THE GREAT TEXTBOOK WAR

Transcript
From American Public Media, this is an American RadioWorks documentary.

In 1974, a storm was brewing in the mountains and hollows of West Virginia.

Archival news: Earlier this week, a school in the community of Cabin

Creek was bombed with a homemade device.

The center of the storm was new textbooks for school kids, and a growing rift in
American society.

David Callison: They was going to teach my kids socialism,

homosexuality...

David Lucas: ... they was teaching situational ethics.

Phyllis Harmon-Higginbotham: Satan is a roaring lion and he's out to

steal, kill and destroy our children.

I'm Stephen Smith. In the coming hour, The Great Textbook War from American
RadioWorks. First, this news.

PART ONE

Martin Luther King, Jr.: How Long? Not Long!

Stephen Smith: From American Public Media, this is an American RadioWorks

documentary, The Great Textbook War. I'm Stephen Smith.

King.: You shall reap what you sew. How Long? Not Long!

In the 1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King and legions of other black Americans took to the
streets demanding equal rights. Seismic changes ran through American culture, and
American schools.

King: Let us march on segregated schools [Let us march, tell it] until
every vestige of segregated and inferior education becomes a thing of the
past, and Negroes and whites study side-by-side in the socially-healing
context of the classroom.

Civil rights activists pushed for school desegregation - and for lesson plans and school
books that included black children. Many schools taught reading with books like Dick
and Jane, stories about a white, middle class family in an all-white community.
Education experts began looking for better ways to reach children who were not white
or middle class.
[Sesame Street tape]

Character 1: Roosevelt Franklin what you say?

Character 2: You know the very first letter is the letter "A."

Public television program Sesame Street debuted in 1969. It was meant to attract inner-
city kids as viewers, to entertain kids and to teach them. It featured Muppets interacting
with people of different races in an urban setting. A similar kind of change was brewing
in the public schools, where people began using the term "multiculturalism." In 1965,
the federal government has passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It
provided millions of dollars to transform school curriculum and to produce new
textbooks.

Albert Bursma: There was almost an absence of any African-American

literature in the past.

Albert Bursma was an executive at a company that published schoolbooks at the time of
this education transformation.

Bursma: In order to motivate these kids we have to give them something

that's contemporary, someone that they have heard about, and give them
literature that may be more understandable to them than the traditional
historical literature that we were giving them in the past.

When new, multicultural textbooks hit the classrooms in the early 1970s, some
communities did not welcome the change. Producer Trey Kay was a kid in West
Virginia the year when new textbooks tore his hometown apart. Over the coming hour,
The Great Textbook War.

Trey Kay: I grew up in Charleston, West Virginia, the capitol of the state and the seat of
Kanawha County. In September 1974, the year of the great textbook war, I was 12 years
old and about to enter the seventh grade. When the bus rolled up to John Adams Junior
High that first day, I saw a group of women holding homemade signs. One read - "I
have a Bible, I don't need those dirty textbooks!" What dirty textbooks, I wondered?
Were we going to be reading Playboy in school?

In the next few weeks, our community would be turned upside down. Neighbors
threatened and harassed each other; the Ku Klux Klan - who I'd heard of but never seen
- marched on the state capitol steps and burned crosses in the community.

It all seems hard to believe now, but to understand what happened you'd need to know a
little bit about where I grew up.

I grew up in the part of Charleston people called "The Hill." It was the affluent part of
town.

It looks like "Anywhere Suburbia, USA" - kids playing on cul-de-sacs, dads cooking
burgers on outdoor grills.
Our neighbors were doctors, lawyers, business people.

Outside the city, the twisting, bumpy roads wound through hills and hollows past small
towns and mining camps. There are general stores and filling stations, men in grease-
covered overalls and dozens of little churches filled to capacity on Sunday mornings
and Wednesday evenings.

There was a lot that was different between urban and rural Kanawha County; not the
least of which were our churches. People on the Hill, where I lived, went to mainstream
churches - like Catholic, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist - with sedate, orderly
services. In the working-class communities on the outskirts of Charleston, old time
religion believers met for spirited services with loud singing and the free shouting of
praises and testimony.

Preacher: That scared the hell out of me. Now hell's a real place, [yes it
is], it wasn't created for you...

Despite our differences, we had one institution that tied us together: the board of
education, which oversaw Kanawha County's 125 schools. But that was before the great
textbook war.

On April 11th in the spring of 1974, the Kanawha County Board of Ed[ucation] met to
consider some new textbooks that were being proposed for adoption.

Al Anson: The meeting will please come to order. We're starting a little
bit late this evening....

Becky Burns: I remember it, going into it, as a typical meeting, I mean, I
had attended these before, but just as a teacher. My name is Becky Burns.
I was a member of the five-member textbook selection committee in
Kanawha County Schools in 1974. Thelma Conley presented the
rationale for the selection

Thelma Conley: Not only did the committee look for multiethnic
content but also multicultural.

Burns: We were operating under state guidelines. One of the guidelines,

which was a new one, was that the textbooks - they should be multi-
cultural in their content and in their authorship.

Multiculturalism was a newer concept in curriculum planning in the late 1960's and
early 70s. Across the country, schools were beginning to use textbooks that included
more viewpoints and more writers of color.

