Local Luminary: Trey Kay

by Brian K. Mahoney and photographs by Diane Bondaref , February 24, 2011

In 1974 Kanawha County, West Virginia, burst onto the national news when newly adopted multicultural textbooks kicked up a firestorm of controversy that many view as the first battleground in the contemporary culture wars. The community was divided over the question of whether books advocating values that were not neccesarily in line with the beliefs with the students’ parents should be taught in public schools. The ensuing protests eventually turned violent, with school buildings dynamited, snipers shooting at school buses, journalists beaten, coal mines shut down, and a minister sent to jail for three years for inciting others to violence.
Trey Kay, a local radio journalist, returned to his hometown in West Virginia in 2008 to revisit the controversy. “The Great Textbook War,” an hour-long documentary Kay produced with Deborah George uses archival audio from community board hearings as well as interviews with key figures to explore the volatile issue. The documentary, which originally aired on West Virginia Public Radio, was awarded the prestigious Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Award, considered the Pulitzer Prize of broadcast news.
Here's a link to the full audio of "The Great Textbook War" on American Radioworks.

Set the context for what happened in West Virginia in 1974.
It’s six years after the RFK and MLK assassinations, in a way we were still involved with the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War is winding down, a lot of people in West Virginia were part of Richard Nixon’s Silent Majority—socially conservative, labor union Democrats. They did not see themselves in Eugene McCarthy or George McGovern. This protest marked a shift for a great deal of them. A lot of the preachers who led the protest were Democrats. They’re not now, but they were then.

How old were you in ‘74? What do you remember from that time?
I was 12. One morning my bus goes through the gate of the school and there are these women standing there with protest signs that say things like “Get the devil books out of the schools.” And then a bit later the books were taken out of the schools. They had already assigned us books, and then they took them away.

How did the “Great Textbook War” begin?
The opening shot was when [Kanawha County School Board member] Alice Moore’s husband showed her books that she had just voted to adopt but she hadn’t had a chance to look at yet. He pointed to a Malcolm X quote: “All praise is due to Allah that I left Boston when I did, because had I not, I’d probably still be a brainwashed black Christian.”