Kanawha County textbook controversy

Add links
Coordinates: 38°17′15″N 81°39′37″W / 38.2874°N 81.6604°W / 38.2874; -81.6604
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Kanawha County textbook controversy was a violent school control struggle in the 20th century United States. It led to the largest protests ever in the history of Kanawha County, West Virginia, the shooting of one bystander, and extended school closings. The controversy erupted in 1974 when new, multicultural textbooks were introduced that some parents considered blasphemous.[1]

1974 school board ruling

In 1970, West Virginia's

authorship".[2] An English teacher on the committee stated that although she held strong conservative values, she felt that removing books that showed opposing opinions would be equivalent to "telling lies by omitting ideas I know exist".[1] Among these were titles such as America Reads and Language of Man.[3] These textbooks were part of a new state curriculum that included for the first time the concepts of multiculturalism and egalitarianism
in textbook writing. Most school board members saw no reason to question the state's decision.

Alice Moore

Alice Moore had previously campaigned against

African American Vernacular English as "equally correct" dialects. Historian Carol Mason writes that Moore did not want White children to learn language used by African Americans with the belief that it would cause the White children "to speak in ghetto dialect."[5][6]

The school board moved to review the books before sending them to schools. Upon receiving the review copies, Moore was offended by a quote from the

George Jackson.[7][8]

Moore then telephoned

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, including Moore met again, with over 1,000 local residents observing, and voted to approve the books after a three-hour debate over the merits of teaching a liberal curriculum. This was met with much consternation from conservative groups. Reverend Marvin Horan called for a boycott of all public schools. Flyers were distributed around the county which purported to demonstrate the lewdness of the books, but were actually quotations from completely different books like Sexual Politics that were not part of the curriculum. When parents could not find these passages in their children's own textbooks, they accused the teachers of hiding the real books from them.[9]

In 2011, Moore received the Dr. Robert Dreyfus Courageous Christian Leadership Award, from a South Carolina based ministry that promotes Christian based schools to parents. Announced in

Tea Party Movement.[10]

Boycott and violence

The boycott escalated quickly. Nine thousand 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. Bombs were planted at an elementary school and a school board building; another elementary school was dynamited, school buses were attacked with shotguns, and rocks were thrown at the homes of children who continued to attend school during the boycott. Alice Moore herself fled town during this time.[11]

Reverend Charles Quigley asked Christians to "pray that God will kill the giants who have mocked and made fun of dumb fundamentalists",

Arch A. Moore, Jr.
denied the request. Schools were closed several times to avoid further violence.

In April 1975 Marvin Horan was sentenced to three years in prison on charges related to the bombings, effectively ending the demonstration. In the fall of 1975, the school board restored the full line of books that they had approved before to all county schools.

Legacy

Joe L. Kincheloe in Understanding the New Right and its Impact on Education (1983) made the argument that the actions of Kanawha County School Board Member Alice Moore and her fundamentalist Christian allies in the 1974 controversy represented a defining moment in not only educational politics but American political history as well. Arguing that the Kanawha County textbook controversy was the first major victory for conservative evangelical Christians in the politically polarizing cultural debates that emerged from the 1960s social unrest, Kincheloe wrote in the early 1980s and in subsequent work that the victory was a key moment in what he and Aaron Gresson (2004) have labeled the right-wing recovery movement. This movement has profoundly shaped subsequent American education and electoral politics, as proponents have attempted to regain the power they perceived themselves to have lost in the 1960s cultural movements. In the case of the Kanawha County controversy, Moore and her supporters perceived that progressive secularists were undermining Christian values in their embrace of moral relativism, atheism and sexual experimentation (amongst other things) in educational textbooks a la 1960s liberationism.

After the textbook controversy, a network of private Christian schools was founded across the state, teaching Christian principles in place of the concepts at the center of the controversy.[7]

See also

References

  • Foerstel, Herbert N. Banned in the U.S.A. Greenwood Press, 1994. p. 1-7
  • Kincheloe, Joe L. Understanding the New Right and its Impact on Education, 1983. Bloomington, Indiana: Phi Delta Kappa.
  • Kincheloe, Joe L. Getting Beyond the Facts: Teaching Social Studies and Social Sciences in the Twenty-First Century, 2001. NY: Peter Lang.
  1. ^ a b c Cowan, Paul (3 November 2011) [4 December 1974]. "Holy War in West Virginia: A Fight Over America's Future". The Village Voice. Retrieved 26 August 2021.
  2. ^ Kay, Trey. "Great Kanawha County Textbook War". West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture, and History. Retrieved 26 August 2021.
  3. ^ a b Foerstel 1994, p. 2
  4. ^ Kay, Trey. "Great Kanawha County Textbook War". West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture, and History. Retrieved 26 August 2021.
  5. ^ Day, Megan (24 January 2017). "This violent 1974 clash over textbooks in West Virginia prepped the nation for a New Right movement". Timeline. Medium. Retrieved 26 August 2021.
  6. ^ Mason, Carol. "From Textbooks to Tea Parties: An Appalachian Antecedent of Anti-Obama Rebellion". West Virginia History, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2011. West Virginia University. Retrieved 26 August 2021.
  7. ^ a b c American Public Media. "The Great Textbook Wars - American RadioWorks". publicradio.org.
  8. ^ Skinner, David. "A Battle over Books". National Endowment For The Humanities. United States Government. Retrieved 26 August 2021.
  9. ^ Foerstel 1994, p.3
  10. ^ Knight, Robert. "Culture-war heroine gets her due. Alice Moore opened parents' eyes to liberal indoctrination in textbooks". Washington Times. Retrieved 26 August 2021.
  11. ^ Foerstel 1994, p. 4
  12. ISBN 978-0-547-23772-5
    .
  13. ^ Foerstel 1994, 1994, p. 3
  • Priest, Karl Protester Voices—The 1974 Textbook Tea Party, 2010, Poca, WV: Praying Mantis Press

External links

38°17′15″N 81°39′37″W / 38.2874°N 81.6604°W / 38.2874; -81.6604

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kanawha_County_textbook_controversy&oldid=1172120007"