Textbook War

Transcript to Textbook War Video XII: Alice Moore's Lost Tape

Introduction by Karl Priest:

Mrs. Debbie DeGroff, after many hours of hard work, prepared this document.

The reader will see that Alice Moore was a highly intelligent and insightful lady. This document and audio tape absolutely proves that the Kanawha County (WV) 1974 textbook protesters were well-informed about the anti-Christian and anti-America books.

Mrs. Moore read from the books proposed for students. Following are three categories of what she disclosed.

RELIGIOUS

She read a poem by an anarchist that has this verse:

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary’s womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody’s anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable
and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest of
Second Comings

RACIAL

Reading excerpts, Mrs. Moore revealed that the books were “not sympathetic to Blacks at all. They are demeaning and cheapening to them, and then so many of them hit on this hatred, hatred, hatred of all white people and of America, of Western Civilization."

RAUNCHY

Holding up one of the books, she said, (The terminology they use is) “utterly filthy. It's so explicit. It's about sexual intercourse and I won't read this one but you're welcome to see it later.”

One of the major slurs against the Kanawha County Textbook Protesters is that they were uninformed about the books and that Alice Moore rallied them based upon irrational religious fervor. This recording TOTALLY destroys those lies. Additionally, the slur that the Kanawha County Textbook Protesters were "racists" is soundly debunked.

In 2013 Alice Moore found a cassette tape recording in a forgotten box. She tried playing it, but it jammed, and she thought it was ruined. Miraculously it was not, and she had it professionally transferred to a CD. She does not know who made it originally.

NOTE: In 2018 additional footage was found (5:27) and can be found at Kanawha County Textbook Protest Audio 4 at (Karl Priest) Kanawha County Textbook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKYofb1h2so

There are three photos embedded in this audio.
1. Over 1000 (probably close to 2000) people attended the next board meeting (6-27- 1974) after this taped meeting and others like it. Many stood outside in the pouring rain. (Charleston Daily Mail 6-28-1974)

2. Mrs. Moore at the June 27, 1974 board meeting (Unknown 6-28-74)

3. Citizens kept on investigating the books. (Charleston Gazette 8-3-1974)

Hear for yourself the people who protested in Kanawha County, WV (1974).

In 1974 an event occurred in West Virginia that has been called the first shot in the Culture War https://insectman.us/testimony/text-book-war.htm
Bible believing Christians and their conservative allies brought national attention to the influx of anti-Christian and anti-American textbooks into the public schools. They were not able to stop the onslaught of academic sewage.

The only solution is for a mass exodus out of public (actually, government) schools. https://insectman.us/exodus-mandate-wv/

For more about the true story see the book Protester Voices—The 1974 Textbook Tea Party at www.insectman.us.

Be sure to watch all the videos.

(Karl Priest)Textbook War Videos:

Textbook War Video I 8:50
Avis Hill, Ezra Graley, Charles Quigley, & Alice Moore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euE_7KC-FRA&t=0s

Textbook War Video II 5:53
Marvin Horan, Ezra Graley, Elmer Fike, & a Christian School
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CuhlZYPZmk&t=0s

Textbook War Video III 9:44
March/Rally-Bob Dornan & Marvin Horan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUSwQOqLhWY&t=0s

Textbook War Video IV 13:46
D.C. Press Conference-Ezra Graley, Darrel Beach
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EguYXLKfW7M&t=0s

Textbook War Video V 6:31
Rally-Avis Hill, Bob Dornan, Alice Moore & Marvin Horan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwmJtGhdXcw&t=0s

Textbook War Video VI 4:27
Mothers & Marvin Horan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVYVs8KumL8&t=0s

Textbook War Video VII 8:47
Donald Means interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JV3m-n9998Q&t=0s

Textbook War Video VIII 17:28
Picketing, praying & more
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkmM9vT0exI&t=0s

Textbook War Video IX 6:26
Alice Moore (Board meeting & interview)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as1ck8mGOkY&t=0s

Textbook War Video X 9:27
Theme Song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xf5E0MQC8M0&t=0s

Textbook War Video XI 2:00:26
Passing the Torch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elA1hGeIXCw&list=UUUBA8vMOmPOQXhJM-d5rBXA&index=1&t=0s

Textbook War Video XII 1:21:00
Alice Moore's Lost Tape
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEXDFg1F7uI&t=0s

***

(Karl Priest) Textbook War Video XII: Alice Moore's Lost Tape
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEXDFg1F7uI

[Disclaimer: I have eliminated some “ums, etc.,” but have tried to transcribe Alice Moore’s Lost Tape into a readable document. There are occasions when Mrs. Moore says something by mistake and then corrects herself. A made-up example would be, “I went to town on Tuesday, oh I meant Wednesday.” I would just write, “I went to town on Wednesday” for clarity. I use an overabundance of commas to make long sentences more understandable. I have also placed blanks and a question mark where I was not able to decipher the word or words spoken. I have tried to find the actual poems or stories that she discusses and will provide the links when possible. When found, I print them as they were actually written. Further information not stated by Alice Moore is marked as indented “Additional Notes.” DSD] DSD is Debbie DeGroff

Alice Moore:

I’m just going to take these books and read portions of them and if anyone, later, after I finish, you’re welcome to come up and go through the books. I asked that you not go through them earlier because I didn’t want to lose my marks that I had in them and so forth, but I welcome you—I want you to come and look at them later. If you have any question about anything that I read—if you feel that in any way it’s been taken out of context—I want you to please ask me about that particular course and we’ll go back, you can look at the book. You can decide for yourself. But these books—I have made the statement that they’re anti-God, or they’re anti-Christian, they’re anti-religion and that gets it on a very broad scope. I’m going to begin with a poem that’s in this book, which is one of the main series. There’s about 30 of these books from the Man series. These books, I understood it first, were ungraded. I understand, now, that they are 10 th through 12 th grade, so we’ll accept them as 10 th through 12 th grade books. This begins:

The Preacher Ruminates Behind the Sermon
I think it must be lonely to be God.
Nobody loves a master. No. Despite
The bright hosannas, bright dear-Lords, and bright
Determined reverence of Sunday eyes.

Picture Jehovah striding through the hall
Of His importance, creatures running out
From servant-corners to acclaim, to shout
Appreciation of His merit's glare.

But who walks with Him?—dares to take His arm,
To clap Him on the shoulder, tweak His ear,
Buy Him a Coca-Cola or a beer,
Pooh-pooh His politics, call Him a fool?

Perhaps—who knows?—He tires of looking down.
Those eyes are never lifted. Never straight.
Perhaps sometimes He tires of being great
In solitude. Without a hand to hold.

ADDED NOTE: This poem is titled “The Preacher Ruminates Behind the Sermon,” by Gwendolyn Brooks. You can find the poem at this link: https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/preacher-ruminates-behind-sermon
This poem appears in the McDougal Littel Man series #4 Drama book
“The Preacher Ruminates Behind the Sermon” was part of the book, Black Voices: An Anthology of African-American Literature, September 1968

Now, as I said, there are about 30 of those books. They're filled with this type of literature. I want to pull this ____[?]. I think the idea relates with this, so this is the first book that I brought home. This is the Scott Foresman’s basic reader. Christianity is mentioned in this book repeatedly. There are several stories, several essays, that refer to Christianity and in everyone—every single one—Christianity is (2:00) referred to in a very disparaging manner. Now, if this is balanced, I'd like to see someone explain it. Not once do I find Christianity anywhere in this book described anyway but in the most disparaging manner. All right, this is a poem called “Christ Climbed Down” and I'll read just the last verse. This is a poem that suggests that Christ is running away from the problems of the world. It's my understanding of it.

Christ Climbed Down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary’s womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody’s anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable
and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest
of Second Comings.

ADDED NOTE: The entire poem, “Christ Climbed Down,” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti can be found on this website: https://uuwestport.org/christ-climbed-down/

Another link includes further information on Ferlinghetti and his works:

“The image of Christ climbing down from the cross might at first seem blasphemous, but Ferlinghetti undercuts that negative possibility by showing immediately that his poem is not about Christ as much as about America. He offers criticism of American culture in the name of Christ.”

Ferlinghetti’s publishing company, “City of Lights,” published Allen Ginsberg’s, Howl. You can read Howl at this link: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl
Howl was considered obscene, but the outcome of a subsequent 1957 trial was that it could not be suppressed. This opened the door for much of the obscenity that followed.

There's a story, then, over here— [Added Note: “Pigeon Feathers” by John Updike] about a boy who came across an account of the Life of Christ and the Outline of History by H.G Wells and because of what he read he became fearful. This is a boy who went to church—had gone to church all his life. He believed in God, he believed what his Sunday school teacher had taught him and what the preacher taught him about life after death and he didn't like the thought of dying, but he had confidence in the fact that there was, that he would live even after death, but he came across this account of H.G Wells about the Life of Christ and he became very concerned that there was no life after death. First, he goes to his mother for Comfort because she's a Christian and he asked her and she tells him, “Son everybody has to die some day and that's just part of living.” She doesn't believe in life after death and the boy is, you know, very shocked to find this out, so then he goes to the minister who preaches such beautiful sermons about Heaven and about the terrors of Hell and he finds out that the minister doesn't believe it at all. He admits to him that it doesn't mean anything. He really doesn't believe it. It's just something he preaches. Now this is the account that the Boy does not like going to church. He doesn't like all the thoughts of Christianity, but he does it because you know to have a soul saved someday, but this is what he really thinks about Christianity.

David had been looking for the passage (4:01) where Jesus says to the good thief on the cross, “Today shalt thou be with Me in paradise.” He had never tried reading the Bible for himself before. What was so embarrassing about being caught at it was that he detested the apparatus of piety. Fusty churches, creaking hymns, ugly Sunday-school teachers and their stupid leaflets—he hated everything about them but the promise they held out, a promise that in the most perverse way, as if the homeliest crone in the kingdom were given the prince’s hand, made every good and real thing, ball games and jokes and big-breasted girls, possible. He couldn’t explain this to his mother. There was no time. Her solicitude was upon him.

Added Note: You can read “Pigeon Feathers” here:
https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/pigeon-feathers/

This is typical of the stories in this book, and it is amazing how often Christianity gets in here. We think Christianity or religion's out of the school. That's not in any sense. It's in here in full force. Here's the story of Darwin and his friend Fitzroy. Fitzroy was a Believer after Darwin became an atheist and, in this story, again Darwin, of course, is the hero. Everybody learns that Darwin finds the truth and everyone admires him and he's a great hero and Fitzroy, his friend who remains a Believer, finally becomes disillusioned and then commits suicide, so Christianity loses out in that account.

