Appalachian History Series – Coalfield Classrooms: The Kanawha County Textbook War and the Rise of the Culture Wars
In the late summer of 1974, a school board meeting in Charleston turned into one of the most intense curriculum battles in American history. The fight began over a stack of language arts textbooks meant to bring multicultural voices into Kanawha County classrooms. It quickly spilled beyond the boardroom into churches, coal camps, mine portals, and network news broadcasts.
For nearly three years, Kanawha County parents, preachers, teachers, miners, and national commentators argued over what children should read and who had the right to decide. Dynamite ripped through empty school buildings, buses were shot at, mines shut down in sympathy strikes, and a local preacher eventually went to federal prison for plotting bombings. Historians now see the episode as a key early moment in the modern culture wars, rooted not in an abstract debate but in a particular Appalachian county where coal, religion, and public education collided.
This article follows the Kanawha County textbook war from its first board votes through boycotts, violence, and compromise, using contemporary reports, official inquiries, and later scholarship to trace how a local dispute in the West Virginia coalfields helped shape national arguments over schools and values.
A Coalfield County and a New Curriculum
In 1974 Kanawha County was the political and industrial heart of West Virginia. Charleston housed the state capitol and major chemical plants, while coal camps and working class communities spread along the river valleys and hollows that ringed the city. About 46,000 students attended the county’s 124 public schools, making the local board of education one of the most visible institutions that tied the region together.
That spring the Kanawha County Board of Education took up a routine but important task. On April 11 the five member board voted unanimously to adopt 325 recommended textbooks and supplementary titles in language arts. The books had been selected by an English Language Arts Textbook Committee made up largely of teachers and administrators who followed new state guidelines that urged school systems to choose materials with multiethnic and multicultural content and authorship.
At the time, West Virginia and the nation were responding to the civil rights movement, anti war protests, and changing ideas about gender and race. Textbook publishers and state departments of education began to include voices that had long been left out of school anthologies, including Black writers, Native American authors, and critics of American power. The Kanawha County list reflected that shift. It featured works by Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Eldridge Cleaver, and others whose writing challenged traditional narratives about faith, patriotism, and authority.
For some in Kanawha County, especially in more affluent neighborhoods on Charleston’s hilltops, these changes seemed like a natural way to bring classrooms in line with the wider national conversation. For others, particularly in rural and working class communities on the county’s edges, the books read like an attack on their religion, their families, and their sense of what public schools should be.
Alice Moore and the First Challenge
The first major challenge came from within the board itself. At a May meeting, board member Alice Moore, the wife of a fundamentalist minister from the eastern end of the county, questioned the philosophy and content behind some of the newly adopted materials. Moore had been elected in 1970 as a vocal opponent of sex education and saw the textbooks as part of a broader effort to undermine traditional Christian values.
After the April vote, Moore took home copies of the books. She focused on passages that she felt were blasphemous, obscene, or unpatriotic. A quotation from The Autobiography of Malcolm X describing Christianity as the religion of slave owners, excerpts from Allen Ginsberg, Sigmund Freud, Eldridge Cleaver, and George Jackson, and side by side presentations of myths and Bible stories all became touchstones in her case against the curriculum.
Moore also reached beyond West Virginia for allies. She contacted Mel and Norma Gabler, Texas based conservative textbook analysts who had been fighting national publishers over perceived liberal and secular content since the 1960s. The Gablers supplied her with talking points that framed the Kanawha books as evidence of relativism, anti American sentiment, and hostility to Christianity. Those arguments soon appeared in local church meetings and pamphlets.
At the May board meeting Moore and her supporters pressed for a delay in purchasing the books until they could be more fully examined. The board agreed to postpone buying them while debate continued. In June, after hours of testimony from both sides, the board voted three to two to accept most of the textbooks despite petitions and protests. Moore and one other member dissented. The narrow vote marked the moment when a technical dispute over curriculum turned into a full blown moral and political conflict.
Church Meetings, Petitions, and a Countywide Boycott
Once the board reaffirmed its adoption, opponents shifted their efforts from board meetings to the churches and communities they knew best. Fundamentalist pastors such as Ezra Graley, Avis Hill, Charles Quigley, and Marvin Horan organized rallies, distributed pamphlets that highlighted controversial passages, and framed the textbooks as evidence that outside elites were using the schools to corrupt children.
