On a September morning in 1974, more than nine thousand Kanawha County schoolchildren stayed home. Their parents had pulled them out of school over a set of newly approved English language arts textbooks - books that included passages by Malcolm X, Allen Ginsberg, and Eldridge Cleaver, and that for the first time treated African American Vernacular English and Appalachian English as legitimate dialects rather than errors. Within weeks the dispute would draw in striking coal miners, dynamite an elementary school, send a bullet into a bystander, and put a Baptist minister in federal prison. Decades later, historians would call it the first major victory of the modern Christian right - the moment a local school board fight grew into a national movement.
In 1970, the West Virginia Superintendent of Schools had signed off on a state-level proposal to train teachers to 'induce change' in their classrooms - language taken from the funding document itself - in service of broadening the cultural horizons of the state's children. The new English textbooks that arrived in Kanawha County four years later were the visible end of that policy. They included excerpts from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Cleaver's Soul on Ice, writings by George Jackson, poetry by Allen Ginsberg, and passages on Sigmund Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex. They taught dialectology - the idea that Appalachian English and African American Vernacular English are dialects with their own internal rules rather than corrupted versions of standard English. One English teacher on the state review committee, who said she held strong conservative values, defended including challenging material: removing books that showed opposing opinions, she said, would be equivalent to 'telling lies by omitting ideas I know exist.'
Alice Moore was the only member of the Kanawha County School Board without a college degree. She had four children in county schools and had previously campaigned against sex education in the curriculum. She was the wife of a fundamentalist minister. When the textbook review copies arrived, she read all three hundred of them. Moore was particularly concerned by a passage from Malcolm X calling Christians 'brainwashed,' by the inclusion of Black Panther writers, and by the treatment of African American Vernacular English as a legitimate dialect. Historian Carol Mason has written that Moore did not want White children to learn what she called 'ghetto dialect.' On May 23, 1974, Moore went to the school board meeting and called the books 'filthy, disgusting trash, unpatriotic and unduly favoring blacks.' She also placed a phone call to Mel Gabler, a Texas-based conservative Christian textbook evaluator who supplied her with pamphlets documenting how the books allegedly conflicted with Christian values.
When the school year began in September, the boycott took hold faster than anyone expected. Nine thousand of the county's forty-five thousand elementary students stayed home. Coal miners, bus drivers, and trucking workers walked out in solidarity. Reverend Marvin Horan and other ministers led the opposition. The state Department of Education proposed a compromise. Horan rejected it. He demanded the books be permanently removed and the supporting school board members fired. Then came the bombs. Dynamite was placed at an elementary school and at the school board building. Another elementary school was actually bombed. School buses were attacked with shotguns. Rocks were thrown through the windows of children who continued attending. A bystander was shot. Reverend Charles Quigley publicly asked Christians to 'pray that God will kill the giants who have mocked and made fun of dumb fundamentalists,' to which one student replied: 'They're shooting people because they don't want to see violence in books.' Alice Moore herself fled town. The Kanawha sheriff requested state troopers; Governor Arch Moore refused.
Between 1974 and 1975, federal authorities prosecuted several of the bombers. Reverend Horan received a three-year sentence; the New York Times covered the verdict. The bombings effectively ended the most violent phase of the demonstration. By the fall of 1975, the school board had restored the full line of approved books to all county schools - on paper, the boycott had failed. In practice, it had won something else. A network of private Christian schools sprang up across West Virginia, designed to teach children outside the curriculum the boycott had failed to defeat. The educational historian Joe L. Kincheloe later argued that the Kanawha County controversy was the first major victory for conservative evangelical Christians in the cultural debates that emerged from the 1960s - a precursor, in his framing, to the New Right that would reshape American education and electoral politics for the next half century. In 2011, The Washington Times called Alice Moore a 'culture war heroine' and a precursor to the Tea Party. The schoolbooks at the center of the fight had long since gone out of print.
The Kanawha County Textbook War unfolded across Kanawha County, West Virginia, centered on Charleston at 38.29 degrees north, 81.66 degrees west. Best viewed at 5,000 to 8,000 feet AGL: the Kanawha River winds through Charleston between flanking ridges, with the state capitol dome and downtown grid prominent on the north bank. Yeager Airport (KCRW) sits on a ridge just east of downtown - a striking flat-topped runway carved into the mountains. The Elk River joins the Kanawha at the heart of the city. Schools targeted by the boycott and bombings were spread across the surrounding hollows and valley towns.