All right, what I believe that E.M. Forster. . . he says:

Faith to my mind is a stiffening process a sort of mental starch which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it for its own sake at all. Herein I probably differ from most people who believe in faith or who believe in Belief and are only sorry they cannot swallow even more than they do. My law givers are Erasmus and Montaigne—not Moses and Saint Paul. My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is Lord I disbelieve, Help thou my disbelief.

This has quite a bit in that I have underlined and marked, but he concludes by saying,

Such a change, claim the orthodox, can (6:00) only be made by Christianity, and will be made by it in God's good time: man always has failed and always will fail to organize his own goodness, and it is presumptuous of him to try. This claim – solemn as it is - leaves me cold. I cannot believe that Christianity will ever cope with the present world-wide mess, and I think that such influence as it retains in modern society is due to the money behind it, rather than to its spiritual appeal. It was a spiritual force once, but the indwell-ing spirit will have to be restated if it is to calm the waters again, and probably restated in a non-Christian form. Naturally a lot of people, and people who are not only good but able and intelligent, will disagree here; they will vehemently deny that Christianity has failed, or they will argue that its failure proceeds from the wickedness of men, and really proves its ultimate success. They have Faith, with a large F. My faith has a very small one, and I only intrude it because these are strenuous and serious days, and one likes to say what one thinks while speech is comparatively free; it may not be free much longer.

Added Note: The above story is “What I Believe” from: Forster, E.M., Two Cheers for Democracy https://spichtinger.net/otexts/believe.html

This also has the story of—oh what is his name? I don't have it marked, but is his name Christian Brown? It slipped my mind, but anyway it's a story of hypocrites. It's a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It's a very good story in and of itself. Young good—thank you— Young Goodman Brown and Goody Brown, right, that's it and it's a very good story in and of itself. It can be taken either as the hypocrisy of the church or else his own evil and corrupt nature of gaining control but, nevertheless, here again is the hypocrisy of Christianity. There is nothing in this book from beginning to end that in anyway portrays Christianity except as hypocritical, as a failure, and I haven't read all the examples by any means. But that's all. There's only ways to pray.[?] I asked the teachers at the board meeting—that first board meeting we had meeting with the teachers and on the adoption committee who selected these books—to find a book for me out of this Man series [Added Note: McDougal Littel & Co.] that was something that was patriotic because I said they were were anti-American and against patriotism and so I requested that one of the teachers find something. (8:09) One of the teachers got up and walked over and picked up a whole stack of the books and started flipping through them. Finally, she pulled out this one: “War and Peace” and she used this as an example of a patriotic book. It seems to me that night that one of the . . . she didn't read anything, of course. She read a few titles and one of the titles she called, I'm almost certain , “Speaking the Hero” because it sounds very patriotic and I almost fear of saying it but I won't say for sure that she did . . . but, anyway, here's “Speaking the Hero” from this patriotic book:

Speaking: The Hero
I did not want to go.
They inducted me.
I did not want to die.
They called me yellow.
I tried to run away.
They courtmartialed me.
I did not shoot.
They said I had no guts.
*[They ordered the attack.
They strapped a shrapnel
tore my gut ]
I cried in pain.
They carried me to safety.
In safety I died.
They blew taps over me.
They crossed out my name
And buried me under a cross.
They made a speech in my home town.
I was unable to call them liars.
They said I gave my life.
I had struggled to keep it.
They said I set an example
I had tried to run.
They said they were proud of me.
I had been ashamed of them.
They said my mother should be proud.
My mother cried.
I wanted to live.
They called me a coward.
I died a coward.
They called me a hero.

Added Note:

“Speaking: The Hero” by Felix Pollak
Alice Moore included the three lines designated by the * and brackets. However, those three lines are not found in the link below or in other copies of this poem that I found.
http://2013victory.blogspot.com/2013/05/give-back-peace.html

"Speaking: The Hero" has frequently been cited as a forceful example of Vietnam war protest poetry, though it was written in response to the Nazi concentration camps and the bombing of Hiroshima.” (Wisconsin Literary Map web site) https://www.wisconsinlitmap.com/felix-pollak.html

There's another poem in here that I don't have to turn to. I've memorized it already. Mr. Fike* mentioned this one just recently. It's “Bomb.” This one is to be read aloud. The

book specifies to be read aloud. “Bomb, A bomb B, bomb C, bomb d, bomb e . . . , if you want to hear the rest of it. Anyway, it ends, “bomb Z.” That's it. That's the whole point. Everything in here. There's a lot, as Mr. Fike pointed out in his article, about who may have said ____[?]. Everything in here, just about, is on the horrors of War—never indicating that a war might be justified, that a war might be fought for a good cause, that some-thing might be worth fighting for, or worth saving.

Added Note: “Poem To Be Read Aloud” is the “Bomb” poem Mrs. Moore just read. It is by Henri Chopin. This was found in the Man: In the Poetic Mode Book #4, page 85, McDougal, Littell & Company, 1970
You can read more about Chopin here:
“Why I Am The Autor of Sound Poetry and Free Poetry” by Henri Chopin https://my-blackout.com/2018/09/14/henri-chopin/

* Elmer Fike:

A non-preacher leader of the protesters was the late Elmer Fike who owned a local chemical company. Mr. Fike had the education and position in society to set him apart from the average protester. The Heritage Foundation was invited to come and survey the Kanawha County situation by Elmer Fike who owned Fike Chemical, a small chemical plant in Nitro, West Virginia. He helped found the Business and Professional People’s Alliance for Better Textbooks.

Now here's another patriotic piece:

“DOOLEY IS A TRAITOR”
'So then you won't fight?'
'Yes, your Honour,' I said, 'that's right.'
'Now is it that you simply aren't willing,
Or have you a fundamental and moral objection to killing?'
Says the judge, blowing his nose
(10:02) And making his words stand to attention in long rows.
I stand to attention, too, but with half a grin
(In my time I've done a good many in).
'No objection at all, sir,' I said.
'There's a deal of the world I'd rather see dead—
Such as Johnny Stubbs or Fred Settle or my last landlord, Mr Syme.
Give me a gun and your blessing, your Honour, and I'll be killing them all the time.

And he also goes on to say that he could kill this Honorable judge sitting here if he had anything against him a lot easier than he could these little brown people that he's supposed to go off and shoot and he has nothing against these people and it goes on then on the next page to refer to war as Christian murder and then there's a poem in here that makes reference again to Christ and it says that Christ said that when one sheep was lost the rest didn't mean anything anymore. Now that's the typical way that they represent Christianity.

Added Note: “Dooley is a Traitor” appears in the McDougal Littel Man series #4 Drama textbook pages 71-73
“Dooley is a Traitor,” by James Michie
https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=105794

Now let's see I had one of them. Let's see. All right now, this is about the flag and I want you to listen—talk about respect for the flag—I want you to listen how they—this is a fourth-grade book [Note: The Man series used numbers that did not correlate with the respective grade levels. Series #4 was intended for 10 th-12 th grade students.] This would be 10th grade—10th grade—okay, talking about symbols. What about the flag? What about flags? Are they pieces of cloth that you can buy for almost any price you care to spend or are they the country they symbolize? If a flag falls down in the street and somebody tramples on it, is it a piece of cloth that got dirty, perhaps hopelessly, so that it's ruined and you'll have to spend money to replace it like a sugar bowl, or is it a vital blow to the country it stands for? Obviously, it's not a vital blow to the country it stands for. Does it matter whether the trampling was deliberate or accidental? Would you risk your life to save a flag? If you think they're suggesting that you should, return to the teacher's manual and see what the teacher's manual says. The teacher's manual says: There's a picture here—a painting of a flag on a wall in this book, a school page. The teacher's manual says pretend that this flag was just painted on a wall and someone told you that they were going to wash it off. How would you feel? What would you do? Does it make a difference as to what the flag is made of? Well, you're not going to go out and fight if someone paints a picture of a flag on the wall and want to wash it (12:04) off, are you? Are you going to fight if someone must burn one in the streets? We have a lot of burning flags in the streets. Now that's the kind of respect they teach for our country for the symbol that represents our country. It's not worth fighting for.

Parents don't punish their children as often or as severely as they once did, but not so long ago the punishment for saying quote “dirty words” unquote, then, of course they don't believe words are dirty, so they have to put them in quotation marks, for quote “having a dirty mouth” unquote, was to wash that dirty mouth with soap. And if, by any chance, that remedy really works, please go promptly to the nearest supermarket, buy a good whisk broom and brush the cobwebs from your mind. Well, your mind is full of words and words are the commonest symbols of all the most misleading, the most often confused with the things they symbolize. There's one little short page in the Man series about dirty words and about a dirty word being locked up in a closet and how vicious it is and all because it's locked up and it's not used and then when the child grows up into a man and finally the child dies, then the Dirty Word dies and it was . . . Anyway, the idea is that it's not threatening and it's not dangerous, it's just that you're locking it up and trying to avoid it.

This particular series of books, there's one 7 th through the 12 th grade, and they point out in here that there are many dialects. English, by the way, Standard English—proper speaking of English—which we think we send our children to school to learn is a dialect and children are to learn to speak so-called Standard English as a second dialect. But, anyway, they want to use an example in here of informal language. Now there are a lot of examples we could use of informal language if that's all we wanted in the textbook, but I want you to listen to the example they use. Here's the first one: Here's a 24-year-old who sounds like a drop-out of some sort. I'm not going to read all of it. I'm going to read the first paragraph, pick up the first sentence and the rest of the (14:01) paragraphs and then read the last paragraph and that will cover it pretty well. I don't notice the world. I'm very bored. I really don't know how I feel. I'm nice and cordial to people says something about me. I don't know maybe they don't. I don't like them. Maybe I feel I’m above them. I can't think of anyone I love or respect. I can't be bothered with the news. I just can't get interested. I can't care less. I should care. It's terrible. And she laughs. Vietnam, isn't that a shame? My interest in life is me. I hope I'll make it. I'm not too crazy about children. I'm worried about the next couple of years. Nothing touches me. If I were God, I'd make a world with lots of me in it. Then she says, I love my building. I just love it. If I'm on a bus going to my mother's, I look at these people and I get a nauseous feeling on Michigan Avenue. I respect them more. Home gives me a sick feeling. It's a shame Negroes don't like me and children don't like me and dogs don't run up to me. Now, the next example: These are simply examples of informal speech. There's, in the teacher's manual, there's no real discussion of views about the speaker and what the speakers say. They just, these are to try to identify the age of the speaker. I guess you can tell something about him by the way he speaks.