At revival style gatherings in church sanctuaries and fellowship halls, preachers warned that the books taught children to doubt the Bible, embrace profanity, and adopt the language and outlook of what they described as urban and militant movements. One lesson that compared the story of Daniel in the lions’ den to a classical myth about Androcles became a particular flashpoint. For many parents, that comparison looked less like a literature lesson and more like an attempt to equate biblical miracles with pagan stories.
Opponents circulated petitions that gathered roughly 12,000 signatures. By July and August anti textbook sentiment had grown especially strong in rural eastern Kanawha County, where coal camps and small communities along Campbells Creek and other hollows felt a deep sense of ownership over local schools. Ministers, lay leaders, and parents framed the fight as a defense of home, faith, and children against a distant educational establishment.
As the first day of school approached, the protest leaders called for a boycott. On September 3, 1974 county officials estimated that about 20 percent of Kanawha County’s 45,000 students stayed home. National television cameras soon arrived to film picket lines at schools, interviews with angry parents, and images of buses blocked by protesters. For many viewers outside the region, the sight of miners and mothers in rural West Virginia protesting “dirty books” became their first real encounter with the textbook war.
Miners, Picket Lines, and a County on Strike
Kanawha County was union country. The United Mine Workers of America had long operated in nearby coalfields, and the culture of honoring picket lines ran deep. When protesting mothers and preachers began appearing at mine portals and industrial plants, urging workers to stand with them, many miners responded.
Within days some 3,500 miners joined a wildcat strike in sympathy with the boycott, despite union leaders’ instructions not to walk out. Chemical plants, warehouses, and even municipal bus drivers joined in at different points, disrupting the normal rhythms of work and transportation throughout the Kanawha Valley. For a time, the fight over textbooks became inseparable from local patterns of labor solidarity.
Picket lines formed not only at school gates but also at bus garages and company entrances. Parents who chose to send their children to school often had to walk them through crowds of neighbors, sometimes facing insults and social pressure. Teachers and administrators who supported the books received threatening phone calls and saw their motives questioned from pulpits and in the press.
On September 6 the Kanawha County Circuit Court issued an injunction prohibiting protesters from interfering with the operation of the schools. The order did little to calm tensions. Instead it added a legal layer to a fight that already blended theology, politics, and local identity.
Bombings, Boycotts, and the Edge of Violence
As fall turned into early winter, the controversy moved steadily closer to outright violence. In September and October a series of bombings and attempted bombings shook Kanawha County schools and administrative buildings. Dynamite exploded at Midway Elementary and other schools, shattering windows and wrecking classrooms in the early morning hours. Another blast damaged the school board headquarters. School buses were shot at on rural routes, and some cars and homes belonging to pro textbook families were firebombed.
The attacks took place at night or when buildings were empty, and no students were killed. Even so, the message was unmistakable. Parents interviewed on television spoke openly about fearing that their children might be blown up or caught in gunfire if they crossed picket lines or sat in classrooms that had become targets.
In response to escalating violence the school board closed schools for several days in September. When classes resumed, board members tried a compromise that removed the most disputed texts from classroom use and placed them in school libraries with parental permission requirements. Protest leaders rejected this arrangement. They demanded that the books be permanently banned and that pro textbook board members and the superintendent resign.
The mix of religious rhetoric, property destruction, and defiance of court orders eventually drew federal attention. In the most high profile case, the Rev. Marvin Horan was tried and convicted for conspiracy related to the bombing of schools and sentenced to three years in prison, while other activists served shorter terms for violating injunctions. Those prosecutions, along with fatigue among many residents, helped bring the most intense phase of the conflict to a close, though protests and organizing continued into 1977.
Compromises, Courtrooms, and an NEA Inquiry
While streets and coal camps wrestled with protests, courts and professional organizations handled another side of the conflict. Parents who opposed the books filed federal lawsuits arguing that the textbooks violated their religious freedom rights under the First Amendment. Judges ultimately rejected those claims and upheld the board’s authority to select textbooks, echoing Supreme Court precedents that give school officials broad discretion over curriculum so long as they do not directly establish or suppress religion.