Burns: Textbooks, pretty much at that point, were full of selections

written by "dead white guys." Not that there's anything wrong with dead
white guys. However, those represent only one perspective on the world.

But when the book selection committee made its presentation, school board member
Alice Moore questioned a term used in the report: dialectology. This was a teaching
approach that was intended to encourage students to feel comfortable in expressing
themselves by using their natural dialect.

Alice Moore: I just don't think I agree with that approach at all, in fact,
I'm sure I don't.

Anson: What was that?

Alice Moore was new to Kanawha. She had grown up in a small town in Tennessee and
had moved with her family to the area when her husband had been called to preach for a
Church of Christ congregation just outside of Charleston. And it didn't seem right to
Mrs. Moore to teach incorrect English in school.

Moore: There's a correct way to speak. Now, there may be some slight
variations but "dem" is never correct, "dat" is never correct for "that."
Now if we're talking about this in dialectology, I won't approve these
books.

Mrs. Moore's objection caused a sensation. It was rare that an ordinary member of the
community, a parent, had questioned the decisions of education professionals.

Russ Isaacs: My name is Russ Isaacs. I was on the Kanawha County

Board of Education for six years. Why not leave it up to the
professionals? I mean what are we paying these people to do? I mean,
they are professional educators. What am I? I'm an accountant. What the
hell do I know about education?

Mrs. Moore didn't have a college degree, but she read a lot; she was well informed.
She'd been keeping an eye on attempts to bring sex education into the curriculum. And
for some time, she'd been reading about what she believed to be the radical left and their
attempt to use American schools to change society. In her mind, all this talk about
multiculturalism and dialectology was just a cover-up for a larger, liberal agenda.

Moore: I almost think that Kanawha County was a test case. This was
happening in different places around the country, but I wonder if they
didn't think they could come into West Virginia ... that these were
backward, uneducated people. They could come into this little state; they
could do whatever they wanted to and nobody was going to question
them.

After some discussion the board moved to approve the books but hold off purchasing
them until they'd had the chance to review them more closely.

Anson: OK, would you be willing then to go along with the approval
these recommendations on that basis?

Moore: I would approve the recommendation on this basis.

Anson: OK, would you so move?

 Moore: I so move.

Anson: All in favor of the motion say, "Aye."

Board: Aye.

Anson: "Aye" opposed. [silence] The motion is carried.

Moore: Well as soon as the meeting was adjourned, my husband

happened to be there that night - he didn't always go with me, generally
didn't - but he was there that night and he walked up and handed me a
book and said, "I want you to look at what you just adopted."

Isaacs: You know, I remember Malcolm X being a flashpoint for Alice.

Moore: I want you to look at what I just approved! The Autobiography

of Malcolm X.

The quote that Alice's husband pointed out was from The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
"All praise is due to Allah that I moved to Boston when I did. If I hadn't, I'd probably
still be a brainwashed black Christian."

Moore: I was so offended by that, that remark in a student's textbook, so

I told the superintendent, "I want every book delivered to my house, I
want to see every book. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to start
reading these books ..."

Ken Underwood: ....and we sent them all...all 300-plus books.

Kenneth Underwood was superintendant of schools.

Ken Underwood: I just figured if she wanted to read 300-plus books,

she could.

Alice Moore's objections at the board meeting had been mostly about grammar. Now
she found other things that made her even more uncomfortable. Four-letter-words
scattered throughout stories; sexually suggestive works by e.e. cummings and Allen
Ginsberg; and excerpts from memoirs by Black Panthers George Jackson and Eldridge
Cleaver that combined what Mrs. Moore believed to be anti-Americanism and sexual
vulgarity.

Alice Moore began giving interviews to the media, spreading the word about what was
in the books.

Underwood: As the people were reading the newspapers, reading letters

to the editor and going to various meetings, they started choosing up
sides and it wasn't about a passage. It wasn't about a portion of a book. It
was the books - you were either for them or against them.

[Music]
A few months later, it was time for the board to make its decision about whether or not
to purchase the books. June 27th was a rainy day in Charleston but people were
flooding in from all parts of Kanawha to the board of ed meeting hoping to voice their
opinion on the textbooks.

Moore: They were standing out in the rain and you just see this sea of
umbrellas because they couldn't get inside the building, the building,
there must've been 2,000 people there I guess. I think it was estimated
around 2,000 people. The building was full down the hall all the way to
the outside, where people were standing; I think maybe the windows
were slightly opened.

Anson: Would the meeting please come to order?

With underlined copies of the texts in hand, Alice began to question those who defended
the books.

Moore: I knew what I was going to be accused of; "These narrow-

minded, religious fanatics, just wanting to censor textbooks." I knew we
would be accused of book-burning and Nazi Germany would be brought
up as this terror threat.

Alice questioned a selection from Freud in one of the supplemental texts.

Moore: In the same book, Essays and Theory, there's another article on
the sexuality of children, their sexual feelings towards their parents
where they spell out quite explicitly how every little girl has a very
sexual desire for her father...

