Monday, April 02, 2007 - 11:23 PM MYLES F. HORTON, TENNESSEE'S "RADICAL HILLBILLY:" THE HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL AND EDUCATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE IN AMERICA, THE SOUTH, AND THE VOLUNTEER STATE. By James B. Jones, Jr.
Posted by: James
MYLES F. HORTON, TENNESSEE'S "RADICAL HILLBILLY:"
THE HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL AND EDUCATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE IN AMERICA, THE SOUTH, AND THE VOLUNTEER STATE.
by James B. Jones, Jr.
Born in Savannah, Tennessee, on July 9, 1905, one Tennessean would become a major protagonist in social justice movements in America. Through his leadership of the Highlander Folk School, Myles F. Horton would train and educate people to take action on their own initiative to better their lives by self-help and organized community action. Nothing in his family history suggested a predilection for social activism or controversial politics. His paternal progenitor, Joshua Horton, was among the original 1769 pioneers who were the first to settle at the Wataugua Settlement. His family usually voted Republican in the preponderantly Democratic South, and his father Perry, a civil servant, was adamantly opposed to labor unions. The Horton's were members of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church.
His reverent parents believed firmly in the value of education as a means of getting ahead in life, and consequently Horton was a studious and religious boy who by 1924 entered Cumberland University, in Lebanon, Tennessee, where he pursued a major in literature. While he pursued the classics young Horton spontaneously learned about social conflict, as demonstrated in his personal revolt against freshmen hazing at Cumberland University.
Social conflict was also apparent to Horton in the famous 1925 Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, which fired his imagination. His membership in the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) unexpectedly introduced him to labor unions. In a speech to the YMCA in Lebanon during his tenure as president of the National Association of Manufacturers, John Emmett Edgerton, a Chattanooga textile industrialist, spoke negatively of labor unions and workers, saying that industrialists alone could claim the right to make social decisions for workers. Horton found this idea undemocratic and repugnant, sentiments that would hold for the rest of his life.
In the summer of 1927 Horton took a job instituting Presbyterian summer Bible schools in Cumberalnd County, then in the throes of economic collapse. At the small town of Ozone, according to historian Frank Adams in his Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander, Horton found the work "neither exciting nor challenging." He discovered that the songs, sermons, and games of summer Bible school had little relation to the "daily problems faced either by the children or their hard-pressed parents." As Horton would say later: "'I couldn't put this into words, but such education failed to connect with their lives.'" At Ozone he found a way to make that connection; he decided to ask parents to come to the church at night to talk about their problems - and to his surprise, they did. If Horton couldn't answer the questions he would find someone who could. He called these "community meetings," in which neighbor met neighbor and often were able to provide answers to community problems. Then the mountaineers would try out what they had learned back home in the hollows. The distinction between "knowledge" and "practice" was becoming more precise to young Horton.
Upon graduating from Cumberland University in 1928 Myles took a summer job as the student YMCA secretary for Tennessee. His position allowed him to travel throughout the state, organizing illegal interracial YMCA meetings, a practice that earned him the enmity of white college and high school officials, who reported him to his YMCA superiors. His resignation was straightaway accepted, and soon Horton began study at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.
Soon after his arrival in New York the stock market crashed, gigantic corporations went bankrupt, and the city's unemployed were forming bread and soup lines. At school Horton learned liberal theology best summarized by the teachings of Reinhold Neibuhr, and the educational philosophy of John Dewey. He studied for a year with the famed Chicago sociologist Dr. Robert E. Park, where he learned about conflict and social movements. Through it all Horton kept the "Ozone Project," as he came to call it, in mind, wondering if a new kind of school might be established to meet the singular needs of the mountain people in Tennessee. Finally, he managed to travel to Denmark in the summer and fall of 1931 and witnessed the working of the Danish folk schools. Here he found a workable model for his Ozone Project.
He returned home believing that he must embrace the everyday notions of the poor and educate them to act and speak for themselves, and gain influence over public decisions impacting their lives. These ideas would be central to the educational philosophy and operation of the folk school he was contemplating.