Within the community the board continued to search for workable policies. In late 1974 and 1975 members adopted guidelines influenced in part by Alice Moore’s proposals. The new standards discouraged the adoption of texts that pried into home life, encouraged racial hatred, insulted patriotism, promoted what were viewed as alien forms of government, or used profanity and irreverent language for God. At the same time, the board created committees with parent representation to participate in future textbook selection and review.
The National Education Association’s Teacher Rights Division conducted an inquiry at the request of local teachers, producing a detailed 1975 report titled Kanawha County, West Virginia: A Textbook Study in Cultural Conflict. Investigators interviewed teachers, administrators, students, parents, and religious leaders. Their report framed the controversy as a clash between differing visions of schooling and democracy rather than as a simple dispute over obscene material. They also documented the climate of intimidation that many educators felt during the height of the protests.
By the end of 1975 the board quietly reauthorized the full line of books it had originally adopted, and the most visible street protests subsided. Yet the county did not simply return to its pre 1974 status. New private Christian schools opened in the region, some founded specifically to offer families an alternative to the public system that had embraced the contested textbooks.
From Kanawha County to the New Right
Even as the controversy waned in Charleston, it attracted growing attention from scholars and activists who saw Kanawha County as a sign of larger shifts in American politics. Sociologists Andrew L. Page and David Clelland analyzed the protests in the late 1970s as a form of “status politics” in which groups that felt culturally threatened used moral language to defend their way of life. Educational researchers and historians of censorship cited the case when studying book challenges and evangelical mobilization.
In the decades that followed, writers like Carol Mason argued that the Kanawha County textbook war foreshadowed later conservative movements, including the mobilization that helped elect Ronald Reagan and, much later, the Tea Party protests during the Obama administration. Mason and others described the textbook controversy as an Appalachian antecedent of a broader backlash against civil rights gains, feminism, and perceived liberal control of cultural institutions.
The story also remained vivid in public memory. In the 2000s producer Trey Kay, who had been a seventh grader in Kanawha County in 1974, returned to the events in his Peabody Award winning radio documentary The Great Textbook War, which wove archival audio with new interviews. Recent coverage from West Virginia Public Broadcasting and other outlets on the fiftieth anniversary has drawn explicit parallels between the Kanawha fight and current debates over book bans, critical race theory, and LGBTQ themed materials in schools and libraries.
Why the Kanawha County Textbook War Matters
From one perspective the Kanawha County textbook war was a local story about a county school board and a stack of language arts books. From another it was a national turning point. The controversy shows how questions that might appear procedural in a policy document or a state curriculum guide can become deeply personal when they reach particular communities.
In Kanawha County the fight drew energy from overlapping sources. Coal field union traditions shaped the power of picket lines and sympathy strikes. Fundamentalist and evangelical churches provided organizing networks, rhetoric, and moral framing. Anxieties about desegregation, the Vietnam War, and social unrest in the 1960s fed suspicion that textbooks written elsewhere were being used to challenge local ways of life. For many parents who kept their children home, the issue was less about any single passage and more about who controlled the story of America that their children would be taught.
For historians of Appalachia, the episode is also a reminder that the region has long been a site where national debates over race, class, and culture play out in distinct ways. The Kanawha County protests were rooted in specific places such as Campbells Creek and rural hollows east of Charleston, in particular congregations, coal camps, and school communities. They were also broadcast on national news and studied in graduate seminars, shaping conversations far beyond the Kanawha River valley.
In the years since 1974, states and districts across the country have revisited curriculum standards, book lists, and the role of parents in school decision making. Each new wave of textbook and library challenges carries its own context, yet many of the core questions remain the same as the ones argued in Charleston half a century ago. Whose stories belong in the classroom. How do schools balance local values with broader civic ideals. And what happens when a disagreement over reading lists becomes a struggle over the future of a community.
