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*deep breath* FUCKING HELL PEOPLE CRITICAL RACE THEORY IS NOT BEING TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS. It’s a right-wing red herring to frighten Trumpanzees into freaking out about teaching real American history. It’s not the first time Americans have gone ballistic over what’s in school textbooks.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: March 12, 1974--
Critical Race Theory is an academic concept about U.S. race law studied by a handful of people. But it sounds scary to Republicans who want American history to be whitewashed as fuck. It’s reminiscent of 1974 West Virginia, when making school textbooks a bit less focused on white men led to violence.
On March 12, 1974, a plan to expand the K-12 curriculum in Kanawha County to include foreign concepts like multiculturalism and equality via 325 books was approved. Most of the school board was fine with it, but Alice Moore, who was married to a fundamentalist preacher, wasn’t. She already had a reputation for opposing teaching sex education, because of course. Her initial protest of the books was a concern that white kids would learn “to speak in ghetto dialect.” Continues below …
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Then in a fit of white Christian rage she contacted the Jesus freaks running the “Educational Research Analysts” group who said oh yeah these books are unchristian and unpatriotic. In a schoolboard meeting she referred to the books as “filthy, disgusting trash … and unduly favoring Blacks.” She got a lot of publicity and the PTA sided with her.
In late June a thousand people attended a schoolboard meeting, where the books were approved despite Moore’s efforts. Conservatives in the community lost their shit and a popular reverend called for a boycott of public schools. Flyers were distributed showing how “lewd” the books were using quotes from books that weren’t even on the list for inclusion, but pesky things like facts rarely matter to such people.
In the boycott, 9,000 of the 45,000 public school students were kept home. They were joined in their protest by thousands of miners, truckers, and bus drivers. The Department of Education tried to compromise but the protesters were all fuck you pull all the books and fire the board members who approved them. Schools and schoolboard buildings were dynamited and firebombed, school buses suffered shotgun blasts, kids who continued to attend school got rocks thrown at them.
In September the board pulled the books to allow them to be evaluated by a committee of citizens, but 1,200 students at a high school said fuck that and walked out in protest. In the ensuing protests one person was shot and wounded. It turned into a national media shitshow. KKK leaders came to support the anti-textbook cause, a reverend publicly prayed to God to kill the approving schoolboard members, reporters were attacked and their vehicles set on fire, snipers fired on state cruisers escorting school buses et-fucking-cetera. Ultimately, it was a hollow victory for the pro-book side, because while the books were approved, Alice Moore got all sorts of bullshit guidelines instituted that restricted most students from being able to read them.
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