Okay. I'm gonna read this one this whole thing to you:

Why should I worry about the world? I figure it this way, who's going to take care of you? Nobody. And you figure these people who don't want to take care of you and you ain't got no education, what are you going to do? I wasn't learning nothing in this school, nothing at all, just sit back, watch the teacher say something and whatnot. He never asked me to say anything. He never told me to do nothing. Just as soon as the bell rings, go to another class. That was it. I even asked one teacher what's this? You know and he wouldn't even answer me. It was a drag. What are you going to do? You're going to be walking the street so I figured like this: if I can't make money the right way, I'm sure going to make it the wrong way. I'll be living in jail half ____ [?]. That's my next home. Oh, that's my home. That's my next home because look it, if I pull a job, I have it real nice you know. If I get away with it. If I (16:02) don't get away with it, I'm in jail. What can I do in the street? I don't want to be walking the street because you walk the streets you see these young guys like they're going to go bum hunting. They just might grab you one of these days and beat you up, so I figure like this: Why walk the street and look for your dimes and nickels and pennies on the sidewalk when you can be robbin’ and if you rob and get away with it you're lucky, but you can't be robbing all your life and then don't get caught, so you figure like this, you're going to spend a couple of times in jail, but you ain't got no education, so that's it. It don't bother me because I don't really care about the world and the world don't care about me.

Now that's their example of informal speech. The others—and there are several other examples—for the most part, they're depressive, they're this type of thing, not as bad as those first two.

There are pictures of doors with each one. The doors don't necessarily relate in any way to the picture, but they're just doors that are damaged in need of repair. One looks like it has got holes knocked in it, weeds growing up around it. Another one looks like it has blood stains on it. These books are filled with pictures that you can't—they're just weird looking pictures. They don't make sense except you use your imagination on them and you can get kind of some pretty wild ideas of your imagination, sometimes, what these pictures have. But they're full of just far out, weird looking pictures. Speaking of patriotism, they have in this book a full-page picture here that looks something like a billboard. There's a couple of pictures there—maybe one interposed on the other. There's a bread line or people standing in line—apparently a bread line, um, maybe waiting for food. They've got buckets and sacks and so forth. There's a family in a car and it's a billboard or something in the background there. And then it says, WORLD'S HIGH STANDARD OF LIVING, THERE'S NO WAY LIKE THE AMERICAN WAY. This picture is used to illustrate this (18:00) particular chapter which is the euphemism telling it like it isn't. Now telling it like it isn't is that there's no way like the American way and that we have WORLD’S HIGH STANDARD OF LIVING and they call that a euphemism, telling it like it isn't. They also say that this is a book—I’ll get to that in a minute.

All right, here's a chapter on the language of white racism and this one begins: Whereas many blacks have demonstrated an increased sensitivity to language and awareness of the impact of words and phrases upon both black and white listeners, the whites of this nation have demonstrated little sensitivity to the language of racial strife. Then, the very next sentence begins with Whitey. “Whitey has for too long been speaking and writing in terminology, which often being offensive to the black space, hostility and suspicion breaks down communication.” Well, there's truth in this to some extent. Black people do offend Black people. Black people offend white people sometime. I don't think we need to be emphasizing this in a textbook, but it's certainly not true that all white people set out to offend black people. It's certainly not true that all white people are insensitive and unaware of racial terminology. And then for to have a chapter on the language of white racism and then this in this chapter to refer to white people as Whitey, it's not in quotation marks or italics or anything else. It's just part of the typing or the regular set print. About two or three times they refer to white people as Whitey. In here they quote Eldridge Cleaver in some of his writings and Eldridge Cleaver was a rapist convicted of rape, several rapes, numerous rapes that he was guilty of by his own admission. He was a high-ranking officer in the Black Panthers which called for the violent overthrow of our government. I don't know if they still exist or to what extent. After Robert Kennedy was killed, the Black Panthers produced a picture of a dead pig or (20:00) Robert Kennedy repre-sented as a dead pig. Now this is the kind of man that they put in these books and I have an example of some of his writing that is just pure filth—something I can't read it and if there's a man who wants to volunteer to read it, fine, I can't read this. His writings in this particular book are just so filthy.

Then they have another chapter here on the rapping[?] in the black ghetto. Now, WCHS [Note: Charleston, WV radio and television station] made the remark that I said these books are sympathetic to blacks and unsympathetic twice. I have never said that. I didn't say that. I don't think they're sympathetic to blacks. I think they're insulting to blacks. I think they are intended to demean and put down black children and make them feel inferior because I think they intend to make them feel put down and incapable of getting out of an unfair or downtrodden situation and, as a result, feel rebellious and feel hatred toward white people. Now these books are not sympathetic to Blacks at all. They are demeaning and cheapening to them, and then so many of them hit on this hatred hatred hatred of all white people and of America, of Western Civilization. But anyway, here's one:

This is rapping in the black ghetto. So they use examples of terms such as shucking [Added Note: to deceive or lie to] and running it down. For shucking, here’s what they use for an example of shucking. Now this has no comment from one side or the other to suggest any disfavor to this, but this is what they say: Some field illustrations of shucking to get out of trouble came from some seventh-grade children from an inner city school in Chicago. The children were asked, I'd say presumably, by their teachers in the class-room since the children were in school in Chicago. The children were asked to talk their way out of a troublesome situation. Here are the situations they were given:

You are cursing at this old man and your mother comes walking down the stairs. She hears you. To talk your way out of this. (22:00) I'd tell her that I was studying a scene in school for a play. What if you were in a store stealing something and the manager caught you? I would start stuttering then I would say oh, oh I forgot here the money is. Then, as an example of running it down, Edith is a saved broad who can't marry out of her religion or do anything else out of her religion for that matter especially what I wanted her to do. A vogue[?] religion man, so dig, for the last couple of weeks I've been quoting the good book and all that stuff to her, telling her I'm now saved myself, you dig? Now here they give an example of cop a plea or means to plead for mercy. Here's the example they give: Please cop, don't hit me, I give. Every time policemen are often mentioned in these books, too, I have never yet seen a policeman mentioned in a respectful way in any of these books I have up here including this basic English text series in which some boy refers to police as a stupid cop behind his back. He acts respectful to his face. When the policeman turns his back and walks away, the boy says stupid cop. I haven't seen a policeman in a single one of these books represented in any way but the most disparaging manner. So, okay, the night before my hearing I decided to make a prayer. It had to be on my knees because if I was going to cop a plea to God, I couldn't play it cheap.

Here's the verbal contest examples of verbal contest in which the players strive to bury one another. Let's see, in the play, the opponent's mother is especially slandered. Then, in turn, fathers are identified as queer syphilic, sisters are whores, brothers are defec-tive, cousins are funny, and the opponent himself is diseased.

Additional Note: “the unexpurgated folk songs of men” . . . an informal song-swapping session with a group of Texans, New Yorkers, and Englishmen exchanging bawdy songs and lore, presented without expurgation . . . COLLECTED BY MACK McCORMICK (See page 14 of this document for the references to queer syphilics, etc.) https://sundayblues.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Unexpurgated.pdf

Now, here's the book I was talking about. I got this one yesterday. I've had some of these. This is from the series called Interaction. Anyway, there's about a hundred or more, maybe 150 or even 200, of these books in all different sizes like this. (24:02)

There's some, this one's also from the Interaction series. This is non-graded. It would be used if it—now they have numbers on the front, but I asked about this and I was told they were non-graded. It's to be used at the teacher's discretion for her students from 7th through the 12th grade. This one I picked up yesterday. There's an article in here—second article in here is by Eldridge Cleaver. Now this is the one that is just so—the terminology they use that he uses, it's utterly filthy. It's so explicit. It's about sexual intercourse and I won't read this one but you're welcome to see it later. Now, the next story in here is by Germaine Greer and it's The Female Eunuch. In this one she urges that women should refuse to marry and refuse legal marriage. They should refuse to tie themselves with this horrible bondage of marriage. If she says, “what does the average girl marry for?” The answer will probably be made for love. Love can exist outside of marriage. Indeed! For a long time, it was supposed that it always did. Love can take many forms. Why must it always, why must it be exclusive? Then, if a woman marries because she wants to have children, she might reflect that the average family has not proved to be a very good breeding ground for children and seeing as the world is in no urgent need of her increase she might do better for contraception. It is very possible to wait until some suitable kind of household presents itself and she suggests then that the average home is not a fit place for the rearing of children. Anyway, her idea is that she should go ahead and live with whomever she pleases but just not bother to marry and get herself all tied up legally. It's very disparaging toward the role of mother. It's very disparaging toward all men and then in the middle of it here in large black letters are in black bold print—they had this little insert here—“All that is good and commendable now existing would continue to exist if all (26:00) marriage laws were repealed tomorrow. I have an inalienable constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can, to change that love every day, if I please!” That's quite a long article.

Added Note: The quote, “All that is good and commendable now existing,” is attributed to Victoria Woodhull in 1871. She was the first woman to run for President of the United States.
More information on Woodhull: https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/victoria-woodhull
https://www.woodhullfoundation.org/about-us/who-was-victoria-woodhull/

Also: Take some time to peruse the Woodhull Foundation website:
https://www.woodhullfoundation.org/

This is the description of The Female Eunuch on Amazon: “Like a woman, this book gets better with age. Greer’s punchy prose and all-too-true observations motivate you to go out and do something to liberate yourself-and other women.” — Leora Tanenbaum, author of Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation

A ground-breaking, worldwide bestselling study of women’s oppression that is at once an important social commentary, a passionately argued masterpiece of polemic, and a feminist classic.

The publication of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch in 1970 was a landmark event, raising eyebrows and ire while creating a shock wave of recognition in women around the world with its steadfast assertion that sexual liberation is the key to women's liberation. Today, Greer's searing examination of the oppression of women in contemporary society is both an important historical record of where we've been and a shockingly relevant treatise on what still remains to be achieved. https://www.amazon.com/Female-Eunuch-Germaine-Greer/dp/006157953X

The next one in here is by Sigmund Freud and this one is “Character and Anal Eroticism.” This is another one I couldn't possibly read and that shouldn’t be for children from 7th through 12th grade . . . the teacher’s discretion.

I'm going to read this one and I don't think they're . . . all right, I'm gonna . . . This is one, it's called:

At Lunchtime a Story of Love
When the busstopped suddenly to avoid
damaging a mother and child in the road, the
younglady in the greenhat sitting opposite
was thrown across me,
and not being one to miss an opportunity
I started to makelove
with all my body.
At first, she resisted saying that it
was tooearly in the morning and too soon
after breakfast and that anyway she found
me repulsive. But when I explained that
this being a nuclearage, the world was going
to end at lunchtime, she tookoff her
greenhat, put her bus ticket into her pocket
and joined in the exercise.
The buspeople, and therewere many of
them, were shockedandsurprised, and amused-
andannoyed, but when the word got around
that the world was coming to an end at lunchtime,
they put their pride in their pockets
with their bustickets and madelove one with the other.
And even the busconductor, being over[?]
climbed into the cab and struck up
some sort of relationship with the driver.

