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19 I N T R O D U C T I O N Soul on Appalachian Ice “This is not a minister’s battle,” Donald Dobbs insisted, speaking into a microphone. Five members of the Kanawha County Board of Education and a crowd of fellow West Virginians listened on a rainy June evening in 1974. Among them was Alice Moore, the only woman on the board of education and the one who first raised objections to the multiethnic language arts curriculum—more than three hundred titles encompassing instruction for students enrolled in kindergarten through high school—that had been adopted for use throughout the West Virginia county. Although he was flattered to be asked to represent other clergy, he said he was speaking for himself, speaking out against the new textbooks as a concerned father. Fifteen other citizens also signed up to publicly debate the vices and virtues of the books. Despite the sound system’s inability to reach the far recesses of the auditorium, people were there to be heard. More than a thousand were in attendance for the school board hearing that lasted nearly three hours. Audio recordings of the event captured the nuance of voices and the crowd’s reaction.1 One of the first speakers, Dobbs took his allotted five minutes to make a “twofold” objection to the content of the books and their implications. Like Alice Moore, Dobbs said the books were lowering standards by teaching students poor grammar in the form of dialectology. Like Moore, he also pointed out “moral objections” to the curriculum, noting its inclusion of Eldridge Cleaver, the black nationalist author of the 1968 bestselling prison memoir, Soul on Ice.2 Although listed only as supplemental reading for advanced placement, college-bound high school students, Soul on Ice—or, more precisely, its notorious analysis of rape as an insurrectionary act—was cited often as the smoking gun, the evidence that corruption and READING APPALACHIA from LEFT to RIGHT 20 “moral degradation” were what the curriculum had to offer. Deviating from the standard led to “works by such men as Eldridge Cleaver,” Dobbs explained, a man who does not “adequately represent the Negro or the white in the morals he presents.” Fighting these books, which were adopted to fulfill a state mandate for implementing multiethnic language instruction, was not a minister’s battle; it was “a people’s battle, a battle which every concerned American should be interested in,” Dobbs declared. The crowd applauded his remarks vigorously. Alice Moore then took the opportunity to question Dobbs. Although the hearing was ostensibly for the entire board to respond to and weigh the concerns of the public, mostly it was Moore who interacted with the speakers. What did Dobbs think about how the books told students to pretend they are God and think about how they would change the world? “I don’t know the reason that a teacher would tell a student to pretend he was God but it somehow, to me, lowers the standard of God, for us to be able to bring it down to our level,” Dobbs responded as Moore simultaneously finished his sentence. “Down to the human standard,” she agreed. And what did Dobbs think about leading a child to consider Bible stories as myths? Dobbs then discussed how one of the books asked students to compare the story of Androcles and the Lion with the story of Daniel in the Lion’s Den, which he believed “is a true story because I believe in the miracles of the word of God and I don’t think many people would want to tear down those things and consider them as myths and yet they’re compared in the same light.” Moore affirmed this interpretation of the textbook: “Right. They’re told to compare the two stories for the similarities of them and they discuss the reality which would force the child to see that the story of Daniel in the Lion’s Den couldn’t be true because a lion doesn’t act that way. That’s the point that they make.” Following Dobbs in the lineup of citizen speakers was pastor Ronald English, who identified “the substantive issue being raised on this particular battlefront” as “our collective commitment to racial balance and racial harmony,” not, he added, “in terms of bodies being integrated but in terms of awareness and lifestyles.” Referencing local history, he acknowledged that the integration of schools in Charleston had been achieved...

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