Kanawha County textbook controversy
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The Kanawha County textbook controversy was a somewhat violent school control struggle in the 20th century United States. It led to the largest protests ever in the history of the county, the shooting of one bystander, and extended school closings.
It has been mislabeled as a book banning controversy, but it actually had little to do with banning books from being read entirely, rather with preventing children from having to read certain kinds of textbooks in county schools.
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[edit] School Board Ruling
On 12 March 1974, the English Language Arts Textbook Committee of Kanawha County, West Virginia recommended 325 books and textbooks to the school board for use in Kanawha elementary schools. Among these were titles such as America Reads and Language of Man.
School board member Alice Moore telephoned Mel Gabler, a self-described "textbook evaluator" who owned his own non-profit organization in Texas, and received outlines of some of the books' conflicting views with conservatism. Moore, wife of a fundamentalist minister, reported her concerns to the board and local newspapers. On 23 May, Moore came to the school board meeting and charged that the textbooks were "filthy, disgusting trash, unpatriotic and unduly favoring blacks". She generated much publicity for her cause and won the support of the local Parent-Teacher Association and the Magic Valley Mother's Club. However, the West Virginia Council of Churches supported the books.
On 27 June the school board met again, with over 1,000 local residents observing, and voted to approve the books. This was met with much consternation from conservative groups. Reverend Martin Horan called for a boycott of all public schools. Fliers were distributed around the county containing faked, purposefully lewd "quotations" from the books.
[edit] Boycott and Violence
The boycott escalated quickly. 9,000 out of 45,000 elementary school students in the county were kept home from school. Thousands of miners, bus drivers, and trucking workers joined in the boycott. The Department of Education called for a compromise, but Reverend Horan denounced them, demanding that the boycott continue until the books were permanently removed and the supporting members of the school board fired.
Reverend Horan conspired with other radicals to set fire to several elementary schools and attach explosives to school buses and carpools. Reverend Charles Qugiley asked Christians to pray that God would kill the three board members who voted to keep the books, leading one student to point out, "They're shooting people because they don't want to see violence in books." The boycott escalated into rioting, as angry workers attacked cars and a CBS news crew. Kanawha's sheriff asked for state troopers to be sent in, but West Virginia Governor Arch A. Moore, Jr. denied the request. Schools were closed several times to avoid further violence.
In April 1975 Martin Horan was sentenced to three years in prison, effectively ending the demonstration. In Fall 1975 the school board restored the full line of books that they had approved before to all county schools. However, most schools ignored the curriculum and returned to the textbooks they had used in the 1940s.
[edit] Reference
- Foerstel, Herbert N. Banned in the U.S.A. Greenwood Press, 1994. p.1-7
[edit] External links
- News stories from the Charleston Gazette: school closings, shooting, letter.
