1960s AD - Decade

Not surprisingly, Berninghausen's article did not go unnoticed by the profession. For example, Patricia Schuman, a librarian at Brooklyn College, New York, and associate editor of School Library Journal, responded to Berninghausen's argument with the following remark: "You frighten me, David Berninghausen ... you promulgate your thesis by setting up a dangerous and insidious syllogism that says: intellectual freedom is the guiding ethic of our profession: therefore, all other ethics are incompatible with it" (Wedgeworth et al., 1973, p. 28). Detroit Public Library Director Clara S. Jones accused Berninghausen of turning "back the clock" (Wedgeworth et al., 1973, p. 33). And following his own perusal of the article, E.J. Josey, chief of the Bureau of Academic & Research Libraries at New York State Library, stated: "If Berninghausen's proposals are what intellectual freedom is like, I for one want no part of it. As a black man who was born and grew up in the South, I have experienced this kind of intellectual freedom and I reject it as inimical to my freedom as a human being" (in Wedgeworth et al., 1973, p. 33).

At the time that Berninghausen's article was published, Schuman,Jones, and Josey were each a part of an activist movement within the library profession opposed to ALA's purist moral stance on intellectual freedom and its accompanying neutral account of the Library Bill of Rights. They were experimenting with "social responsibility"--an alternative conception of intellectual freedom and the Library Bill of Rights. The social responsibility perspective ideologically opposed Berninghausen's proposition of intellectual freedom because it called upon ALA to move away from a neutral stance and toward a viewpoint on social issues. At the very heart of the social responsibility movement in librarianship lay a key question: Was intellectual freedom the profession's only ethic?

Jones held that the Library Bill of Rights "evolved from the profession's developing commitment to the concept of social responsibility." She viewed it as "the civil rights document of the profession...a rallying point for social action" (Wedgeworth et al., 1973, p. 33).

Jones's interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights illustrates how the social responsibility movement within librarianship was symptomatic of the democratic and participatory campaigns being launched across the nation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many citizens were tired of the social and political indifference of the Eisenhower years, involved in the Southern civil rights movement, morally resentful of the war in Vietnam, and bitter about a government "incapable of solving racial and poverty problems in the world's wealthiest nation" (Glassing, 1970, p. 11). A number of these citizens participated in the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the counter culture, and the new left, and sought left-of-center change by using tactics such as boycotts, counter cultural education, and nonviolent demonstration.