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Kanawha County Textbook Controversy Of 1970's West Virginia

833 Words4 Pages

Kelis Guzmán
Mr. Rodriguez
American Literature
19 June, 2023
1970’s West Virginia
During the 1970's West Virginia was known for its scenic mountain beauty, as it is the only state that is completely within the Appalachian Mountain region. Hence its nickname the Mountain State. It is also known for its outdoor recreation, coal production and surplus. Most of West Virginia was composed of 1,744,237 people in total as this was a time of increase in population. The 1970’s for WV were extremely eventful as there was the Kanawha County textbook controversy, Marshall University’ s Football team plane crash, The Buffalo Creek disaster of 1972. There were several components that affected the daily experience of people living in WV, components such …show more content…

Kanawha County Board of Education held a meeting on June 27, 1974 in which board members discussed the controversy about the information being taught in textbooks. Board member Alice Moore represented a petition signed by 12,000 residents of Kanawha County, and it had called for schools to ban any book that undermined the following; The family, which comes from marriage of one man and one woman, belief in God, American political system, capitalism, America’s noble history, and to study the traditional rules of grammar. This was sparked from the new ELA textbooks that were antithetical to religion and patriotism. Distinctly, excerpts from Eldridge Cleaver’s book Soul on Ice and the Autobiography of Malcolm X were protested. Despite this protest, most of the ELA books were approved for use in schools. Soon after this action about 9,000 of the 45,000 students in Kanawha County schools did not attend. Some protesters became violent and derogatory, making countless racist remarks. They were soon ostracized by Alice Moore, the leader of this movement, as she had denied any charge of racism. She instead had a different opinion, she felt that by Black people being represented in “ghetto dialect” that it would degrade them. The movement itself split between striving to keep traditional values and imposing racial

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