Moore: ... anyway, Sigmund Freud, this was something he had said, and
he said every child, every boy, desires to have sex with his mother and
every girl desires to have sex with her father. And that was so repulsive
to me, to think that we would, that any child would see that, I knew that
thought would never leave their mind.

Mrs. Rubenstein: You know, what strikes me Mrs. Moore is that you're
pinpointing a few objectionable things ...

The objections moved from Freud to fairy tales to felons. Moore brought up an excerpt
from Soul On Ice, the memoir by Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, who had spent time
in prison for rape and assault.

Moore: Is it your feeling that in order to represent minorities that we

should - specifically blacks - that we should represent them with the
Eldridge Cleavers and the George Jacksons and the people of this type?

Dan Moles probably represented how most parents felt about children reading Cleaver
in literature class.
 Dan Moles: Yeah, Eldridge Cleaver. Yeah. Soul on Ice in the second or
third chapter he's talking about going across the tracks and raping white
women, you know and things in there. Well, I mean that's fine if that's
what you want to do up in New York, but that doesn't fit on Campbell's
Creek very well.

That chapter of Soul on Ice wasn't actually included in the selections in the textbooks,
but people objected to Cleaver on principle. And Mrs. Moore was not just speaking to
white members of the community.

Moore: They represented the worst of society and called that

multiculturalism. I don't think that represents black culture, or at least
that was what I was trying to say to the black community: this is not a
fair representation of your culture.

But Reverend Ron English, a member of the local chapter of the NAACP, felt
uncomfortable having a white school board member suggest what was the best
representation of the black community. He objected to Mrs. Moore's assertion that
Cleaver and Jackson were unsuitable for the classroom.

Rev. Ron English: When you say people of this type assumes that that
type is not representative or that that is some kind of defect in that type
and that was what I was just speaking to ...

Moore: You do not think... [laughs]

English: No I do not. I think they have a message from the other side of
their American experience that ought to be told, but I will say that those
persons are in a line of protest that I think is a part of the American
experience from Tom Payne to Martin Luther King, Jr.

English: In a strange way, I respected her strategy. This is a very

conservative community and within the black community; there were
people who felt like some of the writings were anti-Christian, that some
of the writings were unpatriotic, you know. Because maybe she had had
some clues that there was that sentiment in the African-American
community, or black community, and that she wanted to kind of speak to
that by way of saying, "Now we're all Americans here - you understand
that we are not talking about race here, we are talking about good old
honest American values." She was pretty media savvy. The way that she
went about raising questions and she would do it in a very cool, calm and
collected kind of way.

Moore: Mr. Clendinin, you mentioned the academic freedom of teachers

at all educational levels. Do you think that a teacher has the academic
freedom to challenge an elementary child's religious beliefs?

Moore worked her way through the objections to the books - full of "coarse language,"
they were "anti-Christian and anti-American." But if there was any one thing at the core
- it was that they encouraged students to question the values of their parents and
community. Like an experienced trial attorney, she grilled Richard Clendenin - the
President of the County Association of English teachers - when he brought up the
subject of academic freedom.

Clendenin: To challenge his belief?

Moore: To challenge an elementary child's religious beliefs.

Clendenin: I don't believe he has the right to challenge his beliefs but he
has the right to challenge him to think for himself about those beliefs.

Moore: He has a right then to put a doubt or a question in an elementary

child's mind about whether or not there is a God or if the Bible stories are
mythology or fables.

Crowd: We can't hear! We can't hear!

Anson: We'll have to have quiet, excuse me just a minute here...

Moore: It wasn't just a matter of throwing in foul words, you know, for
children to see. It was a matter of getting children to accept a whole new
idea that, they talk about the self-actualization, the, of clarifying your
own values, you have to establish and clarify your own values. The idea
that a parent could teach their child that "this is right, this is what you
should do, this is wrong, you should never do this"; that had to be
removed to free this child from the idea that there's an authority that tells
them what's right and wrong. That they themselves can determine by
themselves what is right for them and truth is what ever is truth to that
individual.

And there it was: in a school board room in West Virginia, a basic fissure in American
values was exposed. Whose rights take precedence? The family's or society's? What is
the proper role of the parent as head of the family?

Mike Wenger: If I have been successful as a parent nothing my children

can read in school can hurt them.

There were several parents, like Mike Wenger, who defended the books.

Wenger: I believe these books present a balanced and realistic view of

today's world in a manner that respects students in their intelligence,
gives them an insight into the views of many different groups of people -
all of which they are likely to confront at one time or another in their
lives, and is most of all uplifting, inspiring and filled with the love for
life.

Mike Wenger told the board that the purpose of public education is to teach students to
think for themselves.
 Wenger: Most of us remember the childhood saying "sticks and stones
can break my bones, but words - and I would add ideas - can never harm
me." To summarize, this is the only world in which we live; we cannot
hide it from our children, we can only determine when they will find it
and where they will find it. Let them find it today rather than tomorrow
and let them find it here in our schools rather than on some street corner
in New York or in some rice paddy in Vietnam. Thank you.

The passion-filled speeches went on like that for a little more than three hours before
the board made its decision.

Isaacs: Mr. President, I am prepared to move that we move forward with

the purchase of the basic textbooks as adopted by this Board on the April
11th.

Anson: All in favor of the motion to adopt, say "Aye."

