Amanda Jones: An Accidental Activist

Jones loves books and she loves her job.

As a lifelong resident of Livingston Parish, a conservative, mostly White community east of Baton Rouge, books opened up the world to her. Her family couldn’t afford a lot of travel, so it was books that introduced her to people of different races, cultures, and religions. A library card holder since she was five, she knows that libraries offer a gateway to that same world, no matter how much money you have.

She fondly recalls her high school librarian, Shirley McDonald, who introduced her to works by Alice Walker, Amy Tan, Maya Angelou, and Frank McCourt – each story offered a new perspective that, she readily acknowledges, helped shape who she is today.

Inspired by McDonald and her passion for reading, she graduated from Southeastern Louisiana University with a BA in education and library science. She taught English for 14 years before switching to the school library. She now oversees the library for fifth- and sixth-graders at the same school she attended almost 30 years earlier.

She understands that books can be affirming or offer an escape. As she got older, she also came to understand the isolation felt by those not among the White, Christian majority of the school community. That recognition helped her to realize that books could also save lives.

“I’ve had so many students tell me that they’re still here because of a book that they read.”

Jones likens the baseless accusations leveled against her to the hysteria over witches that gripped Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. Referencing Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”, she says she felt like Goody Proctor, the woman falsely accused, tried, and burned at the stake for witchcraft.

The attacks on her character began within days after Jones spoke at the library board meeting. The executive director of a group called Citizens for a New Louisiana posted on social media that she was “fighting so hard to keep sexually erotic and pornographic materials in the kid’s section” of the public library. That began a salvo of posts, post likes, and shares that spilled offline and into her community. She received a death threat about a month later.

Jones was unprepared for the hate and personal attacks. She developed high blood pressure and experienced hair loss, weight loss, and fainting spells. After receiving the death threat, she bought a taser and pepper spray, started driving with a handgun, and slept with a shotgun under the bed. She took Xanax and started therapy.

When we spoke in January, more than three years later, she said, “My name is mud around here in my community. I’m persona non grata wherever I go. I don’t go out in public in my small town. I’ll go two towns over to go somewhere, and I get my groceries delivered.”

Now, at school for Halloween, she says with a laugh, she dresses as Goody Proctor but wonders how many of the parents get the message.

Given that libraries were the center of her professional life, Jones was well aware of the rapidly growing campaign to ban books from libraries around the country. Like her counterparts in Texas, Florida, New Jersey, and elsewhere, she understood it was her turn to step up when the book banners came to Livingston Parish.

So, despite her emotional and physical trauma and the expectation that further engagement would only lead to more hate mail and hateful posts on social media, she chose to fight back. By September 2022, she had hired an attorney and filed two defamation lawsuits: one against Ryan Thames, who had posted a meme to Facebook accusing her of “advocating teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds”, and the other against Citizens for a New Louisiana and its executive director, Michael Lunsford, for posting a comment on social media claiming she was “promoting pornography and erotic content to kids”. She later filed a third suit against Dan Kleinman, a self-described library watchdog who said she was “sexualizing” her students.

By the next year, she had teamed up with Lynette Mejia and Melanie Brevis from Lafayette Parish to form Louisiana Citizens Against Censorship. She lobbies against legislation that would circumvent well-established evaluation procedures and restrict access to books because they offend some people’s religious values and serve others’ political purposes.

She points out that librarians follow a rigorous process to determine which books are best for which age levels and that procedures are in place to file complaints. She notes that parents sometimes drop off their kids at the library because they view it as a safe space, but she added emphatically, it’s not the librarian’s job to monitor where they go in the library. It’s up to the parents – not the schools, the politicians, or the librarians – to know where their kids are and to decide what their kids should be reading. Those parents, she says, do not have the right to determine what other children can read.

In her book, “That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America”, Jones quotes her sister Melanie: “Those jerks sure did mess with the wrong one.”

Despite the continued attacks and pressure on her and Louisiana’s libraries, Jones still has her job and continues to protect her kids and their right to access age-appropriate books.

In November 2025, Jones won her case against Thames, receiving the $1 she asked for and, more importantly, a public apology from her accuser. The other two suits are ongoing.

Nationally, legislators are fighting back with laws that ban book banning. Nine states have passed such laws; similar legislation has been introduced in 18 states, including Texas and Florida.

In a new afterword to her book, she writes, “The people who proclaim they are protecting the children are still setting horrible examples of how to behave by spreading lies about librarians and yelling at others during open meetings, and the kids are soaking it up like sponges. My hope is that America will wake up from this nightmare hellscape of hatred before it is too late.”