The Kanawha County Textbook Controversy in 1974 began when books meant to expand cultural knowledge of West Virginia students were selected and added to schools. However, many parents and community members were upset by title selections and began to protest adding the books to the district's collection. The Controversy or Kanawha County Textbook War as it is also known, remains the largest protests that began when new multicultural textbooks were introduced in schools. During the protests schools closed, violence escalated, and eventually ended in compromise.
Kanawha textbook controversy
Archives
Ku Klux Klan brochures, 1975. 1 folder. Sc2016-046
Scrapbooks and other materials, 1974-1982. 1 folder and 5 volumes. Sc2002-053
Kanawha Textbook Controversy, 1974. 2 items. Sc93-3
Location: Ph2016-046
Collection: Kanawha Textbook Controversy. B&W prints including Ku Klux Klan protest, 1975 September 6. 17 items.
Donor: Mike Bell
Location: Ph2009-145
Collection: Kanawha Textbook Controversy. Copy negatives of Alice Moore and family, board, 1969-1978. 8 items.
Donor: Alice Moore
Vertical Clipping Files Folder
Textbook Controversy
41 newspaper articles from West Virginia newspapers 1974-2011 from the West Virginia Memory Project
Audio on Kanawha County's Textbook Controversy, 1974: Listen on YouTube
Kanawha County Public Schools, Textbook Controversy Records A&M 3523
Records regarding controversy over textbook selection in Kanawha County schools. Includes correspondence, legal documents, and newsletters. Also includes copies of textbooks in question. The textbooks in this collection cover the subjects of literature, communications and speech, vocabulary and grammar, myths and fables, poetry, nonfiction, writing skills, and biography. There are also books regarding Federal and West Virginia school laws.
Kanawha County Book Protest, Miscellaneous Papers A&M 2624
Articles, broadsides, and other materials concerning selection of textbooks for the public schools of Kanawha County, West Virginia. The controversy involved confrontation between Christian fundamentalists and liberals over educational policy.
An American Conflict: Representing the 1974 Kanawha County Textbook Controversy by Carol Mason. Appalachian Journal, 32(3), 352–378.
The Indicted South by
By the 1920s, the sectional reconciliation that had seemed achievable after Reconstruction was foundering, and the South was increasingly perceived and portrayed as impoverished, uneducated, and backward. In this interdisciplinary study, Angie Maxwell examines and connects three key twentieth-century moments in which the South was exposed to intense public criticism, identifying in white southerners' responses a pattern of defensiveness that shaped the region's political and cultural conservatism. Maxwell exposes the way the perception of regional inferiority confronted all types of southerners, focusing on the 1925 Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, and the birth of the anti-evolution movement; the publication of I'll Take My Stand and the turn to New Criticism by the Southern Agrarians; and Virginia's campaign of Massive Resistance and Interposition in response to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Tracing the effects of media scrutiny and the ridicule that characterized national discourse in each of these cases, Maxwell reveals the reactionary responses that linked modern southern whiteness with anti-elitism, states' rights, fundamentalism, and majoritarianism.
Reading Appalachia Left to Right by
In Reading Appalachia from Left to Right, Carol Mason examines the legacies of a pivotal 1974 curriculum dispute in West Virginia that heralded the rightward shift in American culture and politics. At a time when black nationalists and white conservatives were both maligned as extremists for opposing education reform, the wife of a fundamentalist preacher who objected to new language-arts textbooks featuring multiracial literature sparked the yearlong conflict. It was the most violent textbook battle in America, inspiring mass marches, rallies by white supremacists, boycotts by parents, and strikes by coal miners. Schools were closed several times due to arson and dynamite while national and international news teams descended on Charleston.A native of Kanawha County, Mason infuses local insight into this study of historically left-leaning protesters ushering in cultural conservatism. Exploring how reports of the conflict as a hillbilly feud affected all involved, she draws on substantial archival research and interviews with Klansmen, evangelicals, miners, bombers, and businessmen, a who, like herself, were residents of Kanawha County during the dispute. Mason investigates vulgar accusations of racism that precluded a richer understanding of how ethnicity, race, class, and gender blended together as white protesters set out to protect "our children's souls."In the process, she demonstrates how the significance of the controversy goes well beyond resistance to social change on the part of Christian fundamentalists or a cultural clash between elite educators and working-class citizens. The alliances, tactics, and political discourses that emerged in the Kanawha Valley in 1974 crossed traditional lines, inspiring innovations in neo-Nazi organizing, propelling Christian conservatism into the limelight, and providing models for women of the New Right.
