraries, you know.

Everybody's like, "Oh, everything's digital.

Everybody can access the Internet."

In Louisiana, you cannot.

Over 40% of our population still does not have Internet access.

Over 20% of our adult population are functionally illiterate, so going into a governmental library building so some people, it's stuffy.

Being out on the bookmobile, I get to be full-on Tameka in outreach.

Like, I get to let the devil out!

Ha ha ha!

♪ Logsdon: Searching through Southern archives, I came across a memoir and oral history of a groundbreaking Black librarian.

Her name was Annie McPheeters.

♪ McPheeters: During my years as a librarian, I have come in contact with some of the finest young people that our nation has ever known, and I'm happy that I had a part in helping them on their way.

♪ Logsdon: Annie McPheeters was born on a Georgia farm to parents whose own parents had been enslaved.

Annie's mom taught her to read and write by drawing in the dirt of their yard.

One of her earliest memories is opening day at the newly built Carnegie Library nearby.

The white librarian stood in the entrance and refused to let her family enter.

♪ Carla Hayden: Libraries were part of the general environment of the time, and public libraries in particular reflect what's going on, and when segregation was in full bloom in this country, pools were segregated, lunch counters, cafeterias, everything, and so were public libraries.

[Insects chirping] ♪ [Train wheels clacking] Logsdon: Experiences like this were driving millions of Black Southerners north, and in 1920, white librarian Ernestine Rose got transferred to Harlem to serve this new community.

♪ [Whistle blows] ♪ She was put in charge of Harlem's 135th Street Branch, where she quickly hired New York's first African American and Puerto Rican librarians.

♪ Woman: Well, when you went to work for Miss Rose, the first thing she did was give you a pad and pencil and say, "Now, these are the boundaries "of the 135th Street branch.

"You ought to cover that area and make a note of every institution, every group," so I went out and would march up and say, "I'm on the staff up at the library, and I'm just getting acquainted with the neighborhood."

♪ Logsdon: What Harlem residents told the librarians they wanted were books by and about Black people... ♪ so they worked with community leaders to buy a major private collection from a Black Puerto Rican collector named Arthur Schomburg.

♪ When Schomburg's book and artifacts arrived at the 135th Street branch, it became the intellectual heartbeat of the Harlem Renaissance, and several of its librarians were part of the creative wave.

♪ Ethelene Whitmire: Regina Andrews got there at the start of the Harlem Renaissance.

She's actually from Chicago.

She went to New York on vacation and loved it and never went back, angering the Chicago Public Library.

[Chuckles] I hadn't been there too long when I began trying to write plays, and then in a short time, the organizer held experimental theater.

♪ Logsdon: In the library's tiny basement theater, actors like Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier got their starts.

♪ Whitmire: Regina Andrews set up cubicles for a lot of the artists who would come there to work on their projects, to do research for either their books or for their art.

It was a very productive time in terms of creating art and supporting one another.

♪ Logsdon: So many famous people hung out here-- writers like W.E.B.

Dubois, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston.

The sculptor Augusta Savage taught art classes in the basement.

One of her students was the young Jacob Lawrence, who later painted memories from that time.

♪ Augusta Baker: That feeling for the community was always there... ♪ and these youngsters that came in, we didn't know what they'd be and what they wouldn't be, but we loved them.

♪ James Baldwin: I went to 135th Street Library at least 3 or 4 times a week, and I read everything there, I mean, every single book in that library.

I read books like they were some weird kind of food.

I was looking in books for a bigger world than the world in which I lived.

♪ In some blind and instinctive way, I knew that what was happening in those books was also happening all around me, and I was trying to make a connection between the books and the life I saw and the life I lived.

♪ You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.

It was books that taught me the things that tormented me the most were the very thing that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.

♪ [Train whistle blows] Logsdon: James Baldwin grew up surrounded by people who had fled the South, and these new Harlem Library users did not forget those they left behind.

♪ This is footage I found in the South Carolina State Archives.

♪ These buildings were called Faith Cabin Libraries because they were started with nothing but faith by a poor white farmer, a Black schoolteacher, and a congregation in Harlem that sent down a thousand books.

♪ The Faith Cabin Library movement built over 75 libraries throughout South Carolina and Georgia.

I found archival traces like this all over the South of the people who'd been shut out pushing forward the movement's ideals.

♪ In Southern cities, Black leaders and their white allies eventually persuaded Andrew Carnegie to fund and handful of Black-only branches.

