SIMI VALLEY : Schools Move to Drop Book

The Ventura County chapter of the NAACP won its first battle to remove a book that it says contains racist stereotypes from required reading lists in county schools after it reached a tentative agreement with the Simi Valley Unified School District, officials said Thursday.

The accord was reached when a committee made up of parents, teachers and school administrators decided to remove “The Cay” from required reading lists for seventh-grade students. Instead, the book will be on an optional reading list.

Before the agreement is final, Supt. Robert Purvis must approve it, but officials said his approval is expected.

Both the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People and school officials said they were pleased with the agreement, which ends several months of controversy.

“We are very happy with the decision,” said John R. Hatcher III, president of the Ventura County chapter of the NAACP. “The book is very demeaning. It perpetuates racism.”

Hatcher said the NAACP also plans to move to have the book taken off required reading lists in Moorpark, Ventura and Oxnard.

Susan Parks, the Simi Valley district’s director of elementary education, said that although she had not been offended by the book’s content, she agreed that it might send the wrong message.

“We have to ask ourselves if we are doing the kids a favor by showing this as the one example of people from a major ethnicity,” Parks said.

In one passage, “The Cay” describes a West Indian character central to the plot by saying: “He crawled over toward me. His face couldn’t have been blacker, or his teeth whiter. They made an alabaster trench in his mouth, and his pink-purple lips peeled back over them like the meat of a conch shell.”

But the book, written by Theodore Taylor, is actually a call to anti-prejudice, Parks said. The book is dedicated to “Dr. King’s dream, which can only come true if the very young know and understand.”