For readers across Appalachia and beyond, the Kanawha County textbook war offers both a cautionary tale and an invitation. It warns how quickly debates over education can escalate when grievance, fear, and outside political agendas all converge. It also invites careful attention to local voices and primary records that capture how students, parents, teachers, and miners in one West Virginia county lived through a conflict that helped define an era.
Sources & Further Reading
National Education Association, Teacher Rights Division. Kanawha County, West Virginia: A Textbook Study in Cultural Conflict: Inquiry Report. Washington, DC: National Education Association, 1975. https://books.google.com/books?id=V4W4HAAACAAJ
Smith, Shirley A. “Kanawha County Textbook Controversy.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. West Virginia Humanities Council, last revised February 8, 2024. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/1064
Parker, Franklin. The Battle of the Books: Kanawha County. Bloomington, IN: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, 1975. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED115559
Moffett, James. Storm in the Mountains: A Case Study of Censorship, Conflict, and Consciousness. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. Open access PDF via WAC Clearinghouse, 2022. https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/books/storm/mountains.pdf
Candor, Catherine Ann. “A History of the Kanawha County Textbook Controversy, April 1974–April 1975.” EdD diss., Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1976. https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/items/17a7815c-49a0-449d-b455-445f7d4019c1
Page, Ann L., and Donald A. Clelland. “The Kanawha County Textbook Controversy: A Study of the Politics of Life Style Concern.” Social Forces 57, no. 1 (September 1978): 265–81. https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/57/1/265/2234594
Mason, Carol. “An American Conflict: Representing the 1974 Kanawha County Textbook Controversy.” Appalachian Journal 32, no. 3 (Spring 2005): 352–78. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40934421.pdf
Mason, Carol. Reading Appalachia from Left to Right: Conservatives and the 1974 Kanawha County Textbook Controversy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. https://press.cornell.edu/book/9780801474767/reading-appalachia-from-left-to-right
Mason, Carol. “From Textbooks to Tea Parties: An Appalachian Antecedent of Anti-Obama Rebellion.” West Virginia History 5, no. 2 (2011): 1–27. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/415905
Kay, Trey, with Deborah George and Stan Bumgardner. “The Great Textbook War.” American RadioWorks / American Public Media, radio documentary, first broadcast 2009; featured on Bunk History, September 11, 2023. https://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/textbooks/ and https://www.bunkhistory.org/resources/american-radioworks-the-great-textbook-war
Walker, Jack. “Kanawha County Textbook Controversy, 50 Years Later.” West Virginia Public Broadcasting, April 11, 2024. https://wvpublic.org/kanawha-county-textbook-controversy-50-years-later
West Virginia University Libraries. “West Virginia – Book Bans & Censorship: Kanawha County Textbook Controversy.” Research guide, updated 2020s. https://libguides.wvu.edu/bannedbooks/wv
Hillocks, George Jr. “Books and Bombs: Ideological Conflict and the Schools—A Case Study of the Kanawha County Book Protest.” The School Review 86, no. 4 (August 1978): 632–54. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1084743
Kincheloe, Joe L. “Alice Moore and the Kanawha County Textbook Controversy.” Journal of Thought 15, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 21–34. https://journalofthought.com/article/alice-moore-and-the-kanawha-county-textbook-controversy
Watras, Joseph. “Landscapes of Learning, West Virginia’s Textbook Controversy, and the Culture Wars.” American Educational History Journal 41, no. 1 (2014): 65–82. https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA394347432&issn=15350584&it=r&linkaccess=abs&p=AONE
Gershon, Livia. “When a Battle to Ban Textbooks Became Violent.” JSTOR Daily, September 27, 2021. https://daily.jstor.org/when-a-battle-to-ban-textbooks-became-violent/
Mason, Carol. “Reproducing the Souls of White Folk.” Hypatia 22, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 85–100. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/hypatia/article/reproducing-the-souls-of-white-folk/C4A5325AAFDDFE625E26A740A7DB424B
Author Note: I wrote this piece to follow Kanawha County’s textbook war from a routine board vote into picket lines, bombings, and a national culture fight. I hope it helps readers see how one Appalachian school system became a flashpoint for questions that still shape our debates over books, classrooms, and who gets to tell the story of America.