Anson, Isaacs and Stansbury: Aye.

Anson: Opposed.

Moore and Matt Kinsolving: No.

Anson: The motion is carried 3 - 2.

The books were adopted. Mrs. Moore and the other book opponents lost this battle. But
the war had just begun.

[Music]

Smith: You're listening to The Great Textbook War. I'm Stephen Smith. Coming up:

Archival news tape: Shattered windows, chairs scattered about, what

was left of Mrs. Catherine Albright's first grade room at Midway
Elementary School at Campbells Creek, West Virginia.

To see slideshows of the growing protests, and eventual violence over textbooks in
Kanawha County, visit our website - American RadioWorks.org. There, you can
download this and other American RadioWorks programs, sign up for our podcast, and
share this story with others. That's at American RadioWorks.org. Our program continues
in just a moment, from American Public Media.

PART TWO

Smith: From American Public Media, this is an American RadioWorks documentary,

The Great Textbook War, I'm Stephen Smith. In the late summer of 1974, Americans
were struggling to find their footing in uncertain times.
 Richard Nixon: I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.
Vice President Ford will be sworn in as president at that hour in this
office.

In August of '74, Richard Nixon became the first American president to resign from
office. Americans faced rising inflation and gas shortages. Parents in Boston were
gearing up to fight court-ordered busing that would desegregate their schools.

In West Virginia, a battle was raging over new textbooks the Kanawha County school
board had just adopted. The books were meant to provide multicultural perspectives.
But many people in Charleston and the surrounding communities saw them as an attack
on families, on religion, on a way of life. Trey Kay continues our story.

Kay: School was still out for the summer, but everyone was talking about the new
books that children would find in their classrooms that fall.

Avis Hill: We are all out for one thing and that's to not see that our
children's minds are, are torn down and this stuff goes into the schools.

Avis Hill and other fundamentalist preachers from Kanawha County's mining
communities took up the fight against the books. Marvin Horan was a truck driver and a
preacher from the Campbells Creek community. He called for a school boycott.

Marvin Horan: Now the thing we have to do is stay out of school until
the books are gone. [cheering] We must stay out of schools. The books
must go! We can win, if we'll stay out of these schools!

Leaflets circulated with excerpts from the texts. A lesson on mythology used the
example of Aesop's fable about the gladiator Androcles and the lion who spares him
because he'd once pulled a thorn from his paw. It seemed innocent enough, only the
lesson also cited Daniel and the Lion's Den.

Connie Johnson: I went to a meeting at a church across the road from

where I live, and it said in there that God was like a fairy tale - that he
wasn't real. And people's not going to stand for these books. And I'll keep
my kids home before I send 'em.

Mick Staton: I don't have a problem with Androcles and the Lion, what I
have a problem with is comparing a myth which is clearly a myth to the
Bible. And that's the problem.

[Music]

Kackie Eller: There were night meetings all over, in schools and out of
schools, in churches, on the street corners, shouting your cause so that it
was constantly keeping people stirred up. It was the civil war of books.

Hill: And I say this to you today, you that are here, if you've never been
on a protest line, if you've never held your child out of school.
A young English teacher named Kackie Eller went to one of the meetings where the
Rev. Avis Hill spoke.

Avis: Come Tuesday, I expect to see ghost rooms in Kanawha County. I

expect to classes not held. [applause]

Eller: He's very charismatic and the crowd that came were very, "Ban
those books, burn them, let's burn them, let's put them in piles and burn
them." And I was standing beside a man that was a businessman in the
area. I said, "You know John, this is getting a little bit out of hand here."
And I can remember that he pulled his coat back and said, "Don't worry,
I'll take care of you," and he had the biggest pistol on his body that I'd
ever seen.

Kelly Wills Carson: It was a scary time because all the adults and your
parents and people around you were acting in ways that you'd not seen
them act before.

Kelly Wills was to be a sixth grader that fall at Midway Elementary School in the coal
mining community of Campbells Creek.

Willis Carson: My mom's involvement, the extent of her involvement

with me in school was to be a PTA mom and to come for the Christmas
party and all of that and now all of a sudden she's going to meetings
where they're discussing not sending your kids to school. The whole
thing was kind of Twilight Zone-ish, really.

And the rhetoric kept ratcheting up. Reverend Charles Quigley was heard to pray for
God to strike down the school board members who had endorsed the books.

On September 3, the first day of school. Officials estimated twenty percent of Kanawha
County's 45,000 students stayed at home.

Archival news: This is the CBS Evening News with Roger Mudd
substituting for vacationing Walter Cronkite...

The national networks, which had been focused on anti-busing riots in Boston, turned
their cameras south towards the angry parents of West Virginia.

Eller: There were people here, I remember, from everywhere. Every

news, every anchor, everybody anywhere.

Archival news: Hal Walker in Kanawha County, West Virginia ...

Eller: And the more people that came, the more angry the controversy
became.

Archival news: The Kanawha County School buses here in Dickinson

didn't run today. They were blocked by a group of angry parents, some of
them coal miners...
Avis Hill was in demand as a spokesman for the protesters.

