It led to the largest protests ever in the history of Kanawha County, West Virginia, the shooting of one bystander, and extended school closings.
[2] An English teacher on the committee stated that although she held strong conservative values, she felt that removing books that showed opposing opinions would be equivalent to "telling lies by omitting ideas I know exist".
Upon receiving the review copies, Moore was offended by a quote from the Autobiography of Malcolm X in which he referred to Christians as "brainwashed"; she requested and received all 300 textbooks, and claimed that she found unsettling quotations from Allen Ginsberg, Sigmund Freud's writings on the Oedipus complex, and convicted Black Panthers such as Eldridge Cleaver's "Soul on Ice" and by George Jackson.
[7][8] Moore then telephoned Mel Gabler, a textbook evaluator who ran Educational Research Analysts, a conservative Christian non-profit organization in Texas.
Gabler in return sent pamphlets and outlines of some of the ways in which the content of the books allegedly conflicted with Christian values, moral uprightness, and patriotism.
On 27 June the school board, including Moore met again, with over 1,000 local residents observing, and voted to approve the books after a three-hour debate over the merits of teaching a liberal curriculum.
The Department of Education called for a compromise, but Reverend Horan denounced them, demanding that the boycott continue until the books were permanently removed and the supporting members of the school board fired.
[11] Reverend Charles Quigley asked Christians to "pray that God will kill the giants who have mocked and made fun of dumb fundamentalists",[12] leading one student to point out, "They're shooting people because they don't want to see violence in books.
In the case of the Kanawha County controversy, Moore and her supporters perceived that progressive secularists were undermining Christian values in their embrace of moral relativism, atheism and sexual experimentation (amongst other things) in educational textbooks a la 1960s liberationism.