By November 1, 1932, Horton and colleagues moved into a Grundy County location which would become known as the Highlander Folk School, in Summerfield, between Monteagle and Tracy City. Soon Horton found himself embroiled in the first of what would be a long series of participations in the struggles for equity for the oppressed. In 1932 a particularly difficult strike occurred at the coal company town of Wilder-Davidson in Fentress County. He conducted food drives in Nashville to provide relief to striking miners -- the Red Cross furnished supplies only to the strikebreakers. Horton was even arrested by National Guardsmen and charged with "coming here and getting information and going back and teaching it." Ultimately the strike at Wilder-Davidson was broken, but Horton realized that teaching could be a realistic force in bringing about social change in the South only if it were done within the experiential context of the common people, even if it included nonviolent resistance. As Horton wrote to one of his colleagues in early 1933:
the tie-in with the conflict situations and participation in community life keeps our school from being a detached colony or utopian venture....our efforts to live out our ideals makes possible the development of a bit of proletarian culture as an essential part of our program of workers' education.
Highlander initially tutored neither reading, writing, working skills, nor social acquiescence. It did, like its Danish forerunner, teach basic skills and knowledge, yet nothing taught at Highlander sanctioned worker submission to exploitation. The educational philosophy at the Highlander Folk School demonstrated a commitment to instituting mutual aid among people, and their subsequent organized confrontation of various interests for the public good. The Highlander would teach, not lead.
For example, in 1936-1939 Horton led community and union organizing drives, teaching previously unregistered voters about government. At one time voters gained control of the Grundy County Commission and the WPA money it allocated. While initially successful this led to a controversy ultimately won by state and county officials, a reversal which taught Horton two valuable lessons: that trying to help powerless people win authority over a political unit as small as a county must certainly face defeat, and social change could not come from the ballot box, but from education. Afterwards his energies were directed toward connecting education with expanding the growth of the unionization movement in the South.
His first involvement with labor unionization occurred with textile operatives' in a North Carolina company town in 1937. Horton's work there consisted of helping in the formation of a union, but more than that, in teaching the workers how to control, run, and use their union to gain their objectives. In a sense he was helping to empower the previously dependent workers. Maintaining a commitment to local control, Horton firmly believed that the workers had to decide themselves whether or not to strike. A union was formed winning recognition and eventually a pay increase. Horton learned that dealing with one strike at a time did not constitute a social movement, and that a strike generated working-class consciousness and enthusiasm for self-help. The WPA Guide to Tennessee (1939) described the Highlander as:
...one of the few training schools for labor leaders in the South. In two small buildings, whose size helps to limit the student body to about 20, the school offers informal, discussion type lectures on cultural and economic subjects....
A year-around community and county program is carried on and members of the school attempt to preserve the culture of the mountain people.
Horton's educational efforts resulted in the formation of many workers' unions in the South. For instance: in 1938 an alumni had organized textile workers in Louisville, Kentucky, while in 1940 the Highlander helped in the formation of a union among aluminum workers at Alcoa, Tennessee, and in 1941, with the unionization of workers in New Orleans, Louisiana. By 1942 it was noted that some ninety percent of Highlander's graduates were international union officials, local union leaders, or labor organizers in the South. Moreover, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), United Automobile Workers (UAW) regularly supported the school by sending members to participate in the regularly scheduled Highlander School's organizer training programs. It appeared that the union movement and the Highlander were almost permanently bound, but differences of opinion over union militancy and racial discrimination led to a parting of the ways. By 1952 Horton had come to believe that better race relations should be the school's new focus, especially since racism seemed to him to be the major stumbling block to the growth of unionism in the South.
The Highlander Folk School exhibited an early interest in the struggle for civil rights. Horton had shown interest in integration when he worked briefly for the YMCA. In 1935 the convening of the first (and last) All Southern Conference for Civil and Trade Union Rights (ASCCTUR) in Chattanooga was a Highlander project. The meeting of this biracial group was quickly broken-up by uniformed crypto-fascist American Legionaires, members of their post's "Americanization committee, some Chattanooga policemen and several local politicians." Conference participants were called "Reds" by the committeemen and forced to leave Chattanooga. The Conference retreated to Monteagle Mountain only after eluding their pursuers and sending them on a wild goose chase to Cleveland and Bradley County. At Highlander resolutions were adopted against lynching and in favor of civil and union rights.