Thatnight, on the bus coming home,
wewere all alittle embarrassed, especially me
and the younglady in the green hat, and we
started to say in different ways howhasty
and foolish we had been. Butthen, always
having been a bitofalad, i stood up and
said it was a pity that the world didn’t nearly
end every lunchtime, and that we could always
pretend. And then it happened…

Quick asa flash we had all changed partners,
and soon the bus was aquiver with white
mothball bodies doing naughty things.

And the next day
and everyday
In everybus
In everystreet
In everytown
In everycountry

People pretended that the world was coming
to an end at lunchtime.
It still (28:05) hasn’t.
Although in a way it has .

Now that's the whole thing. I have omitted nothing, so I surely haven't pulled it out of context. Anyway, how do you take something like that out of any kind of context?

Added Note: You can find the poem, “At Lunchtime: A Story of Love by Roger McGough here: https://www.oatridge.co.uk/poems/r/story-of-love-roger-mcgough-at-lunchtime.php
McGough connects many of the words in the poem without spacing between them. For example, “shockedandsurprised.”

A YouTube video of “At Lunchtime: A Story of Love” can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGOjTtV4wFE

Now here's an example of the kind of poetry we're going to introduce our children to:

YEAHH I DIG

You’re suppose to be hip
Yeah I know
when you see a black cat with a fay chick

Yeah I dig
you’re suppose to be avant garde
Yeah I know
when LeRoi/Rap/Stokely/blow truth

You dont find them too hard
Yeah I dig
Yeah I dig
some of your BEST friends are ‘Negroes’
you entertain them at your parties until the last white guest goes
Yeah I dig
you were in the Civil Rights bag long long time down south ago
Yeah I dig
you know all about spades and you want to help them so
Yeah I dig
Yeah I dig
but what I don’t dig
is why do you refuse and frown
when I tell you to take up a gun like your own white John Brown
or why do you get uptight or copout funny
when ever I mention giving me some money??
Yeah I dig
Yeah I really do dig!!
So that was just suggesting they take the whites take up a gun and join with the Revolutionary blacks.

Additional Notes: “YEAH I DIG,” is a poem penned by Ted Joans in his book, Black POW-WOW, 1969
"Jazz is my religion, and surrealism is my point of view." (Ted Joans)
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780809000937/blackpowwow

This one is Black Voices. This is . . . I just lost a page. Yeah, here it is. This one is one of just a number of novels, a box full of novels. Some of them are fine. Christy is in there and there's one I recall because I have ___[?]. There's a lot of them that are fine, but so often these books, or I have found a truth, that when they are, supposedly the black literature, they omit people like Roy Wilkins who are the more moderate, the people who are really working for a peaceful solution to racial problems and this type of thing. And they, of course, go to the radicals and the extremists and the haters. But anyway, here's a poem:

The Ballad of Joe Meek

(30:03) Strolling down Claiborne
In the wrong end of town
Joe saw two policemen
Knock a po' Gal down.

He didn't know her at all,
Never saw her befo'
But that didn't make no difference,
To my ole boy Joe.

Walks up to the cops,
And, very polite,
Ast them ef they thought
They had done just right.

One cracked him with his billy
Above the left eye,
One thugged him with his pistol
And left him lie.

3
When he woke up, and knew
What the cops had done,
Went to a hockshop,
Got hisself a gun.

Felt mo' out of sorts
Than ever befo',
So he went on a rampage
My ole boy Joe.

Fo' I die?"

"Won't be here much longer
To bother you so,
Would you bring me a drink of water,
Fo' I go?"

The very last words
He was heard to say,
Showed a different Joe talking
In a different way.

"Ef my bullets weren't gone,
An' my strength all spent-
I'd send (32:03 ) the chief something
With a compliment."

"And we'd race to hell,
And I'd best him there,
Like I would of done here
Ef he'd played me fair."

Added Note: The entire poem, “The Ballad of Joe Meek,” by Sterling A. Brown, can be found here: https://allpoetry.com/The-Ballad-Of-Joe-Meek
“The Ballad of Joe Meek” was part of the book, Black Voices: An Anthology of African-American Literature, September 1968

Now this book is full of stuff like that from beginning to end. Here's a poem on Booker T Washington, a man who is worthy of admiration and respect and it's about Booker T.

Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois and, of course, Booker T is ridiculed, put down,

disparaged, and I won't read this . . . It's quite long and you're welcome to read it, but he is ridiculed and disparaged and put down, but W.E.B. Du Bois is, of course, the hero and W.E.B. Du Bois was, certainly, of a very leftist political philosophy, but they even, they tear down the black heroes with many of them ____[?].

Here's something that's in a description of America:

These streets stretch from one end of America to the other, connect like a maze from which very few can fully escape. Despair sits on this country in most places like a charm, but there is a special gray death that loiters in the streets of the urban Negro slum.

I don't know if you think despair sits on this country in most places like a charm, but I don't:

. . . the fear, frustration, and hatred that Negroes have always been heir to in America. It is just that in the cities which were once the black man's twentieth century “Jordan,” promise is a dying bitch with rotting eyes.

And then it goes on to say:

But It's hard enough to be a human being under any circumstances, but when there's an entire civilization determined to stop you from being one, things get a little more desperately complicated. What can you do then?

You can stand in doorways late nights and hit people in the head.

And then it goes on, [Added Note: Alice Moore paraphrases this as, “you can go to church on Sunday or you can stick a needle in your arms.”] Jones continues with this:

You can go to church Saturday nights and Sundays and three or four times during the week. You can stick a needle in your arm four or five times a day, and bolster the economy. . . .

Added Note: The above passages, beginning with “These streets,” were taken from the 1966 book, Home: Social Essays, written by Le Roi Jones, also known as Amiri Baraka.

The story, “Cold, Hurt, and Sorrow: Streets of Despair,” by LeRoi Jones is found in the McDougal Littell & Company’s Man in the Expository Mode Book #4, pages 109-111.

You can read more about Le Roi Jones/Amiri Baraka here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/amiri-baraka or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiri_Baraka

It just gets very depressive. Every time they represent black people in these books they always represent them as living in the slums. They are the failures in life. There's a middle-class black society. There are successful black people. Why aren't any of (34:00) these people held up for adoration to these children? It's because they don't want them to have people to admire. They want them to feel put down and abused and mistreated so they will turn to the Eldridge Cleavers, the Malcolm X’s and the others that hate whites and call for the end and destruction of all white civilization or all Western Civilization.

Additional Note: The first story in the Man in the Expository Mode series #4 book, pages 1-15, published by McDougal Littell & Co. 1970 is written by Malcolm X. The last paragraph reads: “All praise is due to Allah that I went to Boston when I did. If I hadn’t, I’d probably still be a brainwashed black Christian.”

Now, this one. Again. this is African images. This is by McGraw-Hill. It's another set of, you know, just novels and such. And here, they say, and this from beginning to end, there’s a big, long story in here on professed Christianity where they point out all the farces of the preachers and the only sin, the only sin that the preacher really recognizes, is the sin of sex and some of them don't take that too seriously. They preach it for other people. African infatuation with the West became less enthusiastic and more reasoned as Western ideals steadily reveal themselves to Black intellectuals like Sédar Senghor of Saint Senegal as being bankrupt and self-serving and hypocritical. Senghor was influenced by the existentialists in France, by Marxism, by European surrealists, who were also deeply disillusioned by European values, but most of all Senghor was influenced by black intellectuals in America who never really wholly accepted Western ethics because of their routine acquaintance with them. It goes on to say, then, in the United States . . . well, it mentions the names of some of these things I can't read . . . it's a French name, Leon Davis and Claude Mckay were among the most articulate of these critics in the United States. Black people struggled from the very beginning against white domination and the most persuasive and potent movement was the Black Power movement which furiously exploded American bigotry, a movement which resulted in such independent minded groups as the Black Panthers and the black Muslims.

And then there's a poem that follows this immediately:

And now we got a revolution
'Cause I see the face of things to come
Yeah, your Constitution
Well, my (36:00) friend, it's gonna have to bend
I'm here to tell you 'bout destruction
Of all the evil that will have to end

Some folks are gonna get the notion
I know, they'll say I'm preachin' hate
But if I have to swim the ocean
Well, I would just to communicate
It's not as simple as talkin' jive
The daily struggle just to stay alive

Sing about a revolution
Because I'm talkin' 'bout a change
It's more than just air pollution
Well, you know you got to clean your brain
The only way that we can stand, in fact
Is when you get your foot off our back

Additional Notes: The “Revolution” song was written by songwriters Nina Simone and Weldon Irvine. “Revolution” was written in response to the Beatles' famous song by the same name, released a year earlier. The lyrics of Simone’s song respond to the themes of the Beatles'. Simone expresses the urgency of the civil rights movement and the necessity of change in contrast to the Beatles' critique of the many social movements in 1960s U.S.
https://genius.com/Nina-simone-revolution-lyrics

Now, I'm not suggesting for a moment that black people have not been mistreated and abused in many ways and there have been things to correct, but they're not the only race that's been mistreated and abused. They're not the only people that have ever come to this country that have had to face prejudice. Other people have had to do it. But at this time, I know of no country on Earth that has tried harder to correct if any abuse or any mistreatment of a minority race in this country has done. I know of no country that bends over backwards or goes farther in trying to be fair to a minority people than this country has and if there's anything we don't need to do in school is to constantly emphasize racial hatred and racism at all. Why in the world we have to, in class, constantly emphasize to these children, you are black, you are white, and constantly hit on the differences and make them so conscious of this racism? I think racial pride should come from home and I don't think it's the job of the schools to be instilling racial pride. I think their schools ought to teach these children to have national pride, be proud of being Americans and appreciate it. This goes for about three pages. It's paragraphs here interspersed with poem:

We went to an employment office
Got a number an I got in line
They called everybody's number
But they never did call mine

They said, "if you was white, should be all right"
"If you was brown, stick around"
"But as you black, oh brother, get back get back get back"

Additional Notes: The above lyrics are from “Black, Brown and White” sung by Big Bill Broonzy (William Lee Conley Broonzy). https://www.songfacts.com/lyrics/big-bill-broonzy/black-brown-and-white

Now, then they have a paragraph. They intersperse this poem (38:00) with paragraphs like this:

A negro lay a block east on Broadway, with his face beaten in. He was not dead. An ambulance, driven by white men, dashed up.

“If you pick up that skunk we'll kill you, too,” cried the crowd.

I've got a wife and four children at home said the white-faced ambulance man as he climbed back on the wagon.

When the fire had eaten its way that far the body was tossed into the flames. Two blocks further east lay a negro who had been beaten until he was dying. “Let's string him up,” shouted a man.

A rope was brought and the dying black in a moment was dangling from a pole. Several “good measure” shots were fired into his body and the crowd went further on.

