Charlie Loeb was a 17-year-old high school student when the Kanawha County textbook controversy exploded in 1974. The Rev. Jim Lewis, new pastor of St. John’s Episcopal Church, had been in town barely a month.

In April 1974, school board member Alice Moore, wife of a fundamentalist preacher, objected to a series of language arts textbooks that were to be adopted by the Kanawha County Board of Education. Moore contended the books — among the first in the county to offer material specifically chosen for its cultural and ethnic diversity — were obscene and inappropriate for schoolchildren.

The books were adopted. Throughout that tumultuous summer, protests sprang up all over Kanawha County. Friends kept telling Jim Lewis it would all blow over.

“It didn’t blow over,” Lewis told a lunchtime crowd Tuesday at Covenant House. “In fact, the first week of school, a shot was fired.”

Kanawha County school officials immediately pulled 96,000 textbooks off the shelves, then set up a community committee to review the books. Eventually, the books would be put back in the schools, but many principals remained afraid to use them. Before the textbook controversy ended, schools would be firebombed. Buses would be shot at. Federal authorities finally indicted half a dozen people for the bombings, but the textbook wars opened a wound in Kanawha County some say has never healed.

Loeb, now a member of the Charleston City Council, was student body president at George Washington High School the day school officials came to cart off the books. “I grew up in a house with thousands of books,” Loeb said at Covenant House during one of a series of lunchtime lectures. “I did have an appreciation of the power of books.”

More by instinct than design, Loeb and his friends agreed to walk out of school to protest. To his surprise, most of the school followed.

“The next thing I knew, I was at home wondering, ‘What now?’” Loeb recalled. He called other students at Charleston High, St. Albans and Stonewall Jackson. He got in touch with Lewis and other church leaders and tried to form a group to help fight the apparent censorship.

County school officials eventually would set up a 15-person committee to review the controversial textbooks. Loeb was chosen as a student representative on the committee.

It was a scary time, Loeb and Lewis recalled. Although the actual committee meetings were mostly civil, people on both sides of the controversy used threats and intimidation. Protesters spit on those they disagreed with, and Lewis’ life was threatened on several occasions.

Loeb recalled one meeting in Big Chimney where those who supported keeping the books had to walk a gauntlet of jeering, threatening protesters. Gov. Arch Moore had promised West Virginia State Police protection for the meeting, but no troopers ever showed up.

“It was very threatening,” Loeb remembered. “As a young person at the time, it was simply overwhelming.”

Today, most observers believe the textbook wars were about more than a few potentially controversial books. “I don’t think Charleston, West Virginia, was any different from anyplace else in the U.S. at the time,” Loeb said. The Vietnam War was in its last spasms, roles for women were changing, and uncertainty was in the air.

Loeb said the controversy was one of the first conflicts between the organized religious right and local government. The textbook debate, he said, negotiated the dangerous crossroads where religious ideas meet public policy.

The lessons to be learned from the textbook wars have to do with one group of people attempting to impose their absolute ideas on society as a whole, Loeb contends.

“That is why this still has relevance,” he said.

To contact staff writer Rusty Marks, use e-mail or call 348-1215.