While the ASCCTUR dissolved, in November 1938, at Birmingham, Alabama, Horton joined in the first convening of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW), also biracial. This organization, which existed until the late 1940s, advocated liberal reforms, including unionization, formation of share-croppers cooperatives, and equal rights. Through such ties, blacks in increasing numbers began to attend illegal classes at the Highlander - illegal, that is, because they were integrated. Joining the school's board of directors were notable Negro intellects and leaders such as Fisk University sociologist Dr. Lewis Jones, and Dr. P.A. Stephens of Chattanooga. It became clear to Horton, however, that the struggle for equal rights hinged upon ending racism in southern institutions. The 1950s would be a time of controversy, setbacks and turmoil for Highlander, an interval in which ultimately Horton would prevail.
As part of his civil rights educational initiative Horton began night Citizenship Schools for African-Americans starting with John's Island off shore from Charleston, South Carolina in 1959. These schools were operated and taught by blacks, and covered literacy while they provided basic information on voter registration and the electoral process to its students, who used the information to good effect in local elections. Horton believed strongly that these schools should be run by African-Americans who could better lead and identify with their own constituencies than whites.
Such Highlander sanctioned Citizenship Schools were formed throughout the South. The classes also presented participants with practical knowledge about public policy formulation and execution. Schools were attended by such civil rights leaders as Mrs. Rosa Parks and Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The existence of these schools led to bitterly active opposition by white supremacists in the 1950s. Such antagonism was usually justified by what historian Adams calls "the communist-racist masquerade." Indeed, one of the major controversies in the Highlander's history revolves around the specious belief that the school was "communistic."
Horton was not unused to hearing complaints of "communist influence" at the Highlander, a pejorative heard nearly from the beginning. Now, along with the history of teaching students how to organize labor unions and share-croppers' associations, Horton was instructing biracial classes in methods of nonviolent resistance at Highlander. Scores learned skills and gained the fortitude to persist in their struggle for freedom, but some whites came to conflicting conclusions, and a number of serious attacks were initiated from out-of- state during these waning years of the McCarthy Era. In the first, an undercover agent for Georgia's white supremacist Governor Marvin Griffin, attended a special Labor Day weekend Citizenship School in 1957. He wrote a report which claimed in part that:
They met...and discussed methods and tactics of precipitating racial strife and disturbance.
The meeting of such a large group of specialists in inter-racial strife under the auspices of a Communist Training School, and in the company of many known Communists is the typical method whereby leadership training and tactics are furnished to the agitators....
According to Adams, Governor Griffin and Highlander's adversaries reprinted the report as a pamphlet employing the "technique of guilt by association." Photographs of Horton with Aubrey Williams, Dr. King, and Mrs. Parks started appearing on southern billboards with huge letters proclaiming: "King Attended a Communist Training Center." The white supremacists soon found their campaign had backfired. Liberal patrons from throughout the nation publicly condemned Griffin. The effort to discredit the Highlander ultimately failed. Horton began to see a relationship between the increased antagonism expressed against Highlander and the growing civil rights movement. Horton had weathered this storm and had not compromised the Highlander or his principles.