Additional Notes: The above paragraphs appeared in “The Crisis,” Vol. 14, No. 5. (September, 1917), page 222, second column. The article is titled: “The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People: The Massacre of East St. Louis.” The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People . . . sent Martha Gruening and W. E. Burghardt Du Bois to East St. Louis, as special investigators of the recent outrages. These two collected in person the facts and pictures from which this article is compiled.
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/workers/civil-rights/crisis/0900-crisis-v14n05-w083.pdf

Me and a man was workin' side by side
This is what it meant
They was paying him a dollar an hour
And they was paying me fifty cent

They said, "if you was white, should be all right"
"If you was brown, stick around"
"But as you black, oh brother, get back, get back, get back"

Additional notes: The above lyrics are from “Black, Brown and White” and sung by Big Bill Broonzy (William Lee Conley Broonzy). https://www.songfacts.com/lyrics/big-bill-broonzy/black-brown-and-white

One girl was standing at a window of a white woman's house in which she worked.
Her arm was shot away. A policeman and a soldier, she said, did the shooting . . .
An old woman, frightfully burned, dying in the hospital, was asked if the mob had
done it and replied: 'No, they jes' set fire to my house and I burned myself trying to
get out' . . . About 10 blocks of Negro homes were burned, and the mobs stood outside and shot and stoned those who tried to escape . . . The mob seized a colored woman's baby and threw it into the fire. The woman was then shot and thrown in.

Additional Notes: The above paragraphs appeared in “The Crisis,” Vol. 14, No. 5. (September, 1917), page 226, second column. The article is titled: “The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People: The Massacre of East St. Louis.” The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People . . . sent Martha Gruening and W. E. Burghardt Du Bois to East St. Louis, as special investigators of the recent outrages. These two collected in person the facts and pictures from which this article is compiled.
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/workers/civil-rights/crisis/0900-crisis-v14n05-w083.pdf

And how any black child could read that and not hate white people, I don't know. I think they're intended to. I think they're intended to read it and feel full of hate. This is followed up then by a poem that says:

Brought here in slave ships and pitched overboard.
Love your enemy.
Language taken away, culture taken away.
Love your enemy.
Work from sun up to sun down
Love your enemy.
Work for no pay
Love your enemy.
Last hired, first fired
Love your enemy.
Rape your mother
Love your enemy.
Lynch your father
Love your enemy.
Bomb your churches
Love your enemy.
Kill your children
Love your enemy.

It goes on for several more about four or five inches there, and then it says:

Love.
Love.
Love.
Love.
Love.
Love, for everybody else.
But when will we love ourselves?

Additional Notes: “Love Your Enemy,” by Yusef Iman
This poem is included in a 2003 “The English Teacher: An International Journal.” This is a lesson plan for students revolving around this “Love Your Enemy” poem.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Christine-Manara/publication/234644964_Love_Your_Enemy_Exploiting_a_Poem/links/59c9a9e6aca272bb0503db73/Love-Your-Enemy-Exploiting-a-Poem.pdf

And then it goes on with the, “I who sang the French Fist” and so forth. It just goes on and on and on with this idea of Revolution and what's to come. (40:00) Here's another tablet[?]

. . .Here's another example of Americanism. This is a . . . Students were told to act out for a play. They were to rehearse acting out. They were to say the Pledge of Allegiance acting out any character they wanted to use, saying the Pledge of Allegiance. Now they said that many played as young children who were made to recite the Pledge of Allegiance before school. This is Scholastic journalism. It would be 10 th, 12 th, 11 th and 12th grade. All right, many of them acted as young children who were made to recite the Pledge of Allegiance before school. When the actor finished, the director called the name of another character. The actor repeated the Pledge, this time using the actions and intonations the new character would have. After this process was repeated the actor had to say the Pledge continuously interchanging characters when the director called for it. On the second day a girl whose own character was a witch started out the Pledge. This part of the exercise, this place. I Pledge and she screeches out with a long screech “Allegiance” but then she laughed with witch's gestures ha ha ha to the flag. The director shouts, “Viet Cong woman,” then she drops to the floor rocking her body back and forth, wrapping her body with her arms and pronouncing each word with hatred—the United States of America. It goes on, then they sing America the Beautiful in any style they chose and presumably they used these same character styles when they did that.

All right, and I want to hurry through these as fast as I can. Here's a poem on Playboy. It has a big picture here of Marilyn Monroe next to it, right here, and this boy is a stockroom boy looking at a Playboy magazine:

What so engrosses him? The wild decor
Of this pink-papered alcove into which
A naked girl has stumbled, with its rich
Welter of pelts and pillows on the floor,

(Alice Moore’s commentary): It ends then, this poem in which he’s looking at this picture, ends I say, and how the cunning picture holds her still . . . Did I say that he’s looking at the centerfold in Playboy?

(Alice Moore skips the next 3 stanzas and reads the final one):
And how the cunning picture holds her still
At just that smiling instant when her soul,
Grown faintly (42:03) sweet, and swept beyond control,
Consents to his inexorable will.

Additional Notes: This poem is “Playboy”, by Richard Wilbur.
https://www.ronnowpoetry.com/contents/wilbur/Playboy.html

Here's a poem: My sister leans over an apple basket all day and shouts her two-bit selling line. On the corner, my father and mother are singing tough tunes in my ear and, someday, my whole profanity[?] family will create a pigeon-toed steel line.

Oh, here's what they have to say about middle-class life: Often they're the middle class. You know you're trapped in the middle class. You can't get out of it. You're just here, they say:

There’s no way out.
You were born to waste your life.
You were born to this middleclass life
As others before you
Were born to walk in procession
To the temple, singing.

Additional Notes: “In the Suburbs,” by Louis Simpson https://bashosroad.outlawpoetry.com/louis-simpson-in-the-suburbs/louis-simpson/haiku/

That's just one on the middle-class line. This one says[?] all people in Chicago are brutal, vicious, hard, because the Democratic convention. This is about the Democratic Con-vention that was there. Mayor Daley is referred to as a pig. The police are referred to as a pig, and the people look upon the dead pig as their brother in Heaven. That's a police-man who was shot. Here's one, it's just:

Here's a story that is called “Chicken Hawk’s Dream,” and I won't take time to read it, but it begins just on a ridiculously oppressive, depressive, meaningless story about a boy who's a dope addict who goes to school, not because it's getting anything out of it, because he can bum off his parents and doesn't have to work and it ends on the same kind of note. It tells nothing. It has no plot. It just begins and it ends. There's nothing but this ridiculous story that our kids are supposed to waste their time.

Additional Notes: “Chicken Hawk’s Dream,” by Al Young, is found in the McDougal Little & Co Man in the Fictional Mode series #4, copyright 1970, pages 41-45

Here they talk about soft words that dull and deceive. The Communist country's mass murder is concealed under such euphemisms as purge and liquidation and undesirable elements. And they go on to tell about . . . When Russian troops invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia in August of 1968, Soviet papers and newscasts referred to this invasion as simply the August events, and, anyway, soft peddling what they had done, and then they take this and compare this immediately after Pearl Harbor was bombed, American citizens of Japanese ancestry were (44:00) confined in concentration camps conveniently referred to as relocation centers. This happened in the United States. That's all. They don't tell why these people were confined. They don't tell them that our government confined these people—one thing to protect them because people in this country were so angry and bitter over the bombing of Pearl Harbor that people of Japanese ancestry were endangered. There's a world of difference in what our government did in confining these people and what the Communists have done and their purges where they have killed literally millions of people up to estimated 20, 30, 40 million people.

Here's the kind of high-class material they want our children to read. This is called “A&P.” It's about a boy who works in an A&P store. He says he sees three girls come in in bikinis:

It was bright green and the seams on the bra were still sharp and her belly was still pretty pale, so I guess she just got it.(the suit)

. . . Stokesie's married with two babies chalked up to his fuselage already.

Women are just—anybody who is adult—is disparaged in this story. Women, their varicose vein legs and so forth:

Policy is what the kingpins want. What the others want is juvenile delinquency.

Additional Note: Alice Moore seems to combine two different passages here: “Then, he says, I uncrease the bill tenderly as you may imagine. She had taken a dollar bill out of the top of her bikini. Still with that prim look she lifts a folded dollar bill out of the hollow at the center of her nubbled pink top. The jar went heavy in my hand. Really, I thought it was so cute.”

These are the complete passages she is referring to:

I uncrease the bill, tenderly as you may imagine, it just having come from between the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known were there, and pass a half and a penny into her narrow pink palm, and nestle the herrings in a bag and twist its neck and hand it over, all the time thinking.

. . . Still with that prim look she lifts a folded dollar bill out of the hollow at the center of her nubbled pink top. The jar went heavy in my hand. Really, I thought that was so cute.

A&P by John Updike
https://littletonpublicschools.net/sites/default/files/HHS-2015-Eng-10%20Honors%20Summer%20reading_1.pdf

And then there's another one over here about a girl whose uncle steals her negligee and wears it around. And here's a suggestion . . . now this is the date and I suppose this is a teenage girl's attitude toward her mother is what it sounds like to me:

If she don't hurry up and let me out of here, keeps piling up stuff for me to do, I ain't gonna finish that ironing. She's got another think coming. Hey, you, what you mean talking about cleaning silver? It's eight o'clock now, (46:00) you fool. I'm leaving, got something interesting on my mind, don't mean night school.

This whole book I have marked from end to end. “A Song in the Front Yard” is about a girl who says she wants to go “where its rough and untended and hungry weed grows” in the backyard. “A girl gets sick of a rose.” Then she says, “My mother sneers, but I say it's fine. How they don't have to go in at quarter to nine.” She's talking about the children who live down the street and they get to do everything they want to. “My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae will grow up to be a bad woman. That George’ll be taken to jail soon or late (On account of last winter he sold our back gate). But I say it's fine. Honest I do. And I'd like to be a bad woman, too, And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace, And strut down the street with paint on my face.”

Additional Notes: “A Song in the Front Yard,” by Gwendolyn Brooks
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43310/a-song-in-the-front-yard

Did someone get me some water, please? Thank you.

There's another poem in here about a boy growing up in slums, and all he can think about is ripping the blouses off of women and running men down in a big Cadillac.

And this one just goes on and on . . . with the story about, a . . . Here's a poem on freedom, well it's quite an idea across. Freedom is not following:

Freedom is not following a river. Freedom is following a river, though, if you want to. It is deciding, now, by what happens now.

And if that sounds familiar to you, it’s Situational Ethics. It is knowing what[?] makes a difference:

Most of the world are living by creeds too odd, chancy, and habit-forming to be worth arguing about by reason.

They get this across all the time—the world's changing, new ideas are coming. We've got to accept all the changes. [Audience: What age is this?]: This one, this would be 10 through 12.

