On being a library lover and defender

 

The Background

Last June, I joined an advocacy group called NYC PLAN (Public Library Action Network), which I found out about from a colleague shortly after my unsuccessful application to join my community board. I am pretty busy with my various projects, but I knew that no matter how much I wrote my heart out about liberation and Black creativity for Black Star Reviews, sitting at home and worrying about politics was not going to move the needle or bring me peace. I was eager to get involved in person with a cause that mattered to me!

 

I love libraries, I have always loved libraries, I always will love libraries and I had never once considered that they needed my help. Without exaggeration, I would not have become this ‘version of me’ if libraries didn’t exist. I got to talk about this when I helped emcee the NYC PLAN Manhattan People’s Assembly in October. But even in the present, libraries and their online resources are immensely helpful to me when I’m researching for a review. I’m always going on about the Schomburg, which is just another…library. I would not be able to do my work in the same way without them. But I want them for all my neighbors, not just myself.

 

 

NYC PLAN organized a rally on the steps of City Hall the same day as a City Council budget hearing to urge the mayor and the city council to ensure our library system is fully funded. I volunteered to speak and they asked me to fill 10 minutes (not a problem for a long-winded girlie like me, I think I actually went for 14!). The following is the speech I gave at the rally. My speech was quoted in rally coverage by The Gothamist and The City which feels very cool! 

 

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The Speech

 

Good Morning!

 

I don’t think I’ve been this far downtown this early in the morning since I interned in the Public Advocate’s Office. City Hall is a long way from Harlem. I think I was late for my internship everyday, but they didn’t bother firing me — because they didn’t bother paying me either. 

 

That was more than 10 years ago. Before I got my policy degree. Before I started working in this city as an educator. Before we elected Zohran Mamdani, who I like to think of as a mayor with the heart of a public advocate, and the charisma of a celebrity ambassador. 

 

I’m here this morning to speak directly to Mayor Mamdani, as an educator, a Harlemite, and one of the thousands who cheered him on at his last rally before the election at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens. 

 

Mr. Mayor, when I cast my vote for you last fall, I was voting for something different, someone who wanted to build a city that was Affordable for All, someone who believed in dignity for our neighbors experiencing houselessness, someone who understood deeply how education can transform and radicalize, someone who could rap (!!!), and most of all someone who would make and keep their promises.

 

Mayor Zohran, you promised to deliver half of a percent of the city’s budget to our libraries. And then you went back on your word. You told the news that you had restored funding, but that’s only true if we don’t account for inflation. You celebrated a win for libraries when you knew this was a loss for our communities. But you still have a chance to keep your promise. You still have a chance to make history as the kind of public servant who got it right the first time. 

 

Here is the truth that we all need to hear. Under the current proposal, for every $100 of the budget, only 42 cents will go to libraries. In Eric Adams’s budget, libraries got 45 cents of every $100. 

 

If you let him out-swag you on this, we will never hear the end of it. 

 

We demand those 8 cents! Ensure libraries get 50 cent of every $100. 42 cents is no good! If Queens-born New Yorker Curtis Jackson had dubbed himself 42 cents, it’s unlikely his career would have ever taken off. We want 50 Cent! I got 21 Questions for you and they’re all about libraries!

 

Alright, let’s get serious. 0.5% is not a lot, but $97 million is. And that’s the gap this ill-fated budget has created. It is $97 million short on what you promised, and what our libraries need, and what our neighbors deserve. And that missing $97 million will have to come from somewhere — so let’s talk about 3 Ps: people, place, and programs. 

 

First and foremost, libraries are made up of people. Not just the people who visit, but the people who work there. The people who trek to work in a heat wave because so many of our libraries are cooling centers, and the people who tromp to work in a winter storm because so many of our libraries keep people warm. We talk about police, firefighters, nurses, and teachers like they’re the only public servants in this city: Library workers are essential workers, and I say that as an educator. 

 

The librarians are the ones creating safe and welcoming spaces all across this city but we can do more to extend safety and welcome to them. Through NYC PLAN, I’ve heard too many stories of stressed library workers at understaffed branches, where a building has more floors than librarians, where a library worker can’t take a bathroom break because there aren’t any other colleagues around to take over their post. 

 

Yo-yos in funding undermine job security. This $97 million gap is not just fewer books on the shelves, it’s fewer hands to put them there, fewer smiling faces at the circulation desk, fewer staff to support patrons which range from child to adult and at varying levels of stability. And don’t forget, the libraries don’t just employ librarians: there are security guards, social workers, custodians, tutors, and support staff, too.

 

Second, our library system is a collection of places. So many of the city’s branches across NYPL, BPL, and QPL are drop-dead gorgeous. Have you been to Brooklyn Heights? It’s got an airy atrium, colorful children’s corners, and ample community space where groups like NYC PLAN can meet. Have you been to the Bronx Library Center up by Fordham? It has a glassy entryway, an outdoor terrace, and a Latino and Puerto Rican Cultural Center. Have you been to Seward Park or Bloomingdale? Have you seen the historical photos of their surrounding neighborhoods in the glass cases on the wall? See, I got familiar with a few different branches when my home branch had to close for renovation. Countee Cullen on 136th Street is an old building, it went up in 1941, and was renovated in 1990. But sometimes it needs additional repair, like when it was closed for more than 6 months from June 2024 to February 2025. These beautiful buildings — many historic, and all the heart of their communities — need care. Without baseline funding, without being able to look ahead and anticipate their budget line, repairs may not happen, or worse they start and never finish, leaving neighborhoods without a go-to branch for stretches of time. 

