Verse
Young, Clemewell
all kinds of students. They have criticized them for being anti-American, but I'd call them extremely patriotic because they represent all types of Americans." Yet can there be a...
...We sit barefoot near the bay Where fireflies vibrate with light...
...A Charleston high school student, Jeff Butler, offered that "you hear and see worse things walking down the hallways" and other students, both in urban Charleston and in some of the rural schools of the district, have petitioned for a resumption with normal classes and a full curriculum with the disputed textbooks...
...In Bedford County, Virginia, school system supervisors have directed the board of education to remove "undesirable" books from the schools...
...What's wrong with the books I was taught with in school...
...Change, then, may be the real devil to the hollows, even if speakers at protest rallies have railed against "humanistic conspiracies...
...Rockets spurt and shatter night...
...Yet can there be a "comprehensive" set of anything--much less values--for a region which incorporates Charleston, the state's second largest city, a capital and a generally affluent community by West Virginia standards, together with a rural population living in substandard housing literally at the bottom of the hollows, xvithout water or sanitary sewcrs, sidewalks and conventional shopping facilities...
...Shadow fathers dart away...
...There are no certainties in the West Virginia dispute, but if the image of Bible Belt bigots attempting to ban books is legitimate, then so also should be the allegations of elitist educational administrators making sweeping decisions of the "we know best" school...
...Possibly awaiting the outcome of the West Virginia conflict, the board has delayed action...
...Marburger, the enlightened educator-administrator, places the issue into reality with a question: "What would happen," he asks after discussing the West Virginia controversy, "if the Newark school board decided to issue 'Little Black Sambo' as a third grade reader...
...They was all right...
...asked a lady protesting on the capitol steps with her youngsters carrying small American flags...
...Fireflies vibrate with light...
...They got me through, didn't they...
...Whose the victory today...
...Cannonading with delight...
...Even hillbillies have constitutional rights" declared another sign carried at the capitol protest...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 CLEMEWELL YOUNG FOURTH OF JULY AT THE SHORE Rockets spurt and shatter night...
...Hillbilly jokes are in at cocktail parties in Charleston just as Polish jokes still make the circuit in New York and Washington parties...
...Many who had plans for college next year see the creekers' crusade as a knife into those hopes...
...And an Ohio school district, sensing future trouble, decided that approval of textbooks must include an appointment of a board made up of teachers and administrators to back-up their selection...
...See---the final grand display...
...And understandably, the mountain people resent them just as do their more sophisticated ethnic counterparts in the cities, and there is evidence that Kanawha County may be but one tip of a protest iceberg which could emerge in any part of the nation...
...Mindless rednecks, after all, should be no less intolerable than ostentatious administrators...
...Charleston and its immediate Appalachian environs constitute one of the starkest examples of the "other America" as far removed as any from the neon-sign prosperity of Wattenburg's Real America of 1974...
...Flicking switches in their flight Through the saw-toothed salt marsh hay, Fireflies vibrate with 'light...
...But the creekers are adamant, vowing that they will keep their children out of school and continue the protest until all of the offending volumes are withdrawn...
...Feeding, courting, stolid, slight, Like peasants plying through the fray, Fireflies vibrate with light...
...Rockets spurt and shatter night...
...6 December 1974:234...
...A textbook review committee in Texas, embroiled in a similar controversy, last month passed over one of the series of books under fire in Kanawha County...
...The rot which took over the Nixon Administration barrel was simply an elitist paternalism which had no faith in the wisdom of the people, and which presumed to make decisions for them, often secretive and largely arbitrary...
...Thinking liberals should find it just as offensive that the parents of Cabin Creek, West Virginia, are denied any say in the school curriculum of their children, iust as they have reacted with sympathy toward the view that the parents of Bedford-Stuyvesant should be involved in decision-making for their children...
...Why are they always trying to do something different...
...Fronds of green, blue, red and white Fall in ratatat-array As rockets spurt and shatter night...
...Others point out the obvious contradiction between protests over alleged disrespect for the law and institutions in books and the actual practice of violence and contempt of law by the anti-textbookers...
...Yet so do the students in the Kanawha system and they remain the serious victims of the protest...
Vol. 101 • December 1974 • No. 9