Here's the first one, in Louisville, Kentucky, where Reverend Thomas Blue started a small training program that grew into the first library school for Black Americans.

♪ Librarian Annie McPheeters got her library degree here, and a few years after graduating, she was hired in Atlanta.

♪ The King family lived down the street.

♪ McPheeters: I have some very fond memories of Martin Luther King, Jr. ♪ He loved to read and came to the library many times during the week, and he would walk up to the desk, and he would look me straight in the eye, and I'd say, "Hello, Martin Luther.

What's on your mind?"

and he'd say, "I dipt into the future far as human eye could see"-- that's a poem--and then I would finish that line-- "Saw a Vision of the world and the wonders that would be"... ♪ and every time Martin Luther would learn a poem, he would come to the library, and we played that game down through the years.

♪ Logsdon: Working under segregation, Annie McPheeters was aware that the books she bought were closely scrutinized.

[People singing in German] Logsdon: World War II would open many librarians' eyes to the dangers of censorship.

Narrator: Across the Reich, bonfires consume books by Thomas Mann, Einstein, Freud, and countless others.

Deborah Caldwell Stone: Librarians in the United States were watching what was happening in Nazi Germany.

They saw their colleagues being asked to turn over information, and that had consequences.

They began to think about what it meant ethically to be a librarian.

[Gunfire and explosions] Logsdon: As democracies around the world fell to authoritarian regimes, libraries hosted forums and radio-listening events where people came together to talk about what was happening abroad.

Once again, librarian Ernestine Rose was at the forefront.

Woman, as Rose: As the persecution of Jewish people continues, indications in many parts of the world point to growing intolerance, suppression of free speech, and censorship of minorities and individuals.

♪ This is a very good time for libraries to take a stand.

♪ Logsdon: Soon after war broke out, Ernestine Rose traveled to California to attend the American Library Association's annual gathering.

There, she helped spur her colleagues into proclaiming a library bill of rights.

They took strong stands against censorship and for protecting patrons' privacy.

♪ [Drums and brass playing] My parents were born during the war and raised in the postwar 1940s and 50s, when waves of anti-communist fear were sweeping the country.

♪ Growing up in Wisconsin, my mom's senator was Joseph McCarthy.

McCarthy: The thing that the American people can do is to be vigilant day and night to make sure they don't have communists teaching the sons and daughters of America.

Now, I realize... Logsdon: In his investigations to uncover communists, McCarthy targeted libraries.

♪ Ruth Brown was the town librarian for over 30 years at the Carnegie Library in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

Her story later inspired this Hollywood film starring Bette Davis.

Good morning, children.

Morning, Miss Hull.

Logsdon: The real Ruth Brown angered community leaders by encouraging Black families to join the library and ordering some magazines they wanted to read.

The final straw was when she tried to desegregate story time... ♪ It wouldn't be about my children's wing, would it?

Yes.

We want to talk about your children's wing.

Logsdon: so they accused her of harboring dangerous books.

Take my word for it.

It's not unreasonable to ask you to take out just this one book.

I simply couldn't do what you asked.

I mean, I couldn't remove a book because it has ideas we don't like.

♪ Logsdon: Ruth Brown was denounced as a communist, and she was fired for exposing children to subversive literature.

♪ Devich-Cyril: Libraries have been and continue to be a front line of defense around privacy.

Many libraries across this country have refused to comply with unjust laws that have to do with giving up information that shouldn't be given up to the government.

♪ People who go to libraries, people who use the library are often some of the most vulnerable members of our society-- homeless people, people who are disabled, students, teachers.

These community members often are at risk for all kinds of surveillance.

♪ John Palfrey, voice-over: It's really about reader privacy.

It's about the ability of someone to read something and engage with materials without having that then be reported directly to somebody else because if you create a great database of everything everybody read and then make that available for the FBI or a commercial purpose, that's a very bad outcome, and librarians have been raising their hands and saying, "Wait.

We don't want to go there."

Logsdon: This is librarian Zoia Horn.

♪ During the Vietnam War, the FBI came to Zoia's library and demanded that she turn over the records of antiwar patrons.

Zoia refused and went to jail for weeks instead of giving up the information.

♪ Horn: Having a spy who was being paid by the FBI in the library is a no-no.

Our government was making dissent a criminal thing.

♪ This is my ethical job.

I will not spy on anybody in the library.

Logsdon: I'm drawn to these librarian stories and their bravery because when I was growing up in the South, public space was contested space.