Another attack initiated from out-of-state in 1959 would, however, force a compromise. Early that year the attorney general of Arkansas, Bruce Bennett, made a speech warning the Tennessee legislature of subversion in the Volunteer State. He was quoted as saying: "I would gladly come to Tennessee if invited to lend whatever help I could to close Highlander." Bennett's remarks prompted the Tennessee legislature into action and it immediately launched an investigation of the school. Accompanying state Senator Lawrence T. Hughes, and Representatives Harry Lee Senter and T. Allen Hanover, Attorney General Bennett presided over the inquiry which opened in Tracy City in February 1959. Aside from discovering the school was registered in Fentress and not Grundy County, nothing of any damaging nature was revealed and the proceedings were moved to Nashville. In the Capitol City the Arkansan tried to connect Highlander to various individuals or groups who had been accused of affiliation with various "communist front organizations," charging the school and its founder with complicity in a "communist conspiracy." on the stand Horton was asked if he would acknowledge the accusations made about his politics. He refused, did not plead his Fifth Amendment rights, and remained on the stand for four and-a-half hours. The hearings continued until March 6, 1959. According to an editorial in the March 7, 1959 Nashville Tennessean:
[the] two-act drama...had some interesting casting and some dialogue in which the so-called "villains" outperformed the so-called "heroes"....[However it] was pretty much the dud of advance predictions.
Absolutely no evidence was found linking Highlander to subversive groups, and the committee could not make a finding revealing communist connections. Nevertheless, the Attorney General of Tennessee, Albert (Ab) Sloan, filed suit to revoke Highlander charter. on July 31, at 8:30 pm, Attorney General Sloan led a party of twenty sheriff's deputies and state troopers to Highlander in a search for alcoholic beverages. Since Grundy County was dry, possession or sale of alcohol was illegal. No whisky was found anywhere on the school premises, but an empty whisky barrel as well as a trifling amount of gin were discovered in Horton's personal quarters. His home was his private property, and as such not covered by the warrant. Nevertheless, on the basis of such evidence, all the biracial group attending the Highlander Citizenship School were arrested and summarily jailed. Horton, then serving as cochair for an international conference on adult education in Europe, hurried home to Tennessee once he got word of the raid. Perhaps no better proof that allegations of subversion and communist affiliation made against the Highlander were inaccurate can be offered than the facts that the original warrant was thrown out of court and Attorney General Sloan's remark quoted in the August 3, 1959 Chattanooga Daily Times:
the members of the legislative committee gave me information mostly on integration and communism, and I wasn't satisfied I could be successful at that. I thought maybe this was the best shot and I think now I'll be successful.
Finally, Sloan got a temporary injunction and Highlander's main building was padlocked. To keep the Citizenship Schools operating Horton eventually was forced to transfer its function to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1961. While leading a workshop from makeshift quarters in October, 1959, he confidently said:
You can padlock a building. You can't padlock an idea. Highlander is an idea. You can't kill it and you can't close it in. This workshop is part of the idea. It will grow wherever people take it.
In the meantime, the case of the State of Tennessee v. Highlander went to court. The trial ended in February, 1960, with Judge Chester C. Chattin ruling that Highlander had sold beer and convenience items without a license, that the school was operated for Horton's personal gain, and that it had practiced racial integration in violation of Title 49, Section 3701, of Tennessee law forbidding such practice.
The school's charter was revoked and a receiver was appointed to liquidate the property. Expecting the worst Horton had already applied for a new charter, which was granted. on August 28, 1961, the Highlander Research and Education Center, Inc., was opened in a dilapidated mansion in Knoxville near the Tennessee Marble Company plant. In December the Summerfield property was sold at public auction. According to Adams: "No cent of compensation was ever paid to Horton or to his parents for the seizure of their private property. In an ironic footnote, lawyers from the Grundy area bought Highlander's library and turned the building into a private club." The original summer cottage caught fire and burned soon after the auction.
The concept of using social change to foster education was a basic tenet of Horton's educational philosophy. This Tennessean's principles helped produce the leaders to direct the activities of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. This basic idea resulted in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a wave of peaceful sit-ins starting in Nashville in November and December 1959, school desegregation initiatives, and the tempering of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, and ultimately to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
By 1964 Horton wanted to direct Highlander's educational initiatives to Appalachia. He was particularly off-put by the growth of welfare in the region after the collapse of the coal mining industry. He led workshops on self education for small groups aimed at promulgating a "dialogue among nonequals," sponsored by the Tennessee Community Action Program (TCAP) directors in 1969 held at Montgomery Bell State Park. His efforts resulted in local initiatives in the "war on poverty" program launched by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
After strengthening its commitment to Appalachia, Highlander moved from Knoxville to New Market, Tennessee in 1972. Horton announced his resignation on May 28, 1973 but neither he nor the Highlander ceased labors to use education for the practical purpose of solving human problems, to teach ordinary people to meet their own challenges and create beneficial social change. According to his recent autobiography The Long Haul (1990): "The best educational work at Highlander has always taken place when there is a social movement."