Additional Notes: “Freedom,” by William Stafford
https://wordsfortheyear.com/2018/07/04/freedom-by-william-stafford-repost/

Oh, I hate to go on and on—I’m afraid you all are getting tired, but I'm not even, I haven't even begun to touch and I've got to tell you about the elementary books! Again, they wanted an example of ghetto speaking to illustrate ghetto speaking and of all the examples they could have used, here's the one they pull out called (48:00) “Operation Javelin.” This is a story about how a bully can take over the class, get the class on his side to drive the teacher crazy because she just couldn't care less anymore about what happens, and then they take over with the little children and take advantage of them, take their money away from them, excuse me, threaten them, and so forth. Operation Javelin: I'm not going to read the black print which is telling you what this all means I'll just read the red:

The Tomcat begins with a stinging hit and sandbag and starts. Things are thrown. Strange noises come out of nowhere. Children are unresponsive. The Tomcat tells all his tadpoles that it's time for the chicken to come home to become an eagle and they had better trail[?] along because the sun is falling on its belly. The first step is to unzip the teacher so the Tomcat takes the long dive hoping to. She puts him in cold storage so he can then dress her in red dresses. He and his friends get bolder out flapper and scramble her daily. All morning they shoot her down with grease until finally she's ready for the big sleep. They continue the hard, deep kicks until they're sure she's frozen on the needle. The Tomcat then decides to ring the scene. Now his glasses are on his ashes have been hauled away. He sends hotcakes to some of the children demanding money. The rabbits know they will be erased unless they pay him. He tells them that he is a liberty looter—that's a good crook who will protect them because he carries a big twig five-finger discount. Stealing pays off. The cockroaches crow. Poor Tiny Tim! Her nerve ends are humming. Her fleas and bust heads have twisted the knob. The Tomcat doesn't have to waste any more hip bloods on her. After all, a cat can't tell a dog what to do. He'll just keep his shoelaces tied. Hail the stinking King!

Additional Notes: I cannot find “Operation Javelin,” so I have tried to transcribe this as Alice Moore read this. Forgive any inaccuracies; they are mine.

And it goes on then. Well, that's pretty much the dialogue of the story. But there are many examples we could use for ghetto English, unless we want to put something across more than just an example of a language, and they illustrate this with a picture of a little boy in here showing us—or a couple of little boys showing their muscles. And I'll ____[?] for a couple of teenage boys full of hatred and bitterness. These books, now this series and this series, we're not talking about literature books, now. These are not literature books; these are English texts. These are (50:00) supposedly teaching English and the thing they want to teach your child is that every dialect is of equal validity, that we won't have true equality, they say this in the teacher's manual—and a lot of these series disciplines—they say that we won't have true equality in this country until we recognize all dialects of being of equal validity. They intend for our children to learn with these books. . . . Let me point out I don't even think the teachers on the Textbook Committee read these books. I don't believe they could have picked them if they read them, but now they're in a position of having to defend them. It's unfortunate that that's what they're doing. I think. I don't believe they knew what they were picking. I don't think they read them. I think they listened to a sales talk, possibly, but I had rather think that they didn't know, than that they did this deliberately. But these books point out that in this one, that black ghetto children will pick up Standard English as a second dialect. We're not going to teach them to speak correct English. We're never going to suggest that there's a right way to speak and a wrong way to speak. We're going to teach them to speak standard English as a second dialect and middle-class children are going to learn a second dialect ghetto dialect and they'll learn to communicate in the second dialect and we won't have true equality until all dialects are of equal beliefs and they say that right here in this book.

Now, with regard to the teaching of English, . . . I also say it here. These books are extremely politically slanted. They never mention politics and politicians without doing it disparagingly. All politicians are crooks and, of course, if our political system is—if everyone who is in office and it seems right now—maybe a lot of them are—but, anyway, it seems if our whole system is that far gone, and we can't trust politicians, and we can't trust our system, and we can't trust a political system to, you know, to direct this country, then what else do we have? We can go to a dictatorship. That's all it leaves us, but they, every time they mention politicians, it's always (52:01) despairingly. They say in here that they have a whole chapter on Robert Wilson, John Birch Society, and they point out that the Birch Society makes a big issue and says you know Communists, there are Communists in this country, and we're in danger of being overthrown by Communism and so forth. They point out that there is no international communist conspiracy and we have nothing to fear from Communists, that this is just a farce.

Now, here they say on the teaching of English, and I wrote a letter to The Gazette and suggested if we were going to follow this approach to the teaching of English—and again, this is an English textbook—that I’d just as soon get rid of all English teachers, throw out the course, and not teach English anymore. That's what this book suggests and listen to what they say: It would be a good deal better if schools did not teach English as such but rather only how to use English in the study of History or Poetry or Economics. Then he goes on down here to say: I am well aware that most school masters today are doing much better with Jerry than they did with me. What was set theory in Mathematics more thing-a-ma-bobs and less rote learning. I hope they flatly[?] resist all attempts by ignorant taxpayers to push them back into the Little Red Schoolhouse, the utopia of ultra conservatives. So, they have.

Oh, here's a good example: The reason we don't get along with the Communists, they point out in here, are because we don't understand each other. That our differences, and it's not ideological differences, it's because we don't understand each other. If we understood each other, we'd get along better. If our language didn't handicap our thinking, if we weren't tied in and bound down by our language, if we could free ourselves from our language, we'd understand each other a lot better. They say here that there was a time once when, assuming the story is correct, I believe that it is, the surface moral is obvious, he says. Don't back down in confronting a bully. This is the moral of when Hitler marched over Munich, that they should not have backed down. Chamberlain shouldn't have backed down in confronting Hitler. Well, he says, moral is obvious. There was a time, but it was perfectly (54:03) right, so they don't back down confront-ing a bullet. He goes on with all of this, then this page, to say that there was such a time as this, but today in 1974, it's not 1968. The material I've been reading here and telling you that this comes from fourth 10th grade, or this is from, I don't know if I even told you this is grade level sixth grade, or eleventh grade. They use it in this series as non-graded material so it could fall into seventh grade, eighth grade, anywhere in there.

Additional Notes: I will try to explain her last two sentences. I am unsure if she is referring to the Man series of books that were published by McDougal Littell & Co. If she is, there were four different subjects—Man in the Fictional Mode, Man in the Dramatic Mode, Man in the Poetic Mode, and Man in the Expository Mode. Each of these subjects had six individual books. Each subject was given a number between 1 and 6, but the numbers did not refer to a specific grade level. For example, the #4 series was designated for 10 th-12 th graders.

Now this is the one thing. This particular book is the only book I have found in this whole series that deals with the black people above the ghetto level that takes any of them that in any way have been materially successful, the kind that would appear to be, somebody the children might look up to. The young people might admire, look up to, want to be like, and this says, and I know, I tell you, I think some of our strongest, some of the strongest objections would and will come from the Black community when they become acquainted with these books. We have a lot of black people in this county that are Christian people dedicated to Christian principles and I know they'd be appalled with some of this. But listen to this: On the whole, the tradition of the gentleman has ceased to have influence on either the manners or morals of the Negro community. In the Negro colleges, it is futile for teachers to exhort the students to behave like ladies and gentlemen. In the highest social circles, the tradition of the gentleman has become the source of amusement. Even when the term is used, it is quite devoid of meaning since it refers neither to manners nor morals. They go on over here to say that divorce and promiscuity are actually status symbols among the elite of the black community.

And where's the balance if I'm taking something out of context? None of these books. Never in any of these books have I ever, and I've read these books for I know well over 100 hours. I haven't found anything yet that holds up black people, successfully, in any way other than this one particular book. That's what they say about them. And I don't want you all to think for a minute that we're talking about supplementary books. Some of them. This is a basic series (56:04) and I don't want you to think for a minute that if we get rid of these supplementary books that we have taken care of the problem and everything goes okay. It is the worst problem we're going to have, it's going to come right out of this basic series, and the reason is is because it is not so blatant and so obvious. Our children will see those books and we'll see the the biasness in them, the anti-americanism in them, the racial hatred in them. These books are much more subtle in their approach. In this one they say that they take up the matter of language and I won't, I'm just going to refer to these things, and I'll show you . . . if you want to ask me about something specifically, if someone does, then I'll point these out to you. But they take up the matter of language and they say we are handicapped by our language. We're forced by our language to think in terms of good and bad, right and wrong, and black and white. And the world isn't in terms of good and bad, black and white, and right and wrong. The world is in shades of gray. The Chinese philosopher is someone they quote, points out that the Chinese language much more clearly tells what the world is really like because they see things in shades of gray. Now, I have always believed that I thought things were right and wrong, good and bad, black and white because I'm a Christian and because that's what the Bible teaches. The Bible is very outspoken on many things being bad and wrong and other things being good and right. That's the reason I think like that. It's not because my language forces me to, but this English book says we think like this because our language handicaps us and we need to free ourselves from this handicap, and the Chinese see the world more clearly.

There's another set of books I like, pretty well, fairly well-balanced books. I don't have any of them because I like them so there’s no point in bringing them. But these books where they use examples—Well, for instance, they talk about reliability. You know what and when can we trust something, when can we (58:02) depend on it, when do we know this is truthful? Now here are the examples they use: They use a news story from the Communist Party press. Soviet leaders announced today they are granting amnesty to several Soviet writers recently accused of counter-revolutionary propaganda. The teacher's manual says this is reliable. Then they say the source is biased, but it's informed. That's the reason it's reliable. Well, reliability is based more than upon information. It's based upon the soundness and the truthfulness of the witness and I wouldn't call anything that comes out of the Communist Party press reliable information, but they say it's reliable. Joe Hansen or John Hanson, Hollywood screen idol, strongly denounced a guaranteed annual income indicating he plans to head an organization to fight the issue. This man is unreliable. He doesn't know what he's talking about because he's, well you know, he doesn't have any basis or any information on this. Oh! Walter Stone, head of the Peach Growers Institute, indicated that he had secret information that the striking Peach Pickers were supported by Communist funds. This is called unreliable. He doesn't know what he's talking about. What is the fact? They said the statement that there are angels in heaven, what is the report? The statement that there are angels in heaven is not a report because there's no factual information we can base this on. We can't know this. Well, the Bible says there are angels in heaven and there is not a book in existence today that can be more firmly relied upon than the Bible and the Bible says that there are angels in heaven. And we can more firmly prove the existence of Christ and the authenticity of the Bible and that God is its authorship than we can that George Washington was president of this country. So there's more infor-mation. There's a lot more evidence toward the authenticity of the Bible than there is to the fact that George Washington was the president of this country and the only way that you know he was president of this country is because you have books that tell you so and some records and things that said we've been told that he signed. We believe it, of course, but we accept it on faith. But, anyway, they point out that the Bible is not, that the report that there are angels in heaven is not a report that we can look to as infor-mation. It’s (1:00:04) just a statement. They use it here in a poem. I've lost all my books somewhere . . . I’ve moved them somewhere . . . they're using here this point by e.e cummings and it's nothing but ridicule of America and ridicule of patriotism:

“next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?”