[People shouting] ♪ Children: We don't want the integration!

♪ Geraldine Edwards Hollis: Our parents pay taxes for public facilities.

All people should be able to attend those public places, and so we made the choice to integrate the library.

We were all a part of the NAACP youth group.

♪ We went through demonstrations of how to be nonviolent, how to deal with taunts.

♪ That day, we did not know just what to expect.

We knew that groups had been beaten.

♪ We were nervous.

We were human.

We knew what could happen.

♪ They were talking down to us.

They told us we were not the kind of people that should be in that library.

We did not talk back to them.

We didn't want to get struck.

We just wanted to get arrested.

That was the goal.

They told us to get up, and we were taken to jail.

♪ Students from the other colleges came.

They were doing peaceful protest, but that infuriated the police department.

♪ Logsdon: After the Tougaloo 9 took their stand, library sit-ins caught on and spread across the South, often with high-school kids leading the charge.

♪ The materials they asked to check out were the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Crowd: ♪ Ain't gonna let nobody ♪ ♪ Turn me round ♪ ♪ Keep on a-walking ♪ ♪ Keep on a-talking ♪ ♪ Walking on freedom land ♪ ♪ Ain't gonna let you ♪ ♪ Turn me round ♪ ♪ Turn me round ♪ ♪ Turn me round... ♪ Logsdon: I was born the year this footage was shot.

These are the images of my early childhood.

Crowd: ♪ Keep on a-talkin'... ♪ It was an era of profound strife amid a movement to wipe out inequalities from the past.

Woman: Now.

Now.

Now.

Now.

Man: What do we want?

Now.

Now.

Now... Lyndon Johnson: All members of the public should have an equal chance to contribute their talents to the public good, and this administration declares unconditional war on poverty in America.

Our chief weapons will be better schools, and we must build more libraries in every area.

[Applause] Logsdon: In my hometown New Orleans, the old, segregated library got torn down, and this shiny, new one made of steel and glass rose up in its place.

♪ My mom brought us here all the time, especially in the summer, because this building had air conditioning.

♪ We were America's integration generation, and, at least at the library, free for all had finally become a reality... ♪ but less than a decade after publicly funded institutions were open to everyone and just about as I was entering high school, this happened.

Jarvis: I'm mad as hell, and the people are mad as hell, and I'm getting madder than hell every day.

Woman: I'm angry because I don't like the way they spend our money.

We work for our money, and I see so many people who don't work, and our taxes go up and up to support them, and that makes me angry.

Man: Proposition 13 to cut property taxes in half passed in a landslide.

Libraries, parks, schools, or welfare programs must be slashed.

[Cheering] Logsdon: The tax revolt that began in California spread across the country.

♪ This tax revolt has lasted all my adult life, almost half a century, and it's still growing.

So is the impact on our public commons.

♪ The toll is especially apparent in places like Andrew Carnegie's old steel mill towns.

♪ I took a trip to Braddock, Pennsylvania, home to Andrew Carnegie's first American public library.

♪ The city let it fall into ruin in the 1970s and slated it for demolition.

♪ The librarian rescued the building by buying it for a dollar, but without public funding, it continued to deteriorate.

♪ Brechin: Americans forget what they once had, the whole concept of the public, things that belong to all of us that we pay for.

The word "public" is almost toxic, and that's a great change, and we're all paying a very heavy price for that.

♪ Hello, guys.

How you doing today?

Logsdon: In wealthy cities like San Francisco, librarians don't have a funding crisis.

They serve people in crisis.

As public services disappear, the job of a librarian is being transformed.

Woman on radio: 16, can you go up to the sixth floor patio and tell the patron to put his clothes back on?

Oh, 10-4.

I'm en route.

Is that enough, or would you like another one?

It's fine.

Sundheim, voice-over: What I'm doing now as a librarian is a bit like being a social worker.

I get a lot of questions like, "How do I find a place to live?"

or looking for services, you know, medical when they can't really afford it.

There are a lot of homeless people, and they're awake all night trying to keep from getting hurt, and then they need to sleep during the day.

You OK?

Hey, hey.

Hmm?

Are you OK?

Sorry.

Yeah.

I'm all right.

Hello.

Hey, how's it going?

Logsdon: Crises in big cities get lots of media attention, but after 10 years of traveling around the country, I've come to see that it's small-town America that has been even harder hit, and it's the libraries in these communities that face the greatest threats.

