Textbooks in the Hollows

...Heath Co., Houghton Mifflin Co...

...Hillbilly jokes are in at cocktail parties in Charleston just as Polish jokes still make the circuit in New York and Washington parties...

...Cannonading with delight...

...They are, of course, Canada's northernmost Eskimo tribes and West Virginia's mountain people...

...The newspaper, long an urbane voice for' integration and against the Vietnam war, has come down heavy on the anti-textbookers, publishing in full some of the offensive selections...

...Mindless rednecks, after all, should be no less intolerable than ostentatious administrators...

...They're shooting people because they don't want people to see violence in books...

...In Bedford County, Virginia, school system supervisors have directed the board of education to remove "undesirable" books from the schools...

...Charles Quigly, an anti-textbook leader "It doesn't make sense...

...They (the textbooks) are immoral, anti-Christian and anti-religious...

...Now, because Canada's Department RUSSELL W. GIBBONS, a long-time contributor on labor affairs, has also appeared in The Nation, The New Leader, Dissent, and other journals...

...It is a land of unquestioned beauty, but one whose landscape has been ravaged by the absentee power brokers who have owned the mines and much of the state...

...sign carried by a picket in Kanawha County, West Va...

...After the board announced on Nov...

...A graduate student or any other visitor need not have a tape recorder to construct the obvious: the people are poor...

...6 December 1974:234...

...Feeding, courting, stolid, slight, Like peasants plying through the fray, Fireflies vibrate with light...

...It is the heart of Appalachia, and it is one part of the country whose people reject any regional compartmentalization: they are not Easterners, Midwesterners--and especially not Southerns...

...And it was predictable to anyone familiar with the cultural history of this part of West Virginia that objections would have been forthcoming on the selection of anthologies which were part of the English "Language Arts" approved by the board's Textbook Selection Committee earlier this year...

...Possibly awaiting the outcome of the West Virginia conflict, the board has delayed action...

...It seems to me that if parent participation had continued in Kanawha, it is unlikely the situation would ever have become so aggravated," comments Carl Marburger, a onetime Commissioner of Education in the neighboring state of Maryland, whose eastern shore has sociological makeups with some similarities...

...v a Gazette reporter...

...TEXTBOOKS IN THE HOLLOWS RUSSELL W. GIBBONS A cultural counter-revolution th at outrages Eastern sensibilities Even Hillbillies have constitutional rights...

...They was all right...

...Anyone who has visited the state cannot ignore the fact that geography and the land have had a profound effect upon the people: the mountains and the narrow, twisting roads that wind through them give it a sense of isolation and distance from the rest of the country...

...It has, in fact, grown from unreasonable oratory and polemics at meetings of the Kanawha County board of education to demonstrations and counter-demonstrations, each enlisting their children from pre-schoolers to the high school students most affected...

...Shadow fathers dart away...

...Blacks and "street people" who use language easily understood by children of the inner-city of New York or Chicago or Los Angeles populate the stories and poems which present the core of the controversy...

...We sit barefoot near the bay Where fireflies vibrate with light...

...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...

...Alice Moore called by the Charleston Gazette the "dark-eyed patron saint of the anti-textbook crusade," has kept the board in a continued turmoil since last June, when the controversial texts came to the attention of fundamentalist parents...

...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...

...They used to be called hillbillies, a term long considered derogatory but now acceptable in an evolution of self-pride comparable to the black pride movement...

...The irony in the current struggle in the schools around the capitol of Charleston may be that the same people who in past years have been critical of this out-of-state economic power have in another sector imposed a set of values which is just as foreign to the hollows and its creekers as Chase Manhattan or AT&T...

...And if he says the books are against the Lord's teachings--well, that's where we're at...

...asked a lady protesting on the capitol steps with her youngsters carrying small American flags...

...Those who find it difficult to understand why coal miners would jeopardize their jobs at the threshold of a nationwide strike threat must dig deeper with the social anthropologists: "Miners go into the ground and listen for God every day they work," says Carl Glatt, the former head of the state's Human Rights Commission...

...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...

...Most of the texts comply with a requirement of the state which provide that textbooks illustrate both blacks and whites in "real life" situations...

...They got me through, didn't they...

...See---the final grand display...

...The focus of the anti-textbook crusade are the hollows of the upper Kanawha County, an expanse of narrow roads and creeks which twist across the mountains and through communities of insulbrick and stucco dwellings...