 

Finally, libraries offer programming. When most people think about libraries, they envision colorful book-lined shelves, wide open space with clean tables and comfortable seating, children smiling on vibrant rugs, computers, printers, magazines, DVDs. They think about all the stuff. And that’s surely part of the library’s programming, but that’s not all. Libraries hold and host plenty of intangible things with tangible benefits like language and technology classes, teen hours, story time for children and families, legal aid, access to social workers, book talks and author events, and after school. Today alone, my branch will have Adult Computer Lab at 11am, Intermediate Excel at 11:30am, Open Hours for Teen College and Career Pathways at 3:30pm. And the Soul Pages Book Club will meet tomorrow at 5:00pm. 

 

Or… will they? 

 

Because this $97 million dollar gap means something’s got to give. 

 

People, places, and programming. That’s one way to think of all the things libraries offer to our iconic city. And they’re interconnected. You cannot cut one without impacting another. You cannot cut the people without affecting the place and the programming. You cannot shave off a little programming while still investing in people and place. 

 

I care about all libraries, but I want to tell you a little more about my branch in Harlem. Countee Cullen, which is named for an esteemed poet of the Harlem Renaissance, is on 136th Street right around the corner from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, also a part of the New York Public Library System, which just celebrated it’s Centennial Anniversary. The center is named for its founder, Arturo Schomburg, who was Black and Puerto Rican. As he explains in his 1925 essay, “A Negro Digs Up His Past”, Schomburg believed deeply that creating an archive of Black history and culture would be key to ensuring Black people saw themselves with distinction, and with a bright future. He was an avid writer and researcher and the Schomburg’s Junior Scholars Program is one of many ways we carry on his legacy. This year, the Junior Scholars presented an exhibition of 16 Afro-surrealist dioramas in a show titled Guarionex after a Taino lord who resisted European colonialism. But when I went to see the children’s work, there was a rope at the bottom of the staircase pointing toward the exhibition, so I had to ask for entry. 

 

The librarian at the circulation desk looked up toward the second floor where the lights were completely darkened.

 

“How many security guards are at the front door?” he asked. 

 

I counted and responded, “two.”

 

He nodded and asked one of the two security guards, a young woman, to take me up. 

 

She pulled back the rope, headed up the stairs and turned on the lights. The upper level came alive. The student’s dioramas, mounted on the wall, were filled with feathers, and pomade jars, pony beads and black eyed peas and cut-outs of collard greens. From the second floor, my beloved branch looked like a whole new place. I could read the excerpts of “From the Dark Tower” and “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” that crown the main level. When I was finished viewing and headed back downstairs, the security guard followed me, turning off the lights and replacing the rope. 

 

There’s not enough staff to keep both floors open at all times, which means the student dioramas were only visible to those who asked, and the full view of the library built on the site of A’lelia Walker’s townhouse stays behind the rope. Without sufficient people, we can’t experience the programming, and we can’t encounter the place. Now imagine that all over the city to the tune of $97 million dollars. 

 

There’s one more point I’d like to make before I step down from here, a point that I think is important as an educator and as a Harlem resident.

 

Public libraries — the people, the places, and their programming — are some of the only libraries our children have. Abby, my comrade at NYCPLAN shared recently as a guest on the LibraryPunk podcast, that there are 1,600 public schools in our city. But only 1,000 of those schools have libraries. Wait, it gets worse: New York City Public Schools only has about 270 full-time librarians. 270. 

 

That’s a lot of children who won’t get to check out books, develop a love for literacy, or exercise critical thinking in authentic texts — and not just dusty, test-prep passages. And it’s worrisome that public libraries are being asked to do more and more with shrinking resources, that in a time where we need an informed citizenship who can evaluate bias and navigate PR spin, we’re choosing to starve a social institution that can actually have an impact. And the implications of an uninformed populace, who read no further than an AI overview, are dire. Here’s what I mean:

 

Harlem will elect an assembly member this year and my building’s mailroom is cluttered in junk in advance of the primary. I’ve gotten mailers from FanDuel and DraftKings, from Michael Bloomberg and the Walton family, and from a Solidarity PAC-affiliated independent expenditure committee. Of course, they didn’t put their names on this mail, I had to dig through state records and follow the money. What I found was tragic. None of these have any heartfelt interest in me, my neighborhood, or my neighbors. They’re just pouring money from the sky and hoping that no one in district 70 will think too critically about it. They’re the same groups that opposed you in your mayoral race. They don’t care about the public, they prefer to silence us with their pocketbooks.  

 

But you won anyway! And now it’s time to do the work you promised. That last $97 million that we need for the libraries, that last $97 million that we need to satisfy 0.5% of the budget is crucial for people, for place, and for programs. But there’s one more P and that’s Public. Private interests, private corporations, private developers are trying to tear us apart. Our only hope is public interest, public good, public investment — public housing, public schools, public health care, public libraries. 

 

Mayor Mamdani, I’d like to quote you from your budget press conference, “It is evidence of a new era that does not accept austerity as the only answer to adversity. One that understands that when working people organize, they can fundamentally change what is politically possible.” 

 

Well, here we are. We’re working people. We’ve organized. We will not accept austerity. We demand a fundamental change that will extend the gift of literacy and a safe after school option to every child, that will serve as a hub of connection for our seniors, that will re-establish dignity and stability for our library workers, that will provide a third space for New Yorkers to come together and take back our city from billionaires. 

 

We demand that fundamental change.

 

We demand a new political possibility. 

 

We demand that you keep the promise you made.

 

We demand 50 cents of every $100 for libraries. 

 

Not by the end of your mayoral term.

 

Not at some date in the future. 

 

Not in the next cycle. 

 

But right now. 

 

Today.

 

Thank you very much.