Let’s talk about Carla Hayden and America’s discomfort with Black women in positions of authority

I first met Carla Hayden in the quiet hush of a Baltimore bookstore, the kind of place that believes in the dignity of silence and the magic of paper. It was well over a decade ago, and I was an intern English teacher at the Friends School of Baltimore, when I still believed that only literature could save lives.

We locked eyes in the fiction section — somewhere between Toni Morrison and Danielle Steel. She asked what I was reading. She genuinely cared. And not in the polite, passing way, people ask at conferences or parent-teacher nights. She asked in a way that said: Your answer matters.

She asked me not what I did for a living, but what I read. And just like that, she was not only a librarian but a curator of memory, an archivist of moral knowledge, and Black truth.

That was Carla Hayden.

Warm, intelligent, curious. A woman with the kind of quiet command that comes from a life steeped in stories — especially the stories that too often go untold. By the end of our conversation, she’d given me her personal reading list and her business card. She was then the CEO of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Years later, she would make history as the first Black woman — and only the second woman ever — to lead the Library of Congress.

Her recent dismissal from that post may not have made headlines in the way other controversies do in our deeply distracted era, but it should have. Because something about it reveals an ongoing rift in American life — about race, about gender, about the people we choose to trust with our national history and memory.

We often discuss representation in this country. We celebrate when “firsts” happen, and Hayden’s appointment in 2016 was one of those moments. But what we talk about less is what happens after the celebration. What happens when someone like Hayden — who rose not by shouting the loudest but by doing the work, day after day — is quietly shown the door?

This is about more than one woman, more than one position. This is about the strange discomfort America still has with Black women in positions of political, social, or cultural authority. Hayden’s dismissal reminds us how we often romanticize inclusion while resisting what it actually demands of us.

She climbed the ladder not by clawing her way up but by lifting others with her.

America has always had a complicated relationship with its Black people, particularly its Black women. In 1868, just a few years after the Civil War, 12% of the U.S. population was African American. The promises of emancipation were still fresh on paper, but already faltering in practice. Black women were not only navigating a society that denied them power on the basis of their race, but also on the basis of their gender. And often, they were asked to wait their turn, to step aside while others claimed their rightful place in the pecking order of progress.

Nearly a century later, in 1963, the numbers hadn’t changed much — Black Americans still made up about 12% of the population. But the country had begun a second reckoning, the civil rights movement, and once again, Black women found themselves asked to sacrifice for the greater good. They were told feminism could wait. Racial solidarity had to come first. And even as they organized, marched, taught, led, they were rarely the ones in front of the cameras or etched into the textbooks.

That’s a pattern. A troubling one.

And now here we are, decades later, still struggling to hold space for someone like Hayden. A woman who believes that literacy is liberation. A woman who thinks the Library of Congress — a place most Americans will never visit, but which holds the DNA of our culture — should reflect all of America.

Her leadership wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t partisan. It wasn’t radical. It was thoughtful. Humane. And yes, it was shaped by her identity as a Black woman who knows what it means to be told your voice is too much or not enough, depending on who’s listening.

And that’s the thing we so often miss when we talk about leadership in this country. The real mark of someone like Hayden isn’t how loudly she speaks, but how deeply she listens. She understood, in a way few do, that the stories we preserve shape the people we become.

We need more people — not fewer — who are willing to stand in the stacks and say, your story matters.

There’s something deeply American about Hayden’s story, in both its triumph and its heartbreak. She climbed the ladder not by clawing her way up but by lifting others with her. She did the unglamorous work of building trust — across communities, across generations. And then, one day, she was simply dismissed.

You can call it politics. You can call it policy. But beneath it all is a deeper question: Whom do we trust to tell the American story? And why are we still so quick to silence those who bring the most perspective to that story?

The dismissal of Hayden is a loss — not just for those who admired her, not just for Black women, but for all of us. Because when we push out people like her, we are left with institutions that speak more narrowly, that remember less fully, and that become, slowly but surely, less human.

And in a time when so much in American life feels fractured, we need more people — not fewer — who are willing to stand in the stacks and say: Your story matters.

Let’s remember that. Let’s remember her. Before the silence gets too loud.

Jack Hill is a diversity consultant, child advocate, journalist, and writer.