The Small-Town Library That Became a Culture War Battleground
Keith Preston
August 11, 2023
For the better part of a century, the Dayton Memorial Library was run by a town of around 2,500 people, and offered free borrowing privileges to all Columbia County residents. But in the early 2000s, when the library faced insolvency, three-quarters of the county’s voters chose to establish a library district that would tax all county residents so that the library could survive. Now the library is under attack.
For our latest cover, our west coast correspondent Sasha Abramskywent to Dayton to learn about the little library at the fringe of culture wars, whose enemies are trying to ban titles like This Book Is Anti-Racist and Gender Queer. What Abramsky found was “a furor in Dayton.”
Throughout the country, far-right groups are trying to control what books kids can read. In Dayton, Wash., they tried to shut down the library altogether.
The right denounced it as “reverse racism,” while the liberal center hailed it as the endpoint of egalitarianism. But as a limited measure in the fight against discrimination, it has never been either.
