A federal judge has struck down key parts of an Arkansas law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing so-called “harmful” materials to minors.

Democrat Rhode Island lawmakers on Wednesday promoted a suite of bills motivated by the Freedom to Read movement — an assertion of libraries’ right to hold controversial books, amid an ongoing culture clash over the written word.

Both the Indiana and Iowa State Legislatures have introduced legislation regarding criminally charging libraries and librarians over “inappropriate” material. These bills are closely related to widespread book challenges occurring at schools and public libraries across the nation, with people trying to remove books that address certain topics relating to gender, sexuality, and race from library collections. In many cases there is already a clear process for reconsidering materials in a collection, so how do legal defenses play a role in this and what do the bills change?

For Black librarians like me, libraries also symbolize the literacy that was denied.