...Flicking switches in their flight Through the saw-toothed salt marsh hay, Fireflies vibrate with 'light...

...and other recognized educational publishers...

...Mrs...

...Christians should pray to God to strike dead the three (board of education members) who voted to purchase them...

...Those principles are well understood and uncomplicated in most of Kanawha County outside of urban Charleston...

...IRandy Summers, a Dupont high school student in the Kanawha County system Those familiar with the literature of social anthropology know that there are two North American cultural groups who have been studied and probed and analyzed and lived with by psychologists to the point that many of them have now developed a sophisticated cynicism toward visiting professionals...

...Fireflies vibrate with light...

...The creeks which flow through the state and near which have been built the literally hundreds of mining camps and towns and hamlets for well over a century have been Commonweal: 231 home to several generations of mountaineers or hillbillies or "creekers...

...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...

...The disputed books are already in use in many of the nation's larger school systems, but a central part of the controversy has been the elimination of parent members from the selection committee...

...How many more papers do we need to tell us that they are an alienated people, unable to accept the ways of a society which presided at their cultural destruction...

...Yet so do the students in the Kanawha system and they remain the serious victims of the protest...

...Taken in perspective, it should not be too surprising that the controversy over textbooks has long passed the point of reasonable people in disagreement...

...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...

...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...

...Yes I think 'e is a foreigner Egyptian or a Jew Oh aye and that reminds me 'Ed like some water too...

...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...

...She's either afraid that her home will get shot up or she hates us as much as everyone else in that end of the valley," says 'is Luck Is Down The textbook controversy in West Virginia's Kanawha County, a largely rural, coal camp and farmland expanse which twists through the state's west-central mountains, centers upon a "Communicating" series for both elementary and secondary grades, published by the D.C...

...Shots have been fired, dynamite has been fused to schoolhouse doors, a school has been firebombed, at times one quarter of the county school population has boycotted classes and several protesters have been jailed for violating injunctions...

...You have got to hold onto the principles that you believe in," she says...

...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...

...They have a heritage of hard times and yet with it proud convictions about their own self-worth and beliefs...

...And while allegation of "anarchism" in the books has been one of the repeated charges by the protesters, the violence which has resulted has moved the county toward anarchy...

...Disputed textbooks are probably harmless at worst, whatever their effectiveness as teaching materials . . . (but) there was an astonishing insensitivity to local cultural values by the public school system, from the board down to the classroom teachers...

...Yet since in the Union, it has known a disproportionate amount of economic hardship, political turmoil and social discontent...

...I suppose it's a little bit mean, But 'onest 'es filthy dirty You don't know where 'es been...

...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...

...It has evolved into passions and emotions, with threats common...

...Yet it is not a preacher ordained by the fires of a mine cave-in who has given direction to the anti-textbook drive, but an attractive, articulate wife of a Baptist preacher who is a member of the county board of education...

...Change, then, may be the real devil to the hollows, even if speakers at protest rallies have railed against "humanistic conspiracies...

...Said Mother Jones, the miners' angel who understood and helped its wretched poor more than any succession of governors: "When I get to heaven I'll know I am there when I see it isn't West Virginia...

...One which has drawn especially vigorous protest at rallies of the "anti-textbookers" is this poem by Roger McGough from Dialogues and Monologues: MOTHER, THERE'S A STRANGE MAN WAITING AT THE DOOR Mother, There's a strange man waiting at the door With the familiar sort of face you feel you've seen before...

...Bureaucratic paternalism on occasion can surface with good common sense...

...For West Virginia's textbook controversy, whose initial ingredients appeared to be issues involving primitive efforts at censorship and book-banning, has blown into a full-scale eruption of frustrations against a worldly culture imposed in an area literally a world apart from the rest of the country...

...And for a while the 44,500-pupil school system in the county was itself shut down after days of reduced attendance...

...Why are they always trying to do something different...

...Coal mines in Kanawha and Boone counties were shut for several days after school opened in September, and only intervention by Arnold Miller, president of the Mine Workers, reopened them with an uneasy agreement...

...Those who know country music also know West Virginia--as a land of bloody strikes, natural and man-made disasters, coal company towns, company stores and as a stronghold of fundamental religion...

...At Cabin Creek, in the county's lower valley, the local delivery woman for the state's largest circulation newspaper, the Charleston Gazette, has quit...

