CREDIT: Ida Berman, photographer. Highlander Center Archives
DURING THE summer of 1955 Rosa Parks attended a ten-day interracial workshop at the Highlander Folk School, a training center for union and civil rights activists in rural Tennessee. Founded by Myles Horton in 1932, Highlander was one of the few places where whites and blacks—rank-and-file activists and left-wing radicals—could participate as equals. At the workshop that Parks attended, civil rights activists talked about strategies for implementing integration.
“One of my greatest pleasures there was enjoying the smell of bacon frying and coffee brewing and knowing that white folks were doing the preparing instead of me,” Parks recalled. “I was 42 years old, and it was one of the few times in my life up to that point when I did not feel any hostility from white people.”
Parks was a veteran activist with the Montgomery, Alabama, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, challenging the Jim Crow laws that kept blacks from voting, and organizing black youths to protest the city’s segregated public library system. Her experience at Highlander persuaded her that it was possible for blacks and whites to live in “an atmosphere of complete equality,” without “any artificial barriers of racial segregation.” So when she decided to resist Montgomery’s segregation law by refusing to move to the back of the bus on December 1, 1955, she was not acting on the spur of the moment after a hard day’s work. Her action was something she had been thinking about for a long time, but the workshop at Highlander six months earlier had strengthened her resolve.
Highlander’s cultural workshops, led by Horton’s wife Zilphia, brought activists and song leaders together to share songs and create new ones, often by revising popular songs and hymns. It was at Highlander that folksingers Pete Seeger and Guy Carawan first heard the song “We Shall Overcome,” originally a Negro hymn that North Carolina tobacco workers had used to lift their spirits during a strike. Seeger and Carawan revised the words, quickened the tempo, and tweaked the tune, then taught the song to students involved in the sit-in movement and sang it at rallies and marches and in jails. The song eventually became a civil rights anthem around the world.
The issues have evolved over time, but Highlander has retained the Hortons’ original philosophy. “We believe that education leads to action,” Myles Horton said in 1972. “If you advocate just one action, you’re an organizer. We teach leadership here. Then people go out and do what they want.” But Horton was being somewhat disingenuous. He was a radical, and he started Highlander to help people challenge the South’s class and racial caste system. The people he brought to Highlander shared some version of his progressive belief in greater economic and racial equality.
Horton was born in a log cabin near Savannah, Tennessee, in 1905. Both his parents had been schoolteachers before Horton’s birth, but when the state increased its standards and required teachers to have one year of high school (which neither had), they lost their jobs. So his parents worked in factories, as sharecroppers, and at other odd jobs.
“From my mother and father,” Horton wrote, “I learned the idea of service and the value of education.” His mother organized classes for poor and illiterate neighbors. His father was a member of the Workers’ Alliance, a union formed by employees of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration.
While in high school, Horton worked as a store clerk, at a sawmill, and in a factory making crates for shipping tomatoes. Upset at earning only a penny a crate, Horton persuaded the other employees to stop working and hold out for a pay increase. “The tomatoes kept stacking up,” Horton recalled, and after two hours, they got their raise.
Horton entered Cumberland University in Tennessee in 1924 and quickly led a student rebellion against the hazing of freshmen by fraternities. The next summer, working in a Tennessee factory, he shocked his fellow workers by supporting John T. Scopes, who was on trial for teaching evolution.
In the 1920s the YMCA had campus chapters devoted to social action based on the Christian Social Gospel. During Horton’s junior year, he attended a YMCA conference at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where he had his first contact with African American and foreign students. He was angry that he was not permitted to take a Chinese girl to a restaurant or to enter a public library with a black acquaintance. He was further angered by a Labor Day speech given on campus by John Emmett Edgerton, a woolen manufacturer and a trustee of Cumberland University. Edgerton warned students that northern agitators were starting labor unions that would destroy industry and jobs in the South. To see for himself, Horton went to Edgerton’s textile mill in Lebanon, Tennessee; he was shocked by the conditions and urged the workers to organize. University officials threatened to expel him if he visited the mill again.
During the summer of 1927 Horton took a job teaching Bible school classes to poor mountain people in Ozone, Tennessee, for the Presbyterian Church. He invited the students’ parents to discuss their problems, and they talked about the challenges of farming, how to get a job in a textile mill, how to test wells for typhoid, and other issues. During the course of the summer, more and more people came to Horton’s sessions. For the twenty-two-year-old Horton, the people’s response to his classes was a revelation. He realized that he could lead a discussion without knowing all the answers. And he could get people to talk about their problems so they could figure out for themselves how to solve them.
Inspired by these experiences, when he graduated from Cumberland, Horton enrolled at the Union Theological Seminary (UTS) in New York, where he took classes with Reinhold Niebuhr, a leading theologian who headed the Fellowship of Socialist Christians and who cofounded, with socialist Norman Thomas, the World Tomorrow, a journal dedicated to “a social order based on the religion of Jesus.” While at UTS, he visited local settlement houses, Brookwood Labor College (headed by A. J. Muste), and several utopian cooperative communities (such as the Oneida Community) that had been formed by religious and radical groups in the 1800s. He also helped organize garment workers in New York City, and visited North Carolina to observe a textile strike.
In 1930 and 1931, as the Depression deepened, Horton took graduate courses at the University of Chicago with Robert Park and Lester Ward, two reform-oriented sociologists, and John Dewey, the philosopher and educational reformer. He also visited Jane Addams at Hull House.
These ideas and experiences strengthened Horton’s resolve to connect education and social action, and when he toured Denmark’s folk schools in 1931 and 1932, he discovered the pragmatic approach that would animate him for the rest of his life. The folk schools helped mobilize Danish citizens—first rural peasants, then urban workers—to deal with their social and economic problems. Horton admired the close informal relations among students and teachers and their use of culture—songs and stories—as tools for learning. He decided that he wanted to start a similar school in the South, helping ordinary people—black and white, rural and urban—to become effective activists.
In 1932 Horton joined forces with two other white southern progressives—Don West and Jim Dombrowski—to start the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, about fifty-five miles northwest of Chattanooga.
Highlander began with eight students, who were motivated by a commitment to improve their communities. Horton and the students soon got involved helping striking coal miners in Wilder, Tennessee, 100 miles from Monteagle, by soliciting and distributing food and clothing. The violence used by the company against the strikers, the complicity of local government officials, the biased coverage by the newspapers, the murder of the local union president, and the near starvation conditions faced by the workers and their families shocked Horton and shaped Highlander’s labor education program. The school offered practical courses in labor history, union strategies, economics, journalism, public speaking, parliamentary procedure, mimeographing and posters, drama, and music.
Within a few years, Highlander had become a training center for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) union organizers and leaders in the South. It helped coal miners, woodcutters, mill hands, and other workers. Horton and his colleagues defiantly insisted that the workshops be racially integrated, which was not