“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” –Ecclesiastes 1:9
A fury over the content, real and imagined, of public school textbooks. Racist and far-right groups eager to exploit the controversy. Heated rhetoric becoming threats that become real-world violence. These broad strokes might have seemed hopelessly old-fashioned just a few years ago, yet today they sound perfectly plausible.
Half a century before panics over modern textbooks, America’s pent-up reactionary rage over what is taught in schools exploded in Kanawha County, West Virginia, drawing massive protests over then new textbooks that parent activists condemned as radical, sexually explicit, and anti-white. This mid-1970s crisis is a largely forgotten episode in the chaotic post-Watergate era.
Kanawha, where Charleston is located, was at the time sharply divided along class lines, between blue-collar “creekers,” who lived in the county’s rural pockets and worked in coal mines and factories, and the wealthier, more socially liberal “hillers,” who worked as doctors, lawyers, or mining executives. The textbook-related conflict was frequently cast as falling along these same fault lines, as in Paul Cowan’s coverage in the Village Voice.
But the truth is somewhat more complicated, according to Carol Mason, a professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Kentucky who specializes in Appalachian culture and right-wing movements. “What my research showed is that some of the biggest opposition to the books were from middle-class and business-class people,” Mason says, including some with ties to the John Birch Society, the far-right, anticommunist coalition founded in the 1950s by a wealthy business leader turned activist.
While the creekers were largely on the anti-textbook side, many of those leaders could hardly be called working-class, Mason notes. Alice Moore, arguably the face of the movement, was a middle-class minister’s wife, as Mason wrote in Appalachian Journal, and another major figure, Elmer Fike, was a factory owner who feared students were being taught anticapitalist propaganda.
Mapping the conflict strictly along class lines, Mason says, not only perpetuates condescending attitudes about Appalachia, it ignores that the conflict was part of a broader, emerging infrastructure for social conservatism in the 70s, which also included fights against desegregation busing in Boston and the Equal Rights Amendment.
“The whole idea of ‘organized discontent’ is about local problems, tensions, and fears. The little counterrevolutions breaking out all over the country,” said historian Rick Perlstein, who covered all three battles in his books The Invisible Bridge and Reaganland, in a 2020 Bookforum interview. “And a big part of the New Right’s political work was getting on the ground and connecting people all over the country who had similar grievances.”
The matter began in the spring of 1974, during the process of purchasing a suite of new textbooks for the public school system. Moore, the only woman on the board, expressed her outrage at some of the material. In particular, she took umbrage with a reference to “dialectology,” an approach to teaching that encouraged students to use cultural dialects they were familiar with, such as Appalachian English or African American Vernacular English.
“I just don't think I agree with that approach at all. In fact, I'm sure I don't,” Moore said. “There’s a correct way to speak.” She successfully pressured the board to delay the purchase of the textbooks until the proposed materials could be more closely reviewed.
When the board met again, Moore was prepared: A crowd that she later estimated was around 2,000 people had gathered in the rain, and Moore had arrived armed with excerpts from books she found particularly objectionable, including from Soul on Ice, a memoir by Eldridge Cleaver in which the former Black Panther confesses to having raped white women in his youth.
If this all seems remarkably familiar, it’s about to get more so. “Parents have no lobby, no influence, no control over their children’s education,” Moore said of her activism, sounding nearly identical to those who today invoke “parental rights” to censor books. She presented herself as a political neophyte, but in fact had been elected to the board years before on a wave of outrage over the county’s new sex education curriculum.
The board voted 3-2 to approve the new books for purchase, but the controversy was far from over. When school started that September, a full 20% of students were kept home by their parents, and more than 3,000 local coal miners struck in solidarity with them. In October, 18 people were arrested for blocking school bus garages.
Things escalated to the point of violence over the next months. Bombs were planted in at least two schools and the Board of Education’s offices. Snipers fired on two state police vehicles that were escorting school buses. In April 1975, Reverend Martin Horan, a self-ordained minister and leader in the anti-textbook movement, was convicted, along with an associate, in connection with the bombings.
Although no one was seriously hurt in any of those incidents, things eventually reached the point where attendees of school board meetings physically attacked board members, says Adam Laats, a professor of education at Binghamton University (SUNY).
Moore publicly centered concerns about sexual content and parents’ rights, but race was an inescapable factor in the controversy as well. Black Baptist minister Ronald English said he frequently heard the material referred to as “n---r books,” and the phrase reportedly appeared on protesters’ placards as well. A seemingly innocuous language arts textbook featuring an artistic rendering of a group of children on its cover was also the subject of controversy, which baffled the school board — until a protester allegedly pointed out that the image included a white girl holding a bouquet of flowers and a Black boy smelling it.
The following February, the Ku Klux Klan, smelling blood in the water, held a four-hour rally in the county. One speaker, Grand Dragon Dale Reusch, exhorted the crowd to “go to your legislature with an ultimatum: Remove the textbooks or we'll remove you from office — physically.” Like Moore, Reusch wasn’t even from Kanawha County.
Moore remained active in national conservative politics, telling attendees at a Tea Party event in 2010 that 1960s radicals now dominated education and that "the indoctrination of kids for 35 years or longer, this is what led us to the election of [Barack Obama]."
The boycott also served as a sort of coming-out for what is still one of the most influential conservative think tanks: the Heritage Foundation. “This was their first public action," Laats tells Teen Vogue. "They sent a lawyer to provide legal assistance to the boycotters.”
Ultimately, the reason the boycott and its attendant violence petered out, Latts explains, was because it was never particularly popular, including among students, who at one point organized a walkout in opposition to the boycott. That fact offers lessons for those fighting these same battles against censorship today.
“When you come right down to it, the idea of keeping the best modern ideas from children, it has a lot of up-front appeal, but it fizzles fast — or at least that’s the history,” Laats says. Groups that advocate for censorship, he adds, “are sort of paper tigers politically, because…parents don’t like their kids having options taken off of the table at school.”
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