Kanawha County Book-Banning Controversy

Date: April, 1974-December, 1975

Place: Kanawha County, West Virginia

Significance: Demands by conservatives that 325 titles be banned from the schools led to a sympathy strike, high absenteeism, the resignations of the superintendent and president of the school board, and charges of censorship

Charleston, the capital of West Virginia, lies within nine-hundred-square-mile Kanawha County. The controversy began when a five-member faculty panel of Kanawha County language arts teachers recommended the adoption of 330 basic texts, supplementary materials, and hardbound and softbound texts to replace old grammar, reading, English, and literature books. Such actions are typical of public school book-buying methods, in which old books are periodically discarded and new ones selected for purchase. The term used for the selection of books is “adoption.”

Christian Fundamentalists and Others

Alice Moore, a school board member and the wife of a Fundamentalist baptist minister, objected to the books selected and to the manner of selection. Moore claimed the books contained material that was disrespectful of authority and religion, destructive of social and cultural values, obscene and pornographic, unpatriotic, and in violation of individual and family rights of privacy. The textbook series under attack included Heath’s Communicating and Dynamics of Language series, McDougal-Littell’s Man series, Houghton Mifflin Company’s Interaction, Ginn’s Responding series, and Scott Foresman’s Man in Literature and Galaxy programs. Moore extended her attack to include the writings of E. E. Cummings, Sigmund Freud, Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X, Dick Gregory, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Allen Ginsberg. Specific titles to be banned from library shelves included the Iliad, Plato’s Republic, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and Paradise Regained (1671), James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer (1841), Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea (1952), other classic works, and a children’s book of jump rope rhymes. In all, 325 titles and 96,095 volumes were considered offensive and, under conservative protest, temporarily removed to a warehouse.

The objections of Moore won quick support from Fundamentalist churches, parents, and the executive committee of the county Parent Teacher Association. However, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Episcopal church, and the state Human Rights Commission endorsed the committee’s selection. On June 27, at a three-hour hearing, eight of the supplementary paperbacks were dropped, but the school board adopted the other offending titles by a vote of 3-2.

Over the summer of 1974 antitextbook committees organized in rural Kanawha County and called for a boycott of the schools on opening day. In early September 20 percent of the school system’s 45,000 students were absent on the first day of classes. The next day 3,500 coal miners staged a wildcat strike in sympathy with the book protesters. School book protesters picketed businesses and industrial plants, successfully closing the warehouse of a supermarket chain and a trucking terminal.

The pressure of court injunctions, arrests, and school shutdowns forced Superintendent Kenneth E. Underwood to close all the schools and negotiate a truce between the opposing factions. When the schools reopened and a thousand preacher-led antitextbook demonstrators still picketed the schools making new demands, Superintendent Underwood resigned.

During the month of October two men were shot, eleven men were arrested, three schools were vandalized, more than three thousand miners remained out of work in a sympathy strike, an empty school was dynamited, school attendance dropped to 70 percent, and the school board president, Albert Anson, Jr., resigned. On October 21, a conservative delegation from Kanawha County visited the White House and met with presidential adviser Roger Semerad. The White House agreed to look into the matter.

On November 8, the school board voted 4-1 to return all the controversial books to the schools. The board also decided that any parent objecting to a textbook on moral or religious grounds could have their child excused from using it. The board stated that no teacher was authorized to indoctrinate a student to follow either moral or religious values which were objectionable to either student or parents. A new committee of five teachers and fifteen parents was created by the board to select textbooks. The American Library Association and the Association of American Publishers claimed the board’s actions represented censorship.

The school system appeared to be the only institution connecting the diverse populations of Charleston’s urban, industrial, middle-class with the rural, Fundamentalist miners of Kanawha County. The rift between Charleston and Kanawha County parents began over the issue of teaching sex education in the public schools, widened when Kanawha County’s rural schools were consolidated in 1973, and erupted over the issue of language arts textbook selection for classrooms in grades kindergarten through twelve.

Outside Intervention

The National Education Association (NEA) sent an eight-member panel to Kanawha County to investigate the issues and actions undertaken by the school board. The NEA concluded their investigation in March, 1975, and published the NEA Report, Kanawha County, West Virginia: A Textbook Study in Cultural Conflict. The NEA chastised the school board for placating the opposition when the book selection committee’s composition was changed to give the community more decision making authority than educators had. The NEA did not examine the textbooks in dispute but did hold hearings and interviews with educators, parents, students, and others concerned with this issue. Only one member of the board refused to meet with the panel. The NEA backed the embattled school board “in principle” but criticized the board for its failure either to foresee or to respond quickly to the crisis. The school board’s most serious transgression was its failure to communicate with Kanawha County’s more tradition-bound rural communities. The NEA report urged that Kanawha County consider establishing alternative schools or classes where both controversial books and textbooks could be included in the curriculum along with schools offering a more traditional educational format. The report deplored the exploitation and prolongation of the dispute by right-wing elements but expected the school board to be more attuned to the community’s needs.

In December, 1975, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld a federal district court’s order dismissing the action of parents of two school-age children to restrain the board of education of Kanawha County from adopting textbooks. The appeals court decision was consistent with earlier Supreme Court rulings that guaranteed First Amendment protection of speech, inquiry, and belief in the schools. The Court found nothing wrong with the school board’s procedures, actions, or conduct incident to the placing of the books in the schools that abrogated the rights to privacy by parents or children. At the time the appeals court ruled, students in Kanawha County were given a choice from among several language arts textbooks. Superintendent John Santrock noted that parents had stopped complaining about the curriculum. Even school board member Moore was satisfied that her book banning demands had achieved a greater level of parental involvement in Kanawha County’s public schools. Ironically, Kanawha County received the 1975 national award for outstanding community education.

Bibliography

The Teacher Rights group of the National Education Association, Kanawha County, West Virginia: A Textbook Study in Cultural Conflict (Washington, D.C.: National Education Association, 1975) provides background, analysis, and recommendations for the textbook controversy in Kanawha County. Informative contemporary magazine accounts offering a variety of political and regional views about the Kanawha County textbook controversy and censorship include John Mathews’ “Access Right to Children’s Minds: Texts for Our Times: Problems in Kanawha County” in The New Republic (January 4, 1975), John Egerton’s “Battle of the Books: Kanawha County” in The Progressive (June, 1975), Russell W. Gibbons’ “Textbooks in the Hollows” in Commonweal (December 6, 1974), Calvin Trillin’s “U.S. Journal: Kanawha County, West Virginia: Anti-textbook Controversy” in The New Yorker (September 30, 1974), and Curtis Seltzer’s article “West Virginia Book War: A Confusion of Goals: Controversy in Kanawha County” in Nation (November 2, 1974).