Hill: We want what's right for our children. We want these dirty nasty
books, I've been quoted many times through this by UPI and the others
that "the dirty nasty books," and we want - that's what we want out of the
schools.

Reverend Hill even recorded a song for the protest.

[music recording of Avis Hill]: Our lost heaven, West Virginia, dirty textbooks, broken-
hearted mothers...

Woman: Well, I'm against the books, but I don't see doing it this way.

Reporter: How would you see doing it?

Woman: Well, there has to be another way. I think that it's illegal to keep
them out of school and my child wants to go, so he's going.

Parents who did bring their children to school would be met by taunting protesters.
Kelly Wills remembers seeing those parents when she went with her mother to picket in
front of Midway Elementary.

Wills Carson: I felt sorry for them, one thing I remember they never
made eye contact, they looked down, they never spoke. They would take
their kids and have them close to them and walk them through this
gauntlet of people.

Seeing those picket lines, a lot of parents gave up and turned the car around. Kanawha
County was union country and it took nerve to cross a picket line. The book-protesting
mothers also began showing up at morning shifts at the mines, urging the men to join
the protest. It worked. Despite union orders, thousands of miners walked off the job.

David Lucas: They was some for the books probably and they was some
against the books, but they wouldn't cross a protest line.

Dave Lucas tried to get workers from a silicon smelting plant in the town of Alloy to
join the protest. He was arrested and charged with blocking the plant entrance.

Lucas: I thank God one day and I believe I'll get a reward for what I did.

Within days, more mines were shut down. So were chemical plants and grocery
warehouses. Even municipal bus drivers stopped work. A message was being sent.

Lucas: Coal mines started shutting down and other businesses started
shutting down. Then it was no longer a bunch of backwoods, retarded
people, it was a legitimate gripe that we had.

Business owners were split on the protests. Most were against them but others with
fundamentalist leanings gave money. The miners who were pro-union and mostly
Democratic weren't all church-goers. But they didn't like their children being taught
outsider notions.

David Callison: ... They was going to teach my kids socialism,

homosexuality...

Lucas: ... they was teaching situational ethics.

Like whether it was ever OK to lie. One of the lessons used the story of Jack and the
Beanstalk, asking children whether it was right for Jack to steal from the giant. All of
this questioning flew in the face of some people's values. Miner David Callison.

Callison: I'm big on respect, it's just that simple, my kids was raised to
respect you. The only thing that was required of you for them to show
you respect is that you need to be older than them, that's all, you didn't
have to be a handsome, you didn't have to be a hunk, you didn't have to
be smart, you had to be older than them and they showed you some
respect then.

Thousands of Kanawha County parents pulled their children out of public schools and
formed alternative Christian schools.

Class: I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag and to the savior for
whose kingdom it stands...

Charles Quigley: We are using some of the textbooks that's used in the
public schools - the basic textbooks: history books, algebra books, math
books.

Before the fall of 1974, Christian schools were almost non-existent in the state, but after
the book protest they began popping up like dandelions, in church basements and
storefronts and old filling stations.

Quigley: Some of our reading books are different. We have some books
that are written by Christian publications.

Interviewer: There's one other book that I assume you'll have.

Quigley: Yes sir, we'll definitely have the Bible. The Bible will be the
main textbook.

Kelly Wills, now Kelly Wills Carson, went to one of these new Christian schools and
says that she understands why her Mom chose to send her.

Wills Carson: These people have a right in this country, don't they, to
raise their kids the way they see fit within the law, they have a right to
not have their children unduly influenced by something that they don't
agree with.
Kelly Wills Carson took me to meet her Mom and brother at the family home, located
along a row of old coal company houses in Campbell's Creek Hollow.

Marlene Wills: I'm Marlene Wills.

Butch Wills: I'm Butch Wills.

Kelly's mother says she learned what was in the texts from a retired school teacher who
lived next door.

Marlene Wills: She would find something in the books and she'd holler
for me, she'd say, "come over and look at this" and I'd go read it.

Mrs. Wills agreed with the book protesters but says she wasn't a staunch fundamentalist.

Marlene Wills: Now I go to church and I go to Sunday school and I

believe in God, but my name is not on the book.

Meaning, she's not saved. She's Christian, but not born-again.

Marlene Wills: My name's not on the book at the church, but I didn't
send Kelly to school and I believed in the book protest. I didn't want her
taught them kind of values.

Back in 1974, Kelly's older brother Butch Wills was a miner. He used to hang out at the
Campbells Creek anti-textbook headquarters and is still good friends with the family of
Rev. Marvin Horan, who used to run that office. He picks up the phone and calls
Marvin's nephew, Steve to come over.

Butch Wills: Hey, is Stevie home? Yeah, get him on the phone!

When Steve Horan comes into the Wills' living room, we have a long talk about the
various aspects of the book struggle: religion, class, culture. At one point, I bring up the
sensitive subject that seemed to be at the heart of the textbook fight: race. I mention
how the textbooks were intended to help students gain a multicultural experience. Steve
explains that this was a concept that wouldn't have had much support from up the creek.
In 1974, Campbell's Creek was all white.

Steve Horan: You know this was a racist community. No doubt about it.

Steve and Butch say that one Sunday during the protest, a rumor spread around
Campbell's Creek.