Myles F. Horton died of cancer at age 84 on January 19, 1990 at his home. Private graveside services were held in Monteagle, near the site of the original school. An educator as well as a political and social activist, once describing himself as a "radical hillbilly," Horton dedicated his life's work to attaining an equitable social order ruled by human, not political or economic relationships. Stressing equality and nonviolence instead of hate and political dogma, Myles F. Horton was a Tennessean in whom all of his fellow citizens can take pride. His life and work are a stitch in the rich tapestry of Tennessee`s variegated history of contributions to the history of social change in the Volunteer State, the South, and nation.
For more information about the Highlander Folk School and Myles F. Horton see Frank Adams, with Myles Horton, Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of the Highlander (1975), John Glen, Highlander, No Ordinary School (1988), and Myles Horton, The Long Haul (1990).
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Nutshell Biographies #3 Center for Learning Through Community
Service
Myles Horton and Highlander
Bill Moyers writes in the preface to Myles Horton's
autobiography, "The Long Haul" that few people have seen as much
change in the American South or helped to bring it about as Myles
Horton. "He was beaten up, locked up, put upon and railed against
by racists, toughs, demagogues and governors. But for more than
fifty years, Horton went on with his special kind of teaching --
helping people to discover within themselves the courage and ability
to confront reality and change it."
Myles Horton came to his mission from a childhood among the
mountain people of Appalachia, a land rich in natural beauty but a
colony of poverty. "Nothing will change," said Horton to himself,
"until we change -- until we throw off our dependence and act for
ourselves." So in 1932, in the mountains west of Chattanooga, in one
of American's poorest counties, Myles Horton founded the Highlander
Folk School, dedicated to the belief that poor working-class people --
adults -- could learn to take charge of their lives and circumstances.
At first he ran workshops to train union organizers for the CIO.
Jim Crow laws forbade integration, but Horton, a white man, invited
blacks and whites alike, and Highlander became one of the few
places in the South where the two races could meet under the same
roof. In the early 1950s, Horton turned the emphasis of his
workshops from union organizing to civil rights. Highlander was now
the principal gathering place of the moving forces of the Black
revolution. Martin Luther King Jr. came. So did Rosa Parks, Andrew
Young, Julian Bond, Stokeley Carmicheal, and scores of others. The
state tried to close it down, the Klan harassed it, state troopers raided
it. But Highlander was indestructible. Now located in New Market,
Tennessee, Highlander remains a training ground for community
leaders from all over the world.1
Myles lived to his early nineties, working quietly to help
people develop the capacity to make decisions and take
responsibility for their communities. "A good radical education,
Myles once said," wouldn't be anything about methods or techniques:
it would be loving people first... And that means all people
everywhere, not just your family or your own countrymen or your
own color. And wanting for them what you want for yourself. And
then next is respect for people's abilities to learn and to act and to
shape their own lives. You have to have confidence that people can
do that... The third thing is valuing their experiences. You can't say
you respect people if you don't respect their experience."2
Indeed, folks who spend time at Highlander learn most from
sitting in the circle of rocking chairs in the big common room, telling
stories about their own communities, gathering strength from each
other's successes, consoling each other in their setbacks. When Myles
was facilitating workshops, he would stay in the background, keeping
the discussion on track, encouraging people to make plans and take
action, refusing to bring in experts to tell people what to do.
So seriously did he take the idea that people should learn to
trust their own experiences that one night, during the height of the
union organizing, he found himself in a motel room with a strike
committee in crisis. It seems that the highway patrol had been
escorting scab workers across picket lines and little by little, this
tactic had eroded the strikers' solidarity. After discussing different
actions to take, none of which seemed feasible, they turned to Myles
and said, 'Well now, you've had more experience than we have.
