SRRT (Social Responsibilities Round Table)

 Against Neutrality: 150 Years of Contesting the Meaning of Librarianship
M Rosenzweig

As ALA celebrates  its 150th anniversary, I find myself thinking about the people, movements, and struggles that shaped the Association Icame to know through Council, SRRT Action Council, conferences, committee meetings, and years of engagement with colleagues committed to libraries as instruments of democracy and social change.

The American Library Association founded in 1876 was a product of its time. What it has become was not inevitable. It was built-and repeatedly rebuilt-by members who challenged exclusion, expanded participation, and insisted that librarianship is inseparable from the social conditions in which information is produced, controlled, and accessed.

To my mind a decisive turning point came in 1969 with the formation of the Social Responsibilities Round Table. SRRT emerged in the wake of the civil rights movement, anti–Vietnam War organizing, feminist mobilization, and broader struggles for liberation at home and abroad. It brought into ALA a clear insistence that libraries are not neutral spaces floating above society, but institutions embedded in systems of power that demand ethical engagement.

The 1970 conference in Detroit remains emblematic of that shift. It marked a moment when librarianship was openly contested as a political and moral practice. Out of that period came enduring structures of activism within ALA: caucuses, task forces, and organizing spaces that fundamentally reshaped the profession.

The Black Caucus of the American Library Association forced a reckoning with racial exclusion and professional gatekeeping. E.J. Josey's leadership in challenging segregated state associations stands as a defining intervention in the profession's ethical development. The Task Force on Women pressed ALA to confront entrenched gender inequities. The Gay Liberation Task Force-later the Rainbow Round Table-created institutional space for LGBTQ librarians and communities at a time when visibility itself was an act of resistance.

SRRT's task forces extended this framework of engagement into every corner of library work. The Hunger, Homelessness and Poverty Task Force insisted that libraries serve people living under economic systems that deny basic security. The International Responsibilities Task Force pushed ALA to understand librarianship within a global field of struggle over rights, knowledge, and power. The Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Task Force affirmed that the profession's commitments to justice were not abstract ideals but concrete political responsibilities.

This activist tradition has never been contained within ALA's formal boundaries. The Progressive Librarians Guild, founded in 1990, carried forward a more explicitly radical critique of librarianship, bringing together librarians working inside and outside ALA who challenged the growing dominance of market ideology in information systems and higher education. PLG helped sustain a critical vocabulary for understanding libraries as sites shaped by labor relations, political economy, and struggles over access and control of knowledge.

The same currents of engagement shaped some of the most consequential ethical debates in ALA's modern history. Libraries were deeply involved in solidarity movements against apartheid in South Africa, where members pressed ALA to align professional commitments with global human rights struggles. Similar tensions surfaced in debates over U.S. policy toward Cuba, where questions of cultural exchange, embargoes, access to information, and professional engagement reflected broader conflicts over geopolitics and intellectual freedom.

Even more persistently, ALA has wrestled with resolutions and debates concerning Israel/Palestine, where members have brought sharply divergent ethical and political frameworks into Council and conference spaces. These discussions have often been intense, reflecting deep disagreements about occupation, boycott movements, academic freedom, and the role of professional associations in addressing state violence and human rights. Whatever one's position, these conflicts underscore a fundamental reality: librarianship does not exist outside global power struggles over knowledge, narrative, and legitimacy.

Sanford Berman's critique of biased subject headings exposed how classification systems encode power, shaping what can be seen and what remains obscured. The Freedom to Read Foundation strengthened the profession's ability to defend intellectual freedom through legal and political struggle. Following September 11, librarians again found themselves on the front lines of civil liberties debates, resisting the expansion of surveillance under the USA PATRIOT Act and defending the confidentiality of library users against state power.

In recent years, coordinated book challenges, attacks on educators and library workers, political interference in library governance, and the consolidation of information power in corporate platforms have intensified these struggles. Once again, librarians have responded through organizing, advocacy, and refusal.

Across this history, what stands out is not institutional stability but persistent contestation. Council floors, SRRT meetings, caucus gatherings, task forces, and conference halls have functioned as spaces of democratic struggle inside the profession itself. Progress has come not from consensus, but from sustained pressure, organizing, and dissent.

As someone who has served on Council and the SRRT Action Council, I understand ALA not as a settled institution, but as an arena where competing visions of librarianship are continuously negotiated. That tension-between institutional form and insurgent energy-has been the source of the Association's most meaningful growth.

The 150th anniversary belongs to those who pushed the profession beyond comfort: organizers, dissidents, coalition builders, and critical thinkers who insisted that libraries exist to expand access, protect freedom, and confront inequality in all its forms.

The history of ALA is also the history of those who challenged ALA from within and alongside it. SRRT, the caucuses, task forces, the Freedom to Read Foundation, and the Progressive Librarians Guild all expanded the boundaries of what librarianship could mean. Their work forced sustained engagement with questions of equity, censorship, labor, global power, and the politics of information.

That ongoing tension between institutional continuity and organized dissent is not a flaw in ALA's history. It is one of its defining conditions of possibility. It has allowed librarianship to evolve in response to struggle rather than stagnate in comfort.

As we mark 150 years, it is worth remembering that progress in this profession has never come from neutrality or consensus. It has come from organized members willing to challenge power, confront contradiction, and insist that libraries remain accountable to the publics they serve. That work continues, and it remains the only honest way forward.