...of Indian Affairs can make such decisions for its Eskimo wards, they have called a halt to the graduate students with tape recorders and note pads tucked in their parkas...

...It is a state of contradictions: created because of its loyalty to a Republican President, it was carved from the slave-owning aristocracy which became the heartland of the rebel Confederacy...

...What is apparent in recent months in the Mountail~ State is a widespread cultural counter-revolution which outrages Eastern sensibilities and attitudes toward education, religion and community values...

...Rockets spurt and shatter night...

...In years past, when oppressive capital overextended itself in the mines, a raw-boned unionism was not hesitant about taking up arms and shutting down the collieries...

...It is largely rural, yet the economy is coal and the coal camps which have followed the fortunes of the industry are the places where most of the county's creekers reside...

...9 that it was ordering virtually all of a group of disputed textbooks back into the schools, parents and protesters returned to the streets and announced plans for a large-scale "ban-the-books rally" in Charleston in late November...

...Well, shall I give 'im what 'e wants Or send 'im on his way All right, I'll give 'im sixpence Say that's all we've got today And I'll forget about the water...

...However, there is no such bureaucratic counterpart for the mountain folk of West Virginia...

...Opponents say, for instance, that a supplementary book for junior and senior high school readers titled "Jump Rope Jingles and Other Useful Rhymes" teaches "disrespect for law and order" because of a poem which tells of a man arrested ("He took me around the corner/ and he rang a little bell./Along came a police car/ and he took me to my cell...

...Half a dozen school buildings have been firebombed in addition to the board of education building...

...Three or four of the self-ordained funda6 December 1974:232 mentalist preachers have provided leadership to the shock troops, and one of them, Charles Quigly, asked his flock to "pray to God to strike dead" the three board of education members who voted to purchase the controversial texts...

...Even hillbillies have constitutional rights" declared another sign carried at the capitol protest...

...They have criticized them for being anti-American, but I'd call them extremely patriotic because they represent all types of Americans...

...Attempts at reconciliation and resolution of the controversy have only sparked further protests...

...Fronds of green, blue, red and white Fall in ratatat-array As rockets spurt and shatter night...

...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...

...The chairman of the textbook committee calls the books "an excellent seleetion.., a comprehensive program for a complex county in which we are dealing with Commonweal: 233 all kinds of students...

...Many who had plans for college next year see the creekers' crusade as a knife into those hopes...

...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...

...The subsequent approval of the books was made by a committee consisting entirely of professionals, possibly a fatal decision for the school district's tranquillity...

...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...

...The Eskimos have diminished both in numbers and cultural identity since the intrusion of the agents of trading-post civilization, with recent generations experiencing for the first time suicide, homicide, alcoholism and psychological dislocation, phenomena unknown to their grandparents...

...Whose the victory today...

...The anthologies do present another world outside-and far apart from---Cabin Creek, Summit Ridge and Pinch, West Va...

...I would rather see my daughter in a funeral home" than in school exposed to the texts, declared a leader of the anti-textbook crusade, which has virtually shattered the public school system in Kanawha county the past three months...

...The one man who lives through a mine disaster when the others die comes out a fully recognized preacher, called by Jesus' holy name...

...Cultural and ethnic analogy being a dangerous thing, one can only speculate if future shock in the state's mountains is similar to that being experienced in the far north latitudes...

...What's wrong with the books I was taught with in school...

...Moore has regretted the violence and the anarchist tactics used by some of the anti-textbook hardliners, but still maintains that the "anti-Christian" and "filthy" texts must go...

...God, family and blood ties are strong...

...Every tribe has its anthropologist or sociologist," said a Department wit...

...Their beliefs are fundamentalist religion and the strength of their union, and both have produced a collective spirit which has been best expressed in the familiar, yet effective phrase: "Shut it down...

...Says his name is Jesus and can we give 'im 'alf a crown Says 'es run out of miracles and now 'is luck is down...

...And shut them down, they did...

...Several men have been shot and others beaten in connection with the controversy, and Sheriff's deputies in riot gear have been present when protest rallies and school meetings have been held...

...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...

...Rocks and bottles have been tossed at school buses, smashing windows and blocking highways...

...Rockets spurt and shatter night...

...She has given spiritual, if not formal direction, to the Concerned Citizens of Kanawha County, the leading antitextbook group...

...Rev...