You've got to tell us what to do. You're the expert.'
'In the first place, I don't know what to do,' Myles replied, 'and
if I did know, I wouldn't tell you because if I had to tell you today,
then I'd have to tell you tomorrow, and when I'm gone you'd have to
get somebody else to tell you.'
This so infuriated one of the organizers that he pulled a gun out
of his pocket and said, 'Goddamn you, if you don't tell us I'm going to
kill you!' But Myles kept his cool, even though, as he remarked later,
"I was tempted to become an instant expert, right on the spot! But I
know that if I did that, all would be lost, so I said, 'No, go ahead and
shoot if you want to, but I'm not going to tell you.' And the others
calmed him down."3
Despite his philosophy of non-intervention, Myles held strong
political and moral convictions and encouraged others to do the same.
"You have to take sides and know why you're taking sides," Myles
often said. "There can be no such thing as neutrality. It's a code
word for the existing system. "4
Reflecting back on his youth, Myles remembered how he had
become inspired to devote his life to social action. "I'd get ideas from
reading," he said. "I'd get emboldened by it, especially poetry." He
re-read the young poet Shelley, who spoke passionately for social
justice, and decided he wouldn't let himself be subverted from what
he knew was right. "I was going to going to do what I wanted to do
regardless of anything, and the way to do it was not to be afraid of
punishment and not to be tempted by rewards, not to want to be
famous, nor get rich, have power, or be afraid of hell or threats and
ostracism. And at that time I said, "It's not important to be good, it's
important to be good for something."5
Materials about Myles Horton and Highlander
Horton, Myles (1990) The Long Haul, An Autobiography. NY:
Doubleday.
Horton, Myles and Freire, Paulo. (1990) We Make the Road by
Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change. Temple
University Press.
Glen, John. (1988) Highlander: No ordinary school. University Press
of Kentucky.
Community Economic Development Workshop (1991) Coming up the
rough side of the mountain: Community Development Workshop, New
Market, TN: Highlander Center
Highlander Research and Education Center, Knoxville, TN. (1985).
Working Paper Series. Water: "you have to drink it with a fork..."
Stories and resources from a water workshop at Highlander Center.
Highlander Research and Education Center (1980). "We're tired of
being guinea pigs!: A handbook for citizens on environmental health
in Appalachia. New Market, TN.
You've Got To Move: Stories of Change in the South. (video, 87
minutes) NY: First Run/Features 1985.
Adventures of a Radical Hillbilly. (video, 118 minutes) NY: WNET/13
TV 1981.
Notes
1 The preceeding text has been adapted from Bill Moyers' Preface to
Myles Horton's Autobiography: The Long Haul. NY: Doubleday, 1990.
2 Horton, Myles and Paulo Freire (1990) We Make the Road By
Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change. p.177
3 ibid. 125-6
4 ibid. p. 102
5 ibid. p.35
www-personal.umich.edu/~hfox/horton.html
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Since 1932, Highlander has been an adult education center for social change. The philosophy has been and still is that ordinary people in communities who are facing difficult problems are best suited to solve those problems if they are willing to organize and to take action. Highlander Center aims to overcome poverty, bigotry and economic injustice in Appalachia and the South. Our strategy for doing so is based on a simple philosophy: we believe that true social change goes beyond dealing with the symptoms of inequality and gets to root causes. Getting at the roots of injustice requires building grassroots movements for change led by those most affected by oppression. And, the blueprints for successful movements lie in the collective experiences and cultures of local communities in whose daily struggles to overcome oppression lie the keys to creating a just and peaceful world.
1930s and 40s: LABOR EDUCATION
Highlander was started in 1932 by three southerners who wanted to see the South become more democratic – Myles Horton, Don West and Jim Dombrowski. Myles would work at Highlander for the rest of his life. He had studied for the ministry as well as studying sociology and history, but he was especially inspired by the Danish Folk School movement, where he observed people gathering to discuss common problems in the community. He saw a process that he thought would work in rural Tennessee and other impoverished southern communities.
