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WASHINGTON
— On the night in April 2015 that Baltimore went up in flames, Carla D.
Hayden, the city’s chief librarian, was under pressure to board up a
neighborhood library branch and wait out the violence triggered by the
death of Freddie Gray after being injured in police custody.
But she had other ideas.
“I thought, what would that show?” Dr. Hayden said. “That we’re afraid?”
Instead,
as a CVS drugstore across the street was looted and burned, and as the
governor of Maryland declared a state of emergency, Dr. Hayden and her
staff decided they would open their doors the next morning, welcoming in
the weary public.
For
Dr. Hayden, who was sworn in on Wednesday as the 14th librarian of
Congress, the unrest was the test that clarified her values: Libraries
are about far more than books.
“The
people of that neighborhood protected that library,” Dr. Hayden said
during a recent interview in her new office overlooking Capitol Hill.
“There were young men who stood outside. It was such a symbol.”
At
64, Dr. Hayden is the first African-American and the first woman to
lead the 216-year-old library, one of the world’s largest, and the
nation’s leading repository of knowledge and culture. “To be the head of
an institution that’s associated with knowledge and reading and
scholarship when slaves were forbidden to learn how to read on
punishment of losing limbs, that’s kind of something,’’ she said.
Appointed
by President Obama, Dr. Hayden is the first new librarian of Congress
since 1987, and brings with her another generation’s ideas about
accessibility, technology and the role that libraries play in society.
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Her goal is to open to more Americans the riches of the Library of Congress,
which has always balanced mixed loyalties — to members of Congress who
look to it for impartial research, to scholars who live in its archives
and, finally, to the public.
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FERGUSON, MO.—She’s a mom, a librarian, a U.S. army vet, just like her dad. She belongs to a Ferguson book club that hasn’t met since police bullets felled Michael Brown in August.
Her 9-year-old daughter’s on the Ferguson swim team. Her husband, who builds in-ground pools for a living, is president of their neighbourhood community association. Together, they launched two local community gardens. This is home. They’re dug in, here for the long haul.
With a bio like that, Angelique Kidd, 41, admits she’s just about the last person you might expect to find on the picket line, standing vigil day in and day out for the past 102 days opposite the Ferguson Police Department, demanding change.
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