Ten Heroic Librarians

In 2014, an unarmed African-American 18-year-old named Michael Brown was shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Scott Bonner, Director of the Ferguson Municipal Public Library, kept the library open during the riots that erupted after the fatal shooting in order to provide a safe place for children.

In 2003, Alia Muhammad Baker, then chief librarian of Al Basrah Central Library in Basra, Iraq, saved an estimated 30,000 books from the city's main library before it was destroyed during the Iraq War.

In 1972, Zoia Markovna Horn became the first U.S. librarian to be jailed for refusing to reveal information that violated her belief in intellectual freedom.

During World War II, Ona Šimaitė, a librarian at Vilnius University in the capital of Lithuania, tricked Nazis into believing she was collecting overdue books inside a walled ghetto and instead secretly aided and rescued Jews.

During the American Civil Rights Movement, Library Director Patricia Swift Blalock took the lead in desegregating the Selma-Dallas County Public library in Alabama.

Clara Estelle Breed was a children's librarian at the San Diego Public Library in California who sent books and care packages to children in the Japanese-American internment camps during World War II.

In 2012, Abdel Kader Haidara, founder of the Mamma Haidara Library in Timbuktu, Mali, saved several hundred thousand priceless manuscripts from destruction by Islamist rebels.

In 2015 in Baltimore, Maryland, Carla Hayden, CEO of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, kept the library and its branches open during the civil unrest that occurred after an African-American named Freddie Gray died while in police custody.

Librarian T. H. Tsien risked his life to smuggle thousands of rare books to safety after Japan seized Shanghai, China, in 1937.

Laurence Copel, youth outreach librarian and founder of the Lower Ninth Ward Street Library, converted her bicycle to a mobile book carrier to provide thousands of books to children of the Lower Ninth Ward, which was hit hard by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.