After a tense debate and a public comment campaign, Brookline’s Board of Library Trustees authorized the town’s libraries to display Pride and Black Lives Matter flags in June.
Pride, Black Lives Matter, and other flags — Stop Asian Hate flags and flags condemning antisemitism — were displayed outside the library’s three branches for years until May 2023, when former Library Director Amanda Hirst implemented a facility and grounds policy that led to their removal.
The policy aimed to reserve the library’s display space for materials explicitly related to library programs and required signs, flags and other displays to be approved by a vote of the Board of Library Trustees. In Brookline, 12 elected trustees are responsible for hiring and managing the library director and overseeing the library’s budget, services and policies.
The facility and grounds policy also aimed to maintain the library’s role as a “neutral” organization without political or religious affiliations.
On May 13, about a dozen library employees and community members made public comments at a board meeting voicing their desire to display the Pride and Black Lives Matter flags again.
Jackson Mathews, a reference librarian at the Brookline Village branch of the Public Library of Brookline, recounted a time several years ago when Pride flags outside the library were vandalized.
“I took a very long time making sure those flags were back up and in good shape, and I would do that again and again as necessary,” Mathews said. “It’s very important to have the flags out there to show support for our community.”
While several library trustees expressed solidarity with those who spoke at the meeting, some raised concerns about the legal implications of flying flags.
Carol Lohe, a trustee, said displaying some flags might make it difficult for the library not to display others if requested.
“One of the reasons not to put a Pride flag up is because if next month, a neo-Nazi group wanted to put a flag up, we would have a hard time saying no,” Lohe said at the meeting on May 13. “If we said no, they’d sue the pants off us, and they’d win, both because of our policy and because that’s what inclusion is about.”
Others echoed Lohe’s hesitancy. One trustee, Jon Margolis, referenced a 2022 Supreme Court ruling against the city of Boston, which decided that the city must allow a Christian group to fly its flag outside of City Hall.
“The Supreme Court said that’s viewpoint discrimination,” Margolis said at the meeting. “You can’t discriminate upon viewpoints.”
Other trustees pushed back, saying the facility and grounds policy permits the display of materials relevant to programming, and Pride and Black Lives Matter flags would be related to the library’s upcoming programming for Pride month and Juneteenth.
“From the beginning, it was supposed to be that the flags were going to go back up when it was appropriate for programming,” said Trustee Michael Burstein.
After further discussion and input from his colleagues, Burstein made a motion for the library to display Pride and Black Lives Matter flags outside all three library branches during June, alongside messaging about relevant library programming. The motion passed with 10 yes votes and two abstentions from Lohe and Margolis.
For Mac Miller, a library assistant in the collection services department at the Brookline Village library branch, showing allyship for the queer community is an important display of solidarity during a time when the national political climate is not as accepting.
“Neutral institution or not, it would be a message of hope to people such as myself to see a local library flying a Pride flag during Pride month,” Miller said in a public comment at the meeting.