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

Additional note: This poem by e.e. cummings can be found here:
https://brettmilam.com/2020/12/19/e-e-cummings-poem-next-to-of-course-god-america-i/

So that's as patriotic as you get, and if you think I'm jumbling words, I'm not, that's the way the thing reads. Let's see. I had a fifth-grade basic English text. I can't find it now, but the fifth-grade text has examples of sentences, you know paragraphs, a topic paragraph to be written, and, or did I read that? Maybe I . . . Did I refer to this from the topic paragraph where they say we are a nation without any heritage or any roots or any strong ties in history? We have no strong roots in community or church. Therefore, we have created myth to give us a feeling of continuity in this country. George Washington, brave leader, father of this country; Abraham Lincoln for those who like their myths on the darker side. They, also, in at least the third-grade books . . . These are . . . [Added Note: someone in the audience has said something.] No, did I say . . . I'm sorry, I didn't say third-grade book. This one, I meant to say . . . these are numbered one, two, three, four, that means one is seventh grade, two is eighth grade, three would be ninth grade.

Either in the seventh- or the eighth-grade book, they have a chapter on writing your own (1:02:03) story or writing about yourself or writing about your personal experiences. They suggest writing about your first fear, writing about your first . . . oh I don't know—many things, different things, all very personal things that have happened to you. Write about the first time your parents disillusioned or disappointed you. And then they have examples—a whole chapter of examples—of writing experience, personal experiences, and in every case—every case they use—there are stories written by students about elderly people. And every time they refer to elderly people as nauseating them, irritating them, disgusting them. Every last time they're mentioned:

An old man was sitting in an airplane next to me in the seat. Saliva was drooling from his lips or his mouth as he was asleep and at first, he just at first, it just disgusted me or something like that and then I became nauseated and I got up and I ran to the back of the plane. Fear of death is constantly hit on.You know, old people make me think of death and that's fearful and that's terrible, and it's a whole chapter that dwells on that.

They use examples of ain't. It's used repeatedly in the ninth-grade book I believe it is, where four, four different times we're told that if your friends use ain’t, it's perfectly normal, perfectly acceptable, and to be expected that you would use ain't. They also say that if your parents criticize the way you speak, then their parents criticize them, and their parents criticize them. That's the way it's always been. So, now, if you, with these books, your children are going to find out that speaking correctly is just not very important at all. But with these books, even if you try to correct them at home, they're going to point out that “if your parents try to correct you, parents have always done that, (you know), you don't take it too seriously.”

Now, I don't want you to think this is seventh through twelfth grade only. I want to take up, now, and I'm covering this slightly, and these are only some of the books, but I'm going to take apart what they do with these books. They look so perfectly innocent in these elementary grades from kindergarten right on up (1:04:03) through the entire elementary program, there's undermining of faith in God, and faith in the stories of the Bible and the principles that we try to teach our children.

They take an innocent story like “Jack and the Beanstalk” and this is a particularly gruesome story about Jack and the Beanstalk . . . personal notes . . . and it's, it's more gory than most of us would tell the story, anyway, for our children. But after they tell this horrible story about Jack and the Beanstalk about how, you know, this giant really does eat little boys. He just had one yesterday to eat, and the second-grade children . . . Then the teacher's manual suggests—now the teacher's manual—not the child's book, so if you go down to school and look at your child's book, it's going to be an innocent little story about Jack and the Beanstalk, but the teacher's manual suggests, “have the children to debate, was it right or did Jack do wrong in stealing from the giant?” Well, I don't know any second-grade child who could read that story or have that read to them about Jack and the Beanstalk and how this awful giant eats little boys and how he is so cruel and everything, and poor Jack and his mother, you know, they're poor. They need things. They're really starving and they have nothing. How could any little second-grade child read that and think that it's wrong to steal from that giant? So, all right, there's a little inroad. Here's a case where it was wrong still. “Thou shalt not steal isn't always necessarily true.” Then they're told to role play that they are gods and if you were a god what kind of world would you create, they're told. These, from beginning to end, every one of these stories, the children are, you know, they put themselves into the place of the actors and they role play the activities which is fine. Role playing's fine for children to a certain extent, but then they always have to tell their own story and they relate to this story in some way. Now here are some questions:

Additional Notes: Teachers were taught to use role playing, values clarification, and situational ethics techniques in colleges and universities during this time period. Some of the more familiar of these were:
Values Clarification: A Handbook of Practical Strategies for Teachers and Students by Sidney B. Simon, Leland W. Howe, and Howard Kirschenbaum, copyright 1972, Hart Publishing Company (This book included exercises for the students such as this one:
#24. How do you feel about premarital sex? On the left, there is Virginal Virginia who wears white gloves on every date and on the right is Mattress Millie who wears a mattress strapped to her back. The child chooses from 6 points on the line between Virginal Virginia and Mattress Millie as to their position.) page 123

The Change Agent’s Guide to Innovation in Education by Ronald G. Havelock, copyright 1973, Educational Technology Publications (note from The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, Conscious Press, 1999, hardback edition: “The Guide contains authentic case studies of how change agents manipulate their communities into accepting controversial curricula, methods, etc. . . . Ronald Havelock has strong connections to UNESCO (United Nations).”

100 Ways to Enhance Self-concept in the Classroom: A Handbook for Teachers and Parents, by Jack Canfield and Harold C. Wells, copyright 1976, Prentice-Hall, Inc. Although Canfield’s book was published after the 1974 Textbook Wars, it’s interesting that Exercise #84 “If I Were God of the Universe” was about role-playing God. Canfield, of course, is better known for his Chicken Soup for the Soul books.

Second grade children: Have you ever been punished or have you ever disobeyed your parents and been punished? Why did you disobey them? What happened? Were you sorry? Why or why not? Have your parents ever punished you because they thought you had done something wrong and you really hadn't done it? What happened? How did you feel? Do you think you tend to be (1:06:03) a good or a bad child? Why?

In another case, they asked him ____[?] in the second grade or third grade book. They say, did you ever think about running away from home or did you ever try to run away from home? What happened? You know, tell about it, or did you ever want to run away from home? They mention in here, and again, the police are mentioned in these elementary books. You know, we always, I always, had a very strong feeling about you didn't say to a child, “you be good or an old mean policeman's going to get you.” You never suggested that to a child. But, in here they have the story about the fox and they suggest and in, discussing it afterwards, and this is in the teacher's manual . . . How do you think the fox talk? Would you think that it might be a good description, let's see, perhaps you would like to describe the way the fox talked in this way. Be careful not to open the bags that the fox barked like a cross policeman . . .

And then the next story is about the dangerous cowboy and it's about bad Benny and he runs away from the sheriff and the sheriff, of course, is a policeman in the background. He's really not paying attention to him in the story and later over here, though, in the discussion in the book they have something about “the boy ran away from the policeman” and they're just little hints like that. That's fairly mild, that one, and I haven't read this one too awfully closely, but they do suggest that . . . and no one is suggesting for a minute that children should be put down and embarrassed and humiliated because they're using improper grammar—everybody does—but the idea of a school is that we do teach correctly. We try to teach them how to speak correctly, but anyway, they say here in the teacher's manual, “Do not criticize the expression we have labeled non-standard.” Well, I can't find the expression they've given right now. I don't see it, but anyway, it is appropriate among people who naturally speak that way and it's not advisable for (1:08:03) the pupils to go home putting on airs. Well, most of us would be delighted if our children would come home speaking correctly from school, speaking correct English, correcting our errors and correcting the errors we passed on to them. We'd be happy for them to, but they say in every one of these teacher’s manuals it’s not advis-able for these children to go home putting on airs and using correct English if not used at home.

I don't have this one well marked but I have it marked, but I don't have cards in it and everything. Yes, I do. They just slipped down in there. In this one, this is the third-grade book, now we're third grade. This one, they take up the story. Well, they have a story first about the animals who talked and sang and the crooks broke in the house and the animals sang and it scared them to death and they ran away. Then they discussed the reality of the story. Could this be a real story? Well, obviously not, because animals don't sing and talk. Then they go into the next stories about them Androcles and the Lion and how Androcles pulled the thorn out of the paw of a lion and the lion then later when Androcles was thrown into the arena by the emperor, the lion remembered Androcles. The lion hadn't eaten for three days but he remembered Androcles and he appreciated what he had done to pull the thorn out of his paw. He ran up to Androcles and licked his cheek and wouldn't kill him. So, the children discussed the reality of the story. Do you think a lion would really act this way? Does the lion do things like this? They discussed the reality of the story. The very next thing is then, could you—this is Teacher's manual—you could ask if anyone knows and wants to tell the story of Daniel in the Lion's Den. If it is told in any detail you could then discuss any similarities between that story and Androcles and the Lion, and the only conclusion that children could come to is that Androcles or that Daniel in the Lion's Den has to be a myth or fable because a lion just doesn't act that way. Now that's the reason the comparison is made.

Then we have another story about little boy stealing, and it's a very good story. If you read it in your child's book it would impress you, a very good story written by Jesse Stuart and it's about the little boy cheating an old man out of a penny to buy some candy and then he just almost chokes on the candy because his conscience is hurting so bad and he feels so guilty about it. But then they have over here, talking about your own ideas, and this is in the child's book. Most people—they don't say it's wrong to cheat or wrong to steal—they say most people think that cheating is wrong, even if it's only to get a penny which is what Shan did. Do you think there is ever (1:10:00) a time when it might be right? Tell when it is. Tell why you think it is right.

Additional Notes: A Penny’s Worth of Character, by Jesse Stuart
https://jsfbooks.com/product/pennys-worth-of-character/

Now, they have, “Telling your own Fable.” And this one is a story about an Indian myth about the great spirit coming down in the form of an old man going to visit the teepee of an old lady and asking her to bake him some bread. And she tells him she will, and she bakes a loaf of bread but the loafs too big and she won't give it to him and it goes on and on. Finally, she won't bake for him. She tells him to go to the woods and get his own food, so he punishes her. Then the children discuss the story. If you were a god, would you walk around on earth checking on people? Do you think the woman is very badly punished? Would you have punished her that way? Review the purpose of the fable and then ask: what is the purpose of this myth? Now, do you think a myth like this could really be true? Well, obviously, the children aren't going to think it's true. Could it really happen? No. Do you think the Indians who made up this myth thought it was true? It was very likely they did. They believed in their great spirit. Now, I'm interspersing my own words there. The question is: do you think the Indians who made up this myth thought it was true? Now, then they're told, “change the great spirit so that instead of walking on Earth with people he's just invisible and just observes people on earth. So that they’re changing the idea in the child's mind. He's just an invisible man. He ob-serves people apparently, people on earth. And we get over here then and they tell the children, here is in the child's book, and I'm going to read to you word for word:

Telling Your Own Myth. There are a lot of puzzling things in the world. The purpose of a myth is to explain something we can't explain otherwise. That's the purpose of the myth they tell the children. Now there are a lot of puzzling things in our world and they name several. The first one they name is, why do we have pain? Now, I'm not going to . . . well . . . number two is, why do men have different skin colors, why are men usually stronger than women, why do so many animals like to eat meat, why don't they eat fruits and vegetables? Myths are ways of answering questions like these. Answers may not be real but they are fun. They are an interesting part of our imaginary world. One way to make up a myth is to think of a question like one of these: Suppose your question is, why do men have pain? Now imagine a time when (1:12:02) men did not have pain. Pretend that the first men on Earth went around without ever feeling pain. Next imagine that some kind of god walked among men and something happened. Maybe a man did something bad or made a bad mistake. Because of this, the god punished men giving them pain for the rest of their days.

