Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia.

My name is Jody Abergen.

This day, October 19th, 1974, the West Virginia Textbook Wars are entering a new period of

acrimony, paranoia, and violence. There are so many twists and turns to this story which is a

fight over an attempt to introduce a new set of books into the local

public school curriculum in Kanawa County, West Virginia. This is the county that includes Charleston, the

capital of West Virginia. I just want to characterize sort of where the story

ends up. We'll spend a lot of today's episode talking about how it gets there, but in the end what we're looking at is two men

shot and injured on a picket line, an elementary school firebombed, another one dynamited,

a school superintendent sprayed with

mace and receiving death threats a group of extremist fundamentalists led by a

local Reverend who eventually did jail time for a conspiracy to possibly bomb buses full of children heading to school during this boycott

That bombing didn't happen, but school buses were shot at and stoned. Families were chased out of town.

It is just an incredible moment,

all a result of these very heated wars

over local school curriculum that also pulled in all sorts of other

Cultural and political wars taking place at the time so here to discuss a really

very resonant story for this moment we're living in right now

Here to discuss that as always are Nicole Hammer of Columbia and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley.

Hello there.

Hello Jody. Hey there. This story is wild, wild, wild.

Banana. I know we want to like get into all the sort of wild outcomes, but let's chart a little bit the beat by beat of how it got to this point so

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