In its earliest years, Highlander served industrial and rural workers and became known as a regional center for worker’s education. The men and women on the staff organized workshops and training sessions in Monteagle where the school was located, and also went into southern communities where unions were being organized. In the early 1940s Highlander began challenging racial segregation by inviting black workers to attend workshops.
1950s and 60s: CIVIL RIGHTS
Building on the relationships it had with black workers, Highlander began addressing segregation openly. Just before the Supreme Court decision in 1954, the workshops became centered on desegregation. The staff at Highlander changed to reflect this new program. When Septima Clark, a schoolteacher from Charleston, South Carolina, was fired from her job for being a member of the NAACP, she joined the Highlander staff as Director of Education. From the mid 1950s until the 1960s Highlander became known as a Civil Rights School. It was one of the few places in the South where blacks and whites were encouraged to meet together and to stay together to plan action for Civil Rights. During this same period, Highlander staff developed an important program in the field which would have a big political impact in the South. Along with Septima Clark and a community leader named Esau Jenkins, the staff developed a Citizenship School Program that began in the Sea Islands off the coast of Charleston, but eventually spread throughout the South. It was designed to teach people enough literacy skills so they could pass a voter registration test, which was being used to keep black people from voting. Many people think of these schools - which built a politically conscious group of people - as the foundation for the Civil Rights Movement.
Several southern governors actively opposed Highlander because they knew it was openly challenging segregation and power politic. In efforts to undermine Highlander’s work, they they placed billboards throughout the South that displayed a picture of Dr. Martin Luther King at Highlander with the caption "Communist Training School." Then they worked with the House Un-American Activities Committee to hold a series of hearings about Highlander's "communism." Eventually, they organized a raid on the school and a brought a number of charges: selling beer without a license, running the school for the director’s profit and holding integrated classes. There were a series of court cases over two years and the school, after having its charter revoked and property sold at auction, was closed in 1961. However, the staff took a new charter and moved the school to Knoxville. As Myles said at the time, “you can padlock the buildings, but you can’t padlock the ideas.”
1970s and 80s: APPALACHIA
In the mid-1960s, the staff shifted the programs once more and began to work in Appalachia. They believed that the black south needed white Appalachian allies to work for democracy and equality along with them. once again the staff changed. Myles retired as the Director in 1972 and a young Appalachian, Mike Clark, took over. The focus of the work became land and resource issues in the mountains, often in coal mining communities. This gradually led to a strong focus on the environment. Myles still lived at Highlander and began to travel and relate Highlander’s work to international developments.
1980s and 90s: BUILDING BRIDGES IN APPALACHIA AND THE DEEP SOUTH
In the 1980s the staff began to bring Appalachian groups together with community groups from the Deep South around common problems – often the environment. They also developed a leadership-training program for both southern and Appalachian grassroots leaders. once again we had a new director, Hubert Sapp. Along with his wife Jane, they strengthened the ties to the Deep South and encouraged the staff to work more with youth leaders who would soon be taking strong roles in their communities. In the 1980s, following Myles interest in international developments, the staff added an international program.
CURRENT PERIOD: ECONOMIC JUSTICE AND DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPATION
In the late 1990s, the staff and board undertook a major evaluation of Highlander’s programs. After listening to community groups discuss issues and opinions about how Highlander can be most helpful, the staff and board put in place a long-range plan for the current times. It focuses on economic justice and democratic participation. It also makes note of the fact that the South is changing and now includes immigrants from other parts of the world, particularly Spanish speaking immigrants. Additionally, for the first time in Highlander’s history, the new Director is a woman, Suzanne Pharr.
We still seek to work with community groups most affected by serious problems. We still believe that they will have the best strategies to work on the problems and to take action. These groups include low-wage workers of all races, young people, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered persons and gay men who are targeted for abuse and discrimination, and new immigrants to the region.
Throughout its history Highlander has honored people’s experiences and also their culture. We always include some time for singing, dancing and good food. We believe that helps people to feel strong and able to go home and take action.
http://www.hrec.org/aboutus/history.htm
Myles Horton and Esau Jenkins in discussion at the Highlander, 1950s.
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