The controversial firing last year of Oak Park Public Library Director Joslyn Bowling Dixon is reverberating in this year’s Library Board race. There are eight candidates competing for four seats on the Library Board in the April 1 election. Three of the candidates, Bruce Brigell, Megan Butman, and Daniel Suber, are running largely because they are angry about Dixon’s termination and believe it illustrated deeper problems with the board.
“It just seemed a rash decision without due process in our view and left the community kind of aghast,” Brigell said in a telephone interview.
Dixon was fired March 16, 2024, after complaints about how she handled a Palestinian cultural event at the library and amid complaints by some current and former library staff members about staff reorganization that eliminated a restorative practices position.
Brigell, 73, and Butman, 53, are professional librarians while Suber, 73, is a recently retired lawyer. They have formed a slate and are running a joint campaign. Brigell and Butman met after they both made public comments at a Library Board meeting after Dixon was fired. Brigell, who is now retired, worked for 25 years as the head of reference at the Skokie Public Library while Butman is a law librarian for the Ogletree, Deakins law firm. Suber, who was also upset by Dixon’s firing, was introduced to Brigell by former Oak Park Village Clerk Sandra Sokol. Then Brigell, Butman and Suber met and they decided to run for the library board as a team.
“We just had some coffee together and decided, gee we all feel the same way about things,” Suber said.
There is another very different three person slate in the race, consisting of Annie Wilkinson, Colin Bird-Martinez, and Mika Yamamoto. They met after filing to run but all come from a politically left perspective and have been active in the Activate Oak Park group.
“Nobody put together our slate, we came together because we’re like minded,” Wilkinson said.
Positioned somewhat in the middle are two incumbents running for reelection, longtime Library Board member and current board President Matt Fruth and Maya Ganguly.
There are clear differences between the two slates. Brigell and Butman say that it would be helpful to have a professional librarian or two on the Library Board.
“It’s a voice that would, I think, make a more effective board,” Butman said.
Fruth, 46, who has been on the board for 20 years, declined to say much about the firing of Dixon. A statement the library board issued after firing Dixon stated that the decision to terminate Dixon, a Black woman, less than 17 months after she started her job, was not based on one incident.
Ganguly, a 45 year-old-lawyer who has been on the board for two years, was somewhat more forthcoming in a telephone interview.
“I will say that there were, unfortunately, a pretty large range of concerns that had been brought up to the board and not all of them were in the middle of the public meeting,” Ganguly said. “There were also complaints about the Friends of the Oak Park Public Library and how they felt she was treating them. I don’t think that was necessarily a political issue but they did not feel like she was being respectful to them as a group. I certainly don’t want to highlight that because I know that they’re a group of people who really, really love the library like I love the library and I don’t want them to get any of the heat and misinformation that is directed at me.”
Bird-Martinez, Wilkinson and Yamamoto supported the decision to fire Dixon.
“I do believe that she should have been fired,” said Yamamoto, an English teacher at Oak Park and River Forest High School. “There’s a lot of public documentation of staff complaints. She wasn’t in alignment with the library’s vision of being a library for everyone.”
Bird-Martinez, 39, grew up in Oak Park and works as a manager for International Motors, a manufacturer of heavy duty trucks. In 2019, when he lived in Chicago, Bird-Martinez unsuccessfully ran for alderman in the 31st Ward, finishing third in a three person race with 26.47% of the vote. Bird-Martinez has also worked with the People’s Lobby group that former Oak Park village president candidate Cate Readling was a leader of.
Wilkinson, 40, earned a doctorate in anthropology from University of California, Irvine. She works as a senior research analyst for a small think tank called Political Research Associates where she studies transnational anti-gender movements, mis- and disinformation, conspiracy theories and authoritarian movements.
Bird-Martinez, Wilkinson, and Yamamoto’s campaign slogan is “A Library for All, for Always.” They are concerned about the double digit number of people of color who have left jobs at the library in the past year and “the rolling back and sort of dismantling of some of the antiracism and DEI and community engagement team,” Wilkinson said.
All the candidates say that they want the library to continue to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. They all said the new executive director, who will be hired shortly, should decide, in consultation with the Library Board, whether to have a director of diversity, equity and inclusion position or not.
“How an executive director, you know, makes that work will be up to them,” Fruth said.
Brigell said it seems like the opposing slate’s focus seems to be mostly on DEI.
“I think all the candidates value, you know, DEI and antiracism and all those kinds of things,” Brigell said. “However I think that is kind of like the sole focus of that other ticket. We think it’s very important, don’t get me wrong on that, but it’s not the only issue facing the library.”
Wilkinson said that her slate cares about more than DEI.
“It isn’t the only thing that we care about,” Wilkinson said. “We also care about protecting the library from book banning, from ensuring that we continue to have a resilient public institution in the face of federal funding cuts.”
All the candidates say they are opposed to book banning.
Brigell said that it is important to have a diverse collection of materials and noted he didn’t want to see older books gotten rid of.
“Mark Twain uses many words that I wouldn’t use,” Brigell said at a Feb. 5 candidate forum sponsored by the Oak Park chapter of the League of Women Voters. “He characterizes racial diversity in ways that I wouldn’t use, but I think it’s important that we not censor Mark Twain either so it’s keeping the library open to all forms of ideas even if we have do have to have Melania Trump’s book.”
Suber said at the candidate forum he thinks the community should have a role in deciding what is in the library’s collection.
“I’m not a fan of censorship in any way, shape or form but it seems to me that the community should have input into that process as well as the board and the library staff … which is lacking at the moment,” Suber said.
Butman is concerned that the Bird-Martinez, Wilkinson and Yamamoto trio want to use the library to advance their political agenda. To her that’s the distinction in the race.
“To me this looks like people who care about libraries for library’s sake and people who are using the Library Board for their own political agenda,” Butman said.
Wilkinson had a response to that.
“Elections are inherently political,” Wilkinson said. “We’ve made our positions really clear about what our shared vision is for the library and we think that reflects what the community of Oak Park wants.”
Butman said as a librarian she is concerned when any group tries to use a library for political purposes.
“A lot of Activate and progressive ideas I agree with, I just don’t agree with either the Left or Right using their own political agenda to run a library,” Butman said. “I see that as problematic. I see it as problematic when the Right wants to ban books; I see it as problematic when the Left wants to just fire directors and go attack people for all kinds of pretty extreme things.”
Bob Skolnik is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