Butch Wills: I remember that Sunday that they said the blacks was going
to march up here and who know why? But, they was suppose to be here
and the people was ready for it.

Marlene Wills: I was scared to death. I can remember.

 Horan: I mean I can even remember, apparently somebody got a phone
call and they had just went through some toll booth on the turnpike and
were almost here.

Butch Wills: Yeah, 10 minutes from Campbell's Creek and it went up

this creek like wildfire. While their wives, mothers and grandmothers
was in the church on Sunday night, their husbands, uncles, brothers and
cousins was in the parking lot with shotguns and deer rifles. I think Dad
even had his gun ready.

Marlene Wills: I think so.

Horan: If you would have been a strange black person and got lost up
Campbell's Creek, you'd have been dead that night.

Now, just to be clear, no black group ever marched up Campbells Creek. And Steve
Horan says times have changed a lot since then.

Horan: That's 35 years ago and you know, as generations have come and
gone now we've got blacks that live up here in a lot of places and it's not
a big deal, I mean, it's not an issue at all.

[Music]

But in 1974, it was a big deal. Kanawha County's black and white populations may have
held similar Christian values. But to many blacks, the book protests seemed racially
motivated.

Mildred Holt: I was suspicious because they were saying it was not
racial, I couldn't buy that.

Mildred Holt was an English teacher in the school system at the time. She was excited
about the possibility of being able to teach the works of black writers like James
Baldwin, Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks.

Holt: I think it was about race, I don't think it was culture, I think it was
a pent-up fury about the civil rights movement and they were afraid of
blacks becoming so well educated they would take their jobs. That's the
way I felt. And then when I saw signs about "get the nigger books out of
the county." Oh the signs were everywhere, and when I looked out of my
office window and saw the Ku Klux Klan, I knew then that it was purely
racial.

The Klan held protests and burned crosses during the textbook controversy. The
textbook protesters had to spend a good deal of time and money publicly disavowing
them.

As the protests gained media visibility, more national groups - on the right and the left -
took interest. The John Birch Society and the National Education Association came to
Kanawha. So did a fledgling group of conservatives from Washington, DC.
Connie Marshner was the education director for the newly-formed Heritage Foundation.

Connie Marshner: The network stories on the Kanawha County all over
the country, many viewers saw those stories and said, "Oh, I'm not the
only one who has these problems, it's not just my school district, it's not
just my family, I'm part of something bigger."

Archival news: In Kanawha County, West Virginia there was violence

today in the continuing demonstrations against the use of controversial
textbook in the schools. The Charleston Gazette said in an editorial
today: "The county is near anarchy."

Snipers fired at school buses, a CBS camera crew was roughed up by protesters, and a
book protester was shot through the heart by a book supporter. The victim survived and
the shooter turned himself in, but the violence continued. And then ...

Archival news: Shattered windows, chairs scattered about, what was left
of Mrs. Catherine Albright's first grade room at Midway Elementary
School at Campbells Creek, WV. A U.S. Treasury agent at Kanawha
County Sheriff's office speculated the damage was the result of dynamite
set off before sunrise...

Within the span of a few weeks, several elementary schools around the county - as well
as the school board headquarters - were dynamited or firebombed. No one was injured
but people were wary about sending their kids to school.

Mother: The Lord give me children and he give me sense enough to

raise 'em and I sure am not gonna raise 'em to get blowed up under a pile
of bricks or shot at in a school bus.

Shortly after the bombings, the school board announced it had come up with a
compromise. Most of the textbooks would stay in the schools but parents would have to
sign permission slips allowing their children to read them. Children whose parents didn't
sign, could go sit in the library during the lesson.

National news reporter: Was this at least a partial victory for the people
who opposed these books?

Moore: Not really, not really. What do we do? Does the child hold his
hand up and say, "I am sorry Mrs. Smith my mother doesn't want me to
read that book, I've got to leave the room." I know what happens to a
child like that; they are the laughing stock of the schools.

The compromise did little to soothe the frustration of protesters like Rev. Henry
Thaxton, who felt they were being condescended to by a cabal of cultural elitists.

Henry Thaxton: If they had ever shown any real interest in just
listening, I think that's all we really wanted, nobody ever really listened,
nobody, they built a wall and thumbed their nose at us and that's
frustrating, that's frustrating to you, frustrating to me, it's frustrating to
 any human being to be ignored, I'd rather you'd hit me than try to ignore
me.

Some protesters brought their frustration to the next board meeting.

Karl Priest: My name is Karl Priest and I am the acting Chairman of the
Business and Professional People's Alliance for Better Textbooks, that is
the teacher's chapter, I'll speak briefly ...

Karl Priest came to ask the board: how teachers, who were fundamentalist Christians,
were to use texts that were so deeply offensive to their religious principals?

Priest: I just remember that the place was packed, I was scared, I spoke.

Priest: I am not here to criticize, the four of you that voted to return the
controversial books have been adequately and suitably criticized.

Priest addressed superintendent Ken Underwood and the board members, including
Matthew Kinsolving, Russell Isaacs and Alice Moore.

Underwood: I could see, in the front two rows people that I had never
seen before.

Moore: There was a group of men sitting there, maybe coal miners, I
don't know but big men and others I guess sitting there on the front row.

