Qualla: Kanawha County Textbook War

Kanawha County Textbook War: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Kanawha County Textbook War: What the Books Said

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 n...

Kanawha County Textbook War: Alice Moore

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 copi...

Kanawha County Textbook War: The Boycott Turns Violent

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Kanawha County Textbook War: The Long Aftermath

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 h...