“Is it real?”

Carla Hayden didn’t have an answer for her 93-year-old mother. The two were sitting side-by-side, watching television in their Baltimore home when the email popped up on her work phone.

Hayden called her staff, the TV still on in the background, trying to confirm the two-sentence message sent on behalf of President Donald Trump: She was fired as Librarian of Congress.

Her mother, Colleen, who worked for five Chicago mayors and is rarely at a loss for words, kept shaking her head.

When Hayden went to work the next day to collect her belongings, “staff members were crying,” said the 72-year-old. “It was something. I was comforting other people … They had to bring Kleenex and everything.”

The email to Hayden abruptly ended her eight-year-plus tenure as the first woman and African American to oversee the Library of Congress, the main research library of the legislative branch. She ran the library with the goal of further showing the public the treasure trove of information within its walls. The research repository, which does not lend books, holds expansive historic collections that Hayden proudly opened to the public through new exhibits, technology and educational programming.

Her dismissal comes at a time when libraries nationwide say they are grappling with a new magnitude of threats about what information they can stock on shelves and share online. As the former leader of Baltimore’s renowned Enoch Pratt, Hayden has referred to libraries as the “great equalizer.”

In her first local interview since the Trump email, Hayden said she still doesn’t understand why her work has been targeted.

The onslaught of attention after the firing oscillated between letters calling her a source of joy and light to public criticism from White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. The conservative American Accountability Foundation accused her of promoting “radical content”, described her as “anti-Trump” on X and called for her ouster about an hour before news of her firing was public.

“It was confusing when I was told about it,” Hayden said of the group’s statement. “It’s like, what are they talking about?”

When Hayden received her master’s and doctorate in library science from the University of Chicago in the 1970s, she learned the core of librarianship was not telling people what to read, but where to look: “Let the books battle it out on the shelves.”

Her 1993 move from overseeing Chicago’s Public Libraries to Baltimore’s was an opportunity to expand access to one of the most comprehensive resources for information in the country. To her, it was the legendary place where staff created the definitive textbook about how to get teenagers to read. Branches were in need of renovation and an infrastructure for internet and cable was still being built, but Baltimoreans needed it.

Hayden vividly remembers when a woman spoke up in a public meeting after a slashed budget led to five neighborhood library closures. “It may be worn out,” the woman said, “but this is all we have.” Although she tried to shutter the libraries so they could be rebuilt, Hayden said the closures were some of the most difficult decisions on the job and a “horrible thing” she’d never forget.

It made her work harder to expand the system, which she did by opening the first new library branch in three decades. It also pushed her to make the institutions a safe haven — keeping them open amid civil unrest after Freddie Gray’s death in 2015.

She understood the library’s role as an opportunity center. Hayden worked with public agencies to hold job training, after-school programs for kids, food services for families and lessons in navigating the internet. Under her leadership, Enoch Pratt was the first Maryland library to offer public access to the World Wide Web.

She says the role of libraries will continue to evolve, growing from a common ground where people learned how to access information to a place people can navigate its abundance.

“That’s the whole premise of a public library in particular,” she said. “It’s a trusted source in a world of misinformation and manufactured information.”

While that endows the facilities with a further purpose, it’s an attribute that continues to place libraries in a culture war that Hayden unexpectedly finds herself at the center of.

Librarians get stuck in the crossfire as the movement to ban books becomes more coordinated, Hayden said. Mounting pressures in the last few years have led to a surge in training and conferences as the attacks have become more personal. “It’s more intense and more widespread than I’ve seen it before,” she said.

Hayden, who describes herself as apolitical, wouldn’t say whether she felt the current administration inflamed these conflicts, but she’s still deciphering exactly how she got here. She’s spent most of her time since early May on sorting through a desk shrouded in Louise Penny mystery books and other novels she was too busy in the last decade to read. She’s considered teaching college again, but keeps coming back to Enoch Pratt and its power to help the community.

On a recent visit to the main branch of the library that Hayden still describes as “home,” she was in awe.

She followed a young staffer through Central Hall, past rows of young people on devices using technology Hayden can barely keep up with. She passed a music department playing vinyl records and a group of varying ages doing quilting. There were resources beyond what she could have imagined, from helping people file job applications to learning about Narcan. One table in particular, though, filled with stacks of pamphlets on finding the right health insurance, caught the newly unemployed Hayden’s eye.

“Frankly,” she said, cracking a laugh, “I took the brochure, because I gotta.”