Charleston Gazette Reporter Kay Michael and Reverend Avis Hill were also in the
room.

Kay Michael: The men started gathering around. They kind of started
making a semi-circle up near the board members desks. All of a sudden
fists were flying.

Priest: I just saw punches thrown toward the face, towards the head and
that's it.

Isaacs: I looked over and some woman was just beating the hell out of
Matthew Kinsolving with her bag, I mean just pounding him.

Hill: There was a woman in the crowd and she pulled out a can of mace
and she was spraying at the board of education, she was trying to spray
the mace on the superintendent of the board.

Superintendent Underwood got into the fight.

Underwood: It was either get involved or stand there and take a beatin.'

Hill: After it was all over and it happened, I came back in, the crowd had
dispersed and the police was there. And I stood up and I said, "Dr.
Underwood. I'm sorry for this incident this night. I apologize and I'm
 sorry that this fight broke out." And Dr. Underwood had a handkerchief
up to his nose and was wiping blood and he looked at me and said, "Only
thing I can say, Reverend, you just better be glad I never got my hands
on 'em." [laughs] He was ready to fight. He was ready to mix it up. I
think that me and Marvin made a redneck out of Dr. Underwood that
night.

[Music]

About a week after the rumble in the boardroom, there was a break in the investigation
into the bombing at Midway Elementary School in Campbell's Creek.

Wayne Rich: About 11:00 p.m. at night I got a call from one of the
investigators who said, "You need to get to the office." My name is
Wayne A. Rich, Jr., at the time I was Assistant United States Attorney in
the Southern District of West Virginia.

Rich went in and heard the report of federal investigators, who had been questioning a
suspect named Delbert Rose. Rose was a Campbells Creek resident, who had spent a lot
of time at the anti-textbook headquarters, located up that hollow. During the
interrogation, Delbert Rose confessed to throwing a dynamite bomb into Midway
Elementary School. Then he told the investigators about another plan that would send a
message to parents who continued bringing their children to school.

Rich: He said there was a discussion at school textbook protest

headquarters that night on Campbell's Creek that they could take a
blasting cap and put it inside the gas tank of a car and hook the wires to
the brake lights and when the car, when the kids got into the car and you
backed down like onto the road and you hit the brake line it would blow
the gas tank on the car.

Before this, all of the terrorist acts had been leveled at empty buildings. Rich moved fast
- indicting six people for conspiracy. People were shocked to see Reverend Marvin
Horan's name at the top of the list.

At Marvin Horan's trial, Delbert Rose was the main witness for the prosecution. He told
the court that Horan had said the bible supported the violence that they were planning.

Rich: At that time, Marvin Horn began reading several passages out of
the Bible including "there is a time and a place for all things, a time to
love, a time to hate, a time to kill, a time to be killed, a time for peace
and a time for war." Marvin Horan further stated "if you're going to war,
if you get all your horses and your chariots and you go to battle or go to
war be not afraid because the Lord Thy God is with thee."

Delbert Rose then told the court what these words from Horan meant to him.

Wayne Rich: "I was not to be afraid when I was asked to put dynamite
in Midway school, that the textbooks was wrong and that it was time to
 stand up for right and stand up against wrong and this was like a war
against the textbooks."

Marvin Horan was convicted on one count of conspiracy and he served three years in a
federal penitentiary. His conviction did not sit well with people from Campbells Creek.
Here's Butch Wills.

Butch Wills: He was railroaded, the way I look at it, you got to say what
you believe and that's what 95 percent of the people up here believe.
They still believe that way.

But Horan's prison sentence bothered some people in the pro-book faction too.
Reverend Jim Lewis, a liberal Episcopal minister in Charleston, was one of the most
outspoken advocates for the textbooks and was diametrically opposed to Horan on just
about every issue regarding the protest. However, he spoke at Marvin's sentence hearing
and asked the court for leniency on his behalf.

Rev. Jim Lewis: There were a group of us in the community who felt
that his conviction should stand, but that rather than putting him away in
prison in Kentucky or wherever, it may be good some kind of probation
here. Some kind of accountability here and then be helpful in bringing
some kind of reconciliation across the county.

After the trial, things, for the most part, settled down. The civil war of books was over.
Over the decades that followed, reconciliation in Kanawha County was hard to come by.

It was hard to tell who had won exactly. The book supporters claimed victory because
the books went back into the schools. On the other hand, some schools refused to use
them.

Jay Sprigg was a student at one of those schools. Sprigg calls himself a liberal redneck.
He graduated from high school in 1983, attended West Virginia State College for a
while and worked as a carpenter until he was disabled a few years ago

Jay Sprigg: I don't want to dwell on it or carry a grudge, but I got out
later in the world and talked to a friend when he had to do compare and
contrast report on 1984 vs. Brave New World, and I was like "where was
my teacher at on stuff like that?" You know, we were spending a whole
semester on Beowulf, you know. Nothing against Beowulf, but the whole
semester?

Sprigg thinks his teachers wanted to avoid any kind of controversy and just never
assigned much modern literature to their students.