Woman: Supporters of Measure 10-145 are trying to get out the message that the library system is in peril.

Man: 10 Douglas County libraries may be obsolete by the end of this year.

♪ [Indistinct conversation] Child: That has a unicorn on it.

Hey!

Woman: Oh, OK.

Perfect.

Hannah Merrill:, voice-over: I'm trying really hard to be hopeful because our library, it's home.

It's home to me, and it's home to a lot of people.

Wonderful.

She got a little bit of your dark hair, Terri.

Dane Hedrick, voice-over: First, I was like, "Hey, I'm looking for books about dragons," and she went... "How about this?"

I think you've been in here almost every single day since then.

Uh, I'm a book guy.

Oh, triceratops.

Merrill, voice-over: There are a lot of people that this is all they have-- the books and then also the interaction, the interaction with me and the other employees here.

Sometimes that's the only people they talk to all day.

♪ Man: A special taxing measure that would have funded libraries was voted down.

All 11 branches in the system are set to be closed.

♪ Lepore, voice-over: We have lost a lot of public space in American life in the last few decades, and the public library is, to me, like the city hall, which still stands, and the town hall, this sort of last bulwark against a kind of profound isolation.

♪ Man: Late tonight, Mayor Kate Gallego tweeted that, based on CDC recommendations, all Phoenix library facilities and indoor rec centers will close with no timetable on reopening.

Different man: The mayor closing all city libraries.

Marty Walsh: This is a difficult decision because a lot of people use the library as a place to go to get their information, and we're not taking this closure lightly.

Logsdon: During the COVID pandemic, we all had a taste of what it would be like to live in a country without public gathering places.

♪ Man: We don't want your shutdown anymore.

Logsdon: I saw how isolation festered anger and fear that poisoned trust in our government institutions.

[Siren] Man: Burn it.

Burn it.

Burn it.

Different man: A church has a religious right to burn occultic materials that they deem are a threat to their religious rights and freedoms and belief system.

Logsdon: When libraries reopened, they were caught in the crosshairs of deepened divisions.

This is the beginning to take this country back for God.

Man: These are some of the 8 to 10 men who walked into San Lorenzo Public Library Saturday afternoon to stop the book-reading event at the Drag Queen Story Hour.

Woman: Vinton's library will stay closed for the week after its interim library director, the library's only full-time employee, resigned.

He's the third leader to leave in two years.

The previous directors left after complaints from the community about the library's display of LGBTQ books and books on President Biden and Vice President Harris.

♪ Logsdon: Most of us think we know where we stand on what belongs in the library, but listening to people made me think, and some stories have stuck with me.

I'm just gonna sit down.

Kirchberg, voice-over: Being a public institution, there's a whole world of books that, yeah, I don't want my kids in.

So I was in the library.

We were checking material back in, and I grabbed a couple, and I was fanning through them... ♪ and I was like, "Whoa," so then I started reading it.

♪ The whole content of it was that date rape is acceptable and, "You should appreciate it because I'm helping you find yourself."

♪ Mary Kirchberg: My mom just doesn't want my siblings stumbling across something that's immodest or something like that, so we definitely do have certain views about that.

My mom's completely different than me on a lot of subjects like that.

♪ Logsdon: The book was one of several that parents in this town contested the year I was visiting, and in the past few years, book challenges have soared.

♪ Cindy Fesemyer: It's important to me to provide to, say, a teenager who is grappling with her sexuality, it's important to me that she can come to a safe space, find materials, read them in the corner here in the library if she needs to, and get informed without judgment.

Logsdon: Even if you know her parents don't want her to do that?

Not my job.

It's her parents' job to parent her, not mine.

We have information for everybody who walks through the doors.

If you find the information you need, then we've done our job.

I bet that's to tell you about the film.

Logsdon: In this town, the book went through several steps of review before the community decided to keep it in the same place on the shelves.

♪ As challenges grow, many children's books are being moved to other sections or banned altogether.

Rebecca Kirchberg, voice-over: There's times you get mad at something and you're like, "I'm never going back there."

Well, it's the library.

We can't not go back to the library, so we always come back.

It's-- ♪ Kemper, voice-over: We're a place where people come together.

Sometimes it brings the community together, and we find out about our disagreements, and we don't agree to disagree, and sometimes we agree to disagree, and sometimes we find agreement.

We need more of that in this country, not less of it.