Now if that doesn't sound to you like it's right out of the Genesis account, I don't know why, because all you'd have to do is change men to Adam and Eve and you'd have the Genesis account of why pain came into the world. It goes on to say, the purpose of the objective of this lesson is to make children more aware of the nature of myths and to help children make up myths of their own. Then there's the myth about the god of working, how God put thorns on the roses to remind men of work. Every one of these stories ends with tell him, the children tell their own stories in the most personal nature.

[Audience: Read the poem about the roses.] Okay, it's not a poem, it's a role-playing activity for children. Let me see if I can find it again.

The purpose: Why roses have thorns
The characters: The god of work and a village of people
Action: The people of a village always work very hard. The god of work wishes to reward them and makes beautiful flowers grow around their fields. The flowers distract the people from their work, so the god makes thorns grow on the flowers as a reminder when they pick them and smell them that there is still work to be done.

There's something else in this one I wanted to get. Well, I don't know where it is, but anyway here it is. Now this, we're talking about third-grade children, they have pictures here and if you look at these pictures and relate something to them, think of something, and the suggested topics for conversation are social issues, for example, why we have problems like these in the cities or a personal experience prompted by the picture event, and it teaches constantly, the manual says, that . . . if the (1:14:04) children can't think of a personal experience that relates to these stories, help them by asking them questions. Did you ever disobey your parents? Were you ever punished unjustly by your parents? So, these are some of the questions that are suggested. How did you feel when that happened? The teachers is to prod the child and bring these things out of him. Even if he doesn't discuss them freely, she is to bring them out.

Now we're to the fourth-grade book. I haven't read the fifth or sixth-grade books yet, but we're building up an idea to go along here. Here is a story about a bunch of kids making some people miserable who moved into a community and the boy’s mean grandmother comes down very hard because he’s mistreated these people, but she comes out the villain because she’s mean to this boy. They do things like jam up traffic in the street. They're suggesting this to fourth-grade kids. How they tie up all these cars with ropes and wires and make the biggest traffic jam. And that was the biggest game, the most fun, of course. The police were all upset about it.

This book, I'll just tell you about this one quickly. This one goes on with more myths, more myths about God. Then the children are told, “Pretend you are a god. What would you do to make the world a better place?” Pretend you are God [with a Capital G]. Think of a son or daughter of your God. Then where does evil come from? Why are some people bad? You could have a war of some kind or some kind of wrestling match between your son of God or your daughter of God and, let's see, a war between your son of God or your daughter of God and Evil. How does the encounter change the lives of people?”

They have over here, prayer, prayer in public school today. It's here, right here in this book:

Prayer of the Monkey
Dear God, why have you made me so ugly?
With this ridiculous face,
grimaces seem asked for!
Shall I always be the clown of your creation?
Oh, who will lift this melancholy from
my heart?
Could You not, one day,
let someone take me seriously,
Lord?
Amen

Additional Note: “The Prayer of the Monkey,” is part of the book, Prayers From the Ark, by Carmen Bernos de Gasztold.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41386433

The next (1:16:00) one then is a poem of a mouse: I am so little and grey, dear God.

Additional Note: “The Prayer of the Mouse,” by Carmen Bernos de Gazstold from Prayers From the Ark
https://fromtroublesofthisworld.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/the-prayer-of-the-mouse-by-carmen-bernos-de-gazstold/

It goes on and on about how ugly I am and why did you make me like this? And then they are to make up their own poem, or make up their own prayer that some animal might pray. But this one, they have them role playing that they are God, capital God, and you know, role play the Son of God. Perhaps you are the Son of God. What would you do? Anyway, the fifth and sixth book, then, just builds upon this idea. And that's all the time I'm going to take. If y'all want to ask any questions or come and look at the books, you're welcome to take about an hour and a half.

(The audience asks a question about the book publisher.) This is D.C. Heath. I want you to remember, too, that this series, this company put out this series and this. They go together. This is the secondary Series. This is the elementary series and there's a thing, an idea from beginning to end.

DC Heath is the Publishing Company—H-E-A-T-H. This one is called Communicating—the elementary series is called Communicate. On the secondary level it's called Dynamics of Language.

(Audience) The committee, the teachers . . . were they parents or well, I know you think or you hope that they didn't read it.
(Alice Moore) Right, I do.
(Audience) Assuming they did, are they parents?

(Alice Moore) I'm sure some of them are.
(Audience) Are they men and women?
(Alice Moore) Yes, mostly women.
(Audience) And how many?
(Alice Moore) This is a rough guess but there were eight on the first. There were two different committees. About eight on the first secondary committee, eight on the elementary committee, and then five on the final adoption committee. Now I did hear one person say, the second hand report of one person who served on the elementary committee, I heard her make the remark that “we work (1:18:02) ourselves to death and then they go out and pick out what they want to anyway” so apparently she, this one person, anyway, did not feel that they picked, they didn't select the books that she wanted them to select. So maybe the last committee of five had the final decision in selecting the books.

(Someone from the audience is asking about who was on the committees and if they can get the information.)
(Alice Moore) You might could get the information from the board. I'm not sure. No, I don't know of any purpose it would serve, really.
(More audience response unintelligible)
(Alice Moore) I would agree. Well, that's my purpose. I mean I know who they are, but I wouldn't feel, I wouldn't want to give out names.
(Audience) Are those books being used in a lot of schools?
(Alice Moore) Yes, they'll be used in every one of our schools.
(Audience) I mean in other schools in the United States.
(Alice Moore) I'm sure they are in some states. They are in use, yes, I'm sure of that. In fact, these were considered in Texas and some people I have been in contact with in Texas have done a review on these books and had forced some changes in the books. For instance, there was a paragraph of illustrating a topic sentence or something in the fifth-grade book about the pioneers and it said, “Who were the pioneers? People who are happy and successful in life don't pick up and leave and go off into the wilderness and, you know, strike out on their own.”
(Audience unintelligible)
(Alice Moore) No, you didn't read it in these. You read it on the paper because I stuck the paper in there and it was taken from the book. That's where you read it, but it had been there, but anyway the Pioneers were the failures of life. The men who couldn't control their bodily appetites, the thieves, the women chasers, the drunkards, the sick, the people who couldn't (120:00) make it any other way. They struck off and settled the West.
(Audience unintelligible)
(Alice Moore) I would suggest, as much as it bothers them, that the board ought to be called. They ought to hear from people all over this county. You should talk to other people and let them know what's in these books. I have every intention of talking to police departments. I hope I can talk with the police departments because I want to emphasize the rebellion, the rebellion against authority, the lack of respect for authority that is hinted on in these books just constantly. Talk to influential . . . All right, Mr. McCoy, does that have a name Darrell on it? Let me see it, could you please? Someone brought these tonight. Mr. McCoy called me and asked me about the possibility of petitions and I suggested he go ahead and draw . . . *

Additional Note: This Lost Tape video concludes here, but continues on this 5:27 video:

(Karl Priest) Kanawha County Textbook Protest Audio 4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKYofb1h2so&t=43s
The conclusion to the above video begins at about the :58 mark.

*one up and he did. He sent these petitions tonight. This petition simply states:

(1:13) The undersigned citizens and taxpayers of Kanawha County in the state of West Virginia hereby petition the Board of Education to deny the use of certain textbooks in the schools of this county. More specifically, it is requested that any textbooks, periodicals, pamphlets, or other instructional materials be prohibited which demean, encourage skepticism, or foster disbelief in the institutions of the United States of America and in Western civilization. We submit that among these institutions are the following: the family unit which emerges from the marriage of a man and woman, belief in a supernatural being or a power beyond ourselves or a power beyond our comprehension, the political system set forth in the Constitution of the United States of America, the economic system commonly referred to as free enterprise where the exchange of goods and services is governed by the forces of supply and demand rather than a central governmental agency authority, respect for the laws of the nation's state and its subdivisions and for the judicial system which administers those laws, the history and the heritage of this nation as the record of one of the noblest civilizations that has ever existed, and respect for the property of others.

I think it's an excellent petition and it touches on the issue that these books demean so much. Mr. Mcoy didn't put his name and address on here. I think he intended to, and he must have forgotten. I just must have failed to get it typed on, but I would be very happy for anyone who will take these petitions and circulate them and return them to me. I'd be happy to help. Ask people to keep their names and their addresses on them.
(Audience unintelligible)
(Alice Moore) These are the English texts. I think a (3:03) suggestion was made when I objected to this elementary text that possibly the reading series was sufficient. You're familiar with them, then, but anyway, that possibly the reading series was comprehensive enough that this wouldn't be necessary. I don't know where we stand right now. These elementary books concerned me, upset me, disturbed me, more than all the other books because they are so subtle and because they are taking young children from kindergarten age right on up and undermining their faith in God and their belief in the stories of the Bible. That's one series more than any other I want to see out, but I’m just not sure where it stands right now.
(Audience unintelligible)
(Alice Moore) The 27th of July and I would ask you all to be at that board meeting. Pardon me, the 27th of June. That's just two weeks.
(Audience unintelligible)
(Alice Moore) We have got to do everything we can to spread the word. We just can't work on the basis that there is no hope. We just have to work and do everything we can. Yes, I think if we can get the word out to people. I'm holding meetings any place in the county where I’ve been asked.
(Audience unintelligible)
(Alice Moore) Right . . . that the English teachers of the county, and I know, if English teachers see these books, I think we have a tremendous amount of English teachers, a number of English teachers, who will refuse to teach them. I hope we have, but anyway I was told that the English teachers are being told to be at that meeting. If they want to get the books in, they have to have the English teachers there. So, if you want a seat, you better come early.
(Audience unintelligible)
(Alice Moore) Surely, we have some people who would refuse to teach . . .
(Audience unintelligible)
(Alice Moore) (5:00) Dr. Underwood's position? Well, the whole administration, curriculum end, backed up the books 100%. I made a speech. They said that I had pulled things out of context, that the books were well balanced, they represent America as it is, and the entire administrative staff backs up the books 100%.

This concludes this document.

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