Back to the Boycott

It was just a single stick of dynamite tossed through a window of the Midway Elementary School on Campbells Creek Road at 3:30 one morning last week, and it caused only about $1,500 worth of damage. But the explosion, plus a renewed school boycott and a desperate trip to Washington by a fundamentalist delegation, all served notice that the textbook trouble in Kanawha County, W. Va., will be around for some time.

As before (TIME, Sept. 30), the protests were led by ministers and parents who object to texts that include passages by authors from E.E. Cummings and Sigmund Freud to Dick Gregory and Eldridge Cleaver. Under particular attack are selections that appear to challenge a literal interpretation of the Bible or are otherwise antireligious, anti-American or too violent.

The content of the objectionable material varied widely. Some parents demanded that this selection from Jump Rope Jingles and Other Useful Rhymes --a supplemental text for poor readers in junior and senior high school--be banned because it taught disrespect for authority:

I was standing on the corner

Not doing any harm.

Along came a policeman

And took me by the arm.

He took me around the corner,

And he rang a little bell.

Along came a police car

And took me to my cell.

On an entirely different level, many parents protested that one excerpt from Allen Ginsberg at Columbia--supplemental reading for high school students --was obscene:

"A tall, red-haired chick. She had been mainly a whore, actually, with very expensive Johns, who would pay her a hundred dollars a shot. And she was a very lively chick who took a lot of pot."

To show their strength, the anti-book forces urged a new boycott at the start of the week, and persuaded 28% of the county's 45,200 pupils to stay out of school; it was the most effective boycott since early September, when striking coal miners joined in the anti-book demonstrations. Ezra Graley, a fundamentalist minister who has already spent eleven days in jail for his book-banning activities, promised more. "The protests will definitely continue until the books are out for good."

On their mission to Washington, a dozen parents and ministers tried to persuade federal officials to cut off school funds to West Virginia unless the books are banned. After meeting with them for two hours, Roger Senerad, a White House aide for education and labor, said he would try "to help find a constructive compromise for this situation."

Death Threat. Compromises are not easy to find in Kanawha County. In fact, the Rev. Charles Quigley of the Cathedral of Prayer publicly proclaimed a death curse on three of the school board members. One of them, Board President Albert Anson Jr., has already resigned in despair over the deadlock. Kenneth Underwood, the school superintendent, was so upset by death threats that he and his family occasionally moved into hiding. "It seems like you're on a runaway locomotive," he said. "It's a hopeless feeling--it's unreal." Underwood has announced that he will quit as soon as the board can hire a replacement. Furthermore, the 18-member committee appointed by the school board to review the texts is in chaos: at the first meeting, seven anti-book members resigned, declaring that they were under "pressures and ridicule."

At week's end it appeared that the offending books--325 titles and 96,095 volumes--will be stored for a long time in the warehouse where they were taken the second week of school.

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