[Piano playing] Thomas Hamby: I think the serendipitous performances that we have here are really exciting and bring people together, and actually, that's what I think the library is all about.

[Man singing] ♪ Hamby, voice-over: This gives people a moment of the sublime, so, yeah, why not?

[Men singing] Woman: ♪ San Francisco, open your Golden Gate... ♪ Logsdon: In recent years, several cities have launched a big, new event at their libraries.

It's called Night of Ideas.

When I attended one of them, I was surprised that over 5,000 people showed up.

♪ You have to clap when we tap.

Woman: This skill of just taking your body and making sounds and making music and making joy with it is a everyday practice.

♪ Logsdon: If you haven't been to your library lately, you might be surprised by what you can check out and do.

♪ Just like Ernestine Rose and those other forgotten heroes, a new generation is rediscovering and reshaping the public library to meet the needs of their communities.

♪ All right, quick poke.

1, 2, 3.

♪ April Roy, voice-over: So many of our community members don't have medical insurance, health insurance.

I mean, it struck me to my core how real health disparity is, and I want to do something about that.

Good morning.

3 to go, two sets.

Punch, punch.

Perfect.

Pff pff.

Yeah.

Stay with it.

Keep punching.

Andrea Jones, voice-over: The touch, the sense, the things that we lose in our life, the library still holds on to a sense of that.

Roby: On the water, you can see on the water line it's up to the top of the buildings.

It was paramount for us to get out in the bookmobile as soon as possible.

We were champing at the bit to get out into our communities.

Woman: All right.

Thank you.

Roby: Don't forget to get your water and your meals.

How about some books, little lady?

Roby, voice-over: Doing things for other people and helping them with their problems gives me a release.

You're very welcome.

Now, where you pull up around that corner, they have ice.

Woman: ATMs don't work.

Gas is running low.

Water in stores is scarce.

Remote Mendocino is now completely off the grid.

♪ Man: Willits is without phone system, both hard line and cell towers, so we're certainly working with the county to make sure that this building is going to continue to provide as much Internet as possible.

♪ Woman: Ethiopia.

Hong Kong.

India.

♪ Man: People often ask, "Why are we holding naturalization ceremonies in a library?"

I can think of no better place to take this oath.

I take this obligation freely... Woman: without any mental reservation... without any mental reservation... or purpose of evasion... or purpose of evasion... so help me God.

so help me God.

Congratulations.

You are United States citizens.

[Applause] ♪ Hayden, voice-over: When I was nominated as the Librarian of Congress, I was the first female, the first African-American.

♪ I, Carla Hayden, do solemnly swear...

I, Carla Hayden, do solemnly swear... Hayden, voice-over: Here was a descendent of a people who had been denied the right to learn to read standing in this temple of knowledge, the world's largest library, and I must admit, I did get a little choked up thinking about that.

[Cheering and applause] ♪ ♪ Woman: ♪ I believe in me ♪ ♪ ♪ That we could do all things ♪ ♪ So you gotta... ♪ This is what community looks like.

♪ Man: The world has been created for us, all my people, to live.

Woman: ♪ You gotta believe in me ♪ ♪ The way I believe in you, whoa ♪ Palfrey, voice-over: The public library is one of the purest expressions of the possibility of democracy in America.

George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson... "It's okay to have BIG ears."

Woman, voice-over: The library is definitely the kind of America that I believe in.

♪ Woman, voice-over: These things are fluid and fragile and are not to be taken for granted.

Stand up!

Fight back!

Woman, voice-over: Every single one of these libraries, they mean something to these communities, and they respond directly to the needs of these communities.

These community members are not ready to give up yet.

There's gonna be a rally about shutting down the libraries in Philadelphia.

Save our libraries!

Save our libraries!

Logsdon: After half a century of decline, the community of Braddock is finally able to restore their library with support from a new generation of philanthropists and a new generation of volunteers.

Back in New Orleans, supporters of the library were fighting a measure put on the ballot to defund the library.

My mom, who's in her 80s now, pitched in to rally support.

Tax increases down here rarely pass, but this time, they won.

[Applause] Tassiana Willis: ♪ Mm, oh ♪ ♪ Oh, and all of us, and all of us ♪ ♪ Are you ready to change the world?

♪ ♪ Are you ready?

♪ ♪ Today is the day ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Singers: ♪ Oh, whoa, whoa, oh ♪ ♪ Oh, whoa, whoa ♪ ♪ Oh, whoa, whoa ♪ ♪