Sprigg: I can't think of a better place in the world for an eleventh grade
English class to study the Grapes of Wrath. But we never would've. They
would have never done that. The upper Kanawha Valley in West Virginia
would be a perfect place for a teacher to teach the Grapes of Wrath, but
we didn't.
A lot of the teachers agree that they avoided using books that might stir up trouble.
Becky Burns, who was on the committee that selected the disputed books, says that a
teacher who used those texts could become a target.

Burns: I'm a brave person, I'm a brave teacher and I was going to do the
best for my kids, but I did think twice on occasion. And I know of some
teachers, I know of some teachers who never used those books even
though they were restored. They said I'm not going to go there, I'm not
going to put myself out there to be threatened, to be criticized, to have
constant turmoil in my class.

And some teachers' antipathy for the protesters is just as raw as it was three decades
ago.

Nell Wood: I am so tired thirty years afterwards of people wanting me to

state the position of those stupid protestors, and they were stupid.

Teacher Nell Wood who chaired the selection committee - doesn't take kindly to
suggestions that she see the situation from the protesters' point of view.

Wood: I think it is necessary for us to grow up and recognize that it's a

big, wide, wonderful, scary, ugly, beautiful world. There's everything in
it and we have to learn to look at it and not fall apart.

But distrust of public education was a permanent legacy of the textbook war.

Last August, Reverends Avis Hill and Ezra Graley, joined a few dozen other textbook
warriors at a reunion in Little Creek Park in South Charleston to eat chicken and apple
pie, and swap stories about those heady days in 1974.

Woman: I think that we were a wonderful bunch of people, [laughs] to

tell you the truth. Fightin' for something clean and right and legal.

Ezra Graley: Amen!

Phyllis Harmon Higginbotham: I felt like a soldier of the Lord.

[Higginbotham sings "Onward Christian Soldiers"]

Like many of the protesters, Phyllis Harmon now Higginbotham, says that the textbook
war was the most significant part of her life.

Higginbotham: It caused me to realize that I had to really stand guard on

my children and watch everything, you know, knowing that Satan is a
roaring lion and he's out to steal, kill and destroy our children.

A sign on the wall of the picnic shelter at the protest reunion read, "The first Tea Party
was held in Kanawha County 35 years ago." Avis Hill and retired schoolteacher Karl
Priest see themselves as pioneers.
 Hill: Don't let anybody sell you short. We started a movement that has
grown in momentum ...

Priest: I have no doubt that West Virginia was the - to use an analogy of
the American Revolution - the place where the shot was fired that was
heard around the world.

Hill: ...every time you turn on the television and you watch Fox News or
Glenn Beck or you watch Sean Hannity, in 1974 when we got started,
there was no Fox News, there was no Rush Limbaughs, there was no
Sean Hannitys.

[Fox and Friends musical logo]

Welcome back to Fox and Friends. The books your children are learning from could be
filled with harmful inaccuracies ...

...You would be surprised to learn that the most commonly used textbooks in schools are
being used as tools for propaganda

... I gotta tell you something. I would not want my kids in a school where they are
taking a captive audience and indoctrinating them with views that contradict mine.

So, unlike 35 years ago, Reverend Hill has plenty of company on the cable news.

He and the textbook protesters believe that the current state of American schools
vindicates the position that they took three decades ago.

Hill: Our nation is in peril. Our children are being destroyed every day.
Our homes are being crushed and destroyed. And America is reaping
today, cause we have been in ... thrown out... thrown to the wind and we
are reaping a whirlwind of what we have done in the past. [applause]

[Music]

Controversies over textbooks happened before the uproar in Kanawha County and they
flared up afterwards, but none ever provoked such violence. When things settled down
in West Virginia, it marked a temporary truce, not an end to the fundamental, ideological
conflicts over how and what to teach children. Unlike many other countries, the United
States has no federally mandated curriculum for its public schools. Local control of
education is one of our society's abiding principles. And in many American school
districts what gets taught in the classroom is still at the center of an entrenched battle
over what this country is, and what it ought to be.

[Music]

Smith: You've been listening to and American RadioWorks documentary, The Great
Textbook War. It was produced by Trey Kay and Deborah George with help from Anna
Sale, Rosa Meyer and Ellen Guettler. Editing help from Catherine Winter. Music was
provided by Michael Lipton and Tristram Lozaw. Jonathon Mitchell and Craig Thorson
provided technical assistance. I'm Stephen Smith.

Special thanks to Henry Battle, Stan Bumgardner, Richard Fauss of the West Virginia
Archives.

The Great Textbook War is the winner of a 2009 Peabody Award.

To learn more about the textbook debate, in Kanawha County and elsewhere around the
country, visit our website - American RadioWorks.org. There you can download a
podcast of this program, or any program from our archive of more than 100
documentaries. That's at American RadioWorks.org.

The Great Textbook War was sponsored by the Kanawha Historical and Preservation
Society and made possible with funding from the West Virginia Humanities Council,
Friends of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, Kanawha County Senators Community
Partnership Grant, the CRC Foundation, the Spencer Foundation and generous listener
support.

American RadioWorks is supported by the Batten Institute. The research center for
global entrepreneurship and innovation at the University of Virginia's Darden School of
Business. Batteninstitute.org.

Back to The Great Textbook War