Trey Kay: I grew up in Charleston, West Virginia, the capitol of the state and the seat of Kanawha County. In September 1974, the year of the great textbook war, I was 12 years old and about to enter the seventh grade. When the bus rolled up to John Adams Junior High that first day, I saw a group of women holding homemade signs. One read - "I have a Bible, I don't need those dirty textbooks!" What dirty textbooks, I wondered? Were we going to be reading Playboy in school?
In the next few weeks, our community would be turned upside down. Neighbors threatened and harassed each other; the Ku Klux Klan - who I'd heard of but never seen - marched on the state capitol steps and burned crosses in the community.
It all seems hard to believe now, but to understand what happened you'd need to know a little bit about where I grew up.
I grew up in the part of Charleston people called "The Hill." It was the affluent part of town.
It looks like "Anywhere Suburbia, USA" - kids playing on cul-de-sacs, dads cooking burgers on outdoor grills.
Our neighbors were doctors, lawyers, business people.
Outside the city, the twisting, bumpy roads wound through hills and hollows past small towns and mining camps. There are general stores and filling stations, men in grease-covered overalls and dozens of little churches filled to capacity on Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings.
There was a lot that was different between urban and rural Kanawha County; not the least of which were our churches. People on the Hill, where I lived, went to mainstream churches - like Catholic, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist - with sedate, orderly services. In the working-class communities on the outskirts of Charleston, old time religion believers met for spirited services with loud singing and the free shouting of praises and testimony.
Preacher: That scared the hell out of me. Now hell's a real place, [yes it is], it wasn't created for you...
Despite our differences, we had one institution that tied us together: the board of education, which oversaw Kanawha County's 125 schools. But that was before the great textbook war.