The Kanawha County Textbook War, also known as 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.
1974 school board ruling In 1970, West Virginia's Superintendent of Schools signed a proposal for funding to ensure the training of teachers to "induce change" so that children in the state's educational system could elevate and expand above their own cultural surroundings that the state viewed as limited. 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 schools ranging from kindergarten to 12th grade. The books were selected by the Committee based on state guidelines that had been set, including that books should be "multicultural in content and authorship". 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". Among these were titles such as America Reads and Language of Man. 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 sex education being taught in the county and was elected as the only member of the Kanawha County School Board who did not have a college degree. Moore also had four children attending county schools. Moore was concerned by the term dialectology, which implied the teaching of Appalachian English and 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." 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 Autobiography of Malcolm X in which he referred to Christians as "brainwashed"; she requested and received all 300 textbooks, and claimed that she found unsettling quotations from Allen Ginsberg, Sigmund Freud's writings on the Oedipus complex, and convicted Black Panthers such as Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice and by George Jackson. Moore then telephoned Mel Gabler, a textbook evaluator who ran Educational Research Analysts, a conservative Christian non-profit organization in Texas. Gabler in return sent pamphlets and outlines of some of the ways in which the content of the books allegedly conflicted with Christian values, moral uprightness, and patriotism. Moore, the 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 argued that the textbooks taught children to disrespect the beliefs of their parents and taught a brand of relativism that did not belong in West Virginia. 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, 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. 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 The Washington Times, a conservative news publication. The article states that she is a "culture war heroine" who fought against anti-Christian education and liberal indoctrination. The publication went further to state that her leadership in the "uprising" was a precursor to the Tea Party Movement.
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