Published: July 12, 2009 10:42 pm      

Textbook war

Organizers say their forewarnings have now come to pass

CHARLESTON — By any measure, it indeed was a war.

Bombs ripped through the frosty, autumn air of 1974, smashing through two empty schools and a board of education office complex.

Gunfire and harsh rhetoric often flared. Students by the thousands refused to attend classes. One volatile school board meeting erupted into a melee. Coal miners, honoring a long-standing tradition of refusing to cross any picket line, stayed home from their jobs.

And what did this war focus on? Money? Property? Possessions?

Actually, the source of such intense contention lay within the pages of a series of 325 new books and texts for Kanawha County schools that many parents considered an affront to Christian ideals and American patriotism.

Dissent had been brewing for months and came to a head when the board endorsed the books over the objections of member Alice Moore, the wife of a Church of Christ minister. Angry parents were led in a sustained revolt by evangelical preachers. One day, as classes began, the Rev. Ezra Graley led a small knot of pickets outside the county school board office in Charleston in defiance of the law.

Police were called in, and Graley was hauled off to the local lockup, shouting back to his supporters as they eased him into a cruiser, “I love my children!”

From that point on, the dogs of war were unleashed, and for the next few months, there was no peace in the valley, as one protest leader’s warnings proved prophetic.

Almost overnight, Graley, and two other men of the cloth, Avis Hill and Marvin Horan, became folk heroes to a large contingent of disgruntled residents, and objects of scorn and disdain by those who endorsed the controversial texts. National news networks dispatched armies of reporters into the valley to cover “the war.”

Eventually, some non-West Virginia members of a Ku Klux Klan outfit swarmed into the protest. One man identifying himself as a Klansman vented his frustrations on the media, telephoning the Charleston office of United Press International to warn that a bomb had been planted there. None had been.

Now, 35 years after the revolt began, Hill and others are organizing a reunion, unwavering to this day that they took the right path in battling the books, and that history has vindicated their stand.

“People who were fighting against us then will never admit it,” Hill said in a telephone interview from West Palm Beach, Fla., where he serves as bishop of the West Gate Tabernacle since leaving West Virginia some 15 years ago. His ministry is devoted largely to helping the homeless, serving up 500 meals daily.

“All they have to do is look at the statistics in education now, how much the SAT scores have fallen, the violence, the problems of teachers, the sex molestations and all the things that are going on in the school system today. It pretty well speaks for itself. I think the chickens have come home to roost.

“Time has proven that we were right and they were wrong. It doesn’t speak too well for a generation that has no morals and no standards anymore. They don’t even know what to believe. We’ve lost a whole generation of people.”

Hill was prepared to run through a litany of objections to the books in the interview. One classic example was the recitation of an Aesop fable about Androcles, a slave who nursed an ailing lion cub back to health. As time passed, the slave was thrown to the grown lion, but he recognized his benefactor and didn’t regard him as a meal.

“That story is OK, as it appeared, but in the manual, the teacher had to tell the children that this is a myth, because lions don’t act that way,” Hill said.

“Then the teacher is supposed to ask the children, ‘Does anybody know the story about Daniel in the lion’s den? The subtlety is that Androcles is a myth so this must be a myth, too. That kind of subtlety was being pressed in and taught to our kids, that the Bible is a lie. It undermines our values.”

Hill took exception to a Web site depicting fliers he prepared and passed out as using “fake” non-quotes from texts to make them seem objectionable, such as crude and offensive language. Moore had termed the language in the disputed books as “filthy, disgusting trash, unpatriotic.”

“They (book supporters) were the ones telling the lies,” Hill said.

“We did not put anything in there that wasn’t in those texts. They couldn’t repeat the language on television. You couldn’t put it in print.” Hill, in fact, dared one television station to run the objectionable language on the air but was turned down.

Once, in Pennsylvania, the host of a talk show on a 50,000-watt station interviewed Hill and a woman called in to challenge him on the language. The host began reading some of the coarse language, Hill recalled.

Horan served a stretch in a federal prison in Morgantown for a conviction of conspiring to bomb a school, protesting his innocence in a UPI interview shortly after his release.

Hill says he never condoned violence of any sort, nor wanted the presence of the Klan, saying movements that stir emotions always attract an unwanted element.

“Every extremist group from left to right will come,” he said.

Hill says news photographers shot from every angle possible at his rallies, where he often appeared in a coonskin cap and buckskin coat, to make sure a Klansman was caught in the same frame with him as a means of tarnishing his supporters by associating the KKK with the anti-book crusade.

“Other extremist left-wing groups were perpetrating lots of violence in our society by bombing places,” he said.

“I never agreed to that stuff but these guys that perpetrated all that stuff against America back then now are professors in our colleges and the very things we were fighting against they were out doing on their behalf.”

Looking back, Hill said he understands why some people in his movement were led to violent acts.

“When parents feel like their children are being jeopardized and something is being shoved in your culture that is totally opposite to your fundamental beliefs in the Bible, unfortunately everyone is not peaceful,” he said.

“When you’re so frustrated you get the back of the hand by everyone and things are continually pushed down your throat, that is kind of what starts a breakdown in communications. When parents are paying the taxes to provide the money through the county commission and board of education to supply the salaries, and you’re told you have no say, that’s a pretty hard pill to swallow.”

Not all the violence was directed at the opponents of the book protesters.

Hill, himself, came home one night to find his property sprayed with gunfire. The preacher says he counted 17 bullet holes and had to snuff out several bonfires in the parking lot of his combination home-church. Through a friend, Hill said he bought a Thompson sub-machinegun for $100 from a Black Panther member in the valley but never had to use it. One night, sleeping with one eye open, Hill said he heard a voice pronouncing his first name as “Aaayvis, Aaayvis,” and realized it came from God, dispensing an aura of calm that took away any worries about personal harm. The shooting incident was never solved, he added.

Moore is now a widow, and won’t make the Aug. 22 Textbook War Reunion at Little Creek Park in South Charleston, set to run from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Attendees are urged to bring a covered dish. Living in Memphis, where she tends to her ailing mother, Moore plans to speak via a remote control hookup.

Hill, Graley and Horan have more in common these days than as simply veterans in the Textbook War — all three are using pacemakers.

For Hill, at least, the cultural war so many speak of today had its genesis in the textbook revolt, and it is far from over.

“The thing we really need to think about today is not Avis Hill, Marvin Horan and Ezra Graley,” he said.

“The battle is about the educational system in our nation and the struggle. If someone would just really take the time to compare what the education system was then and where it has gone now, the numbers and statistics will speak for themselves.”

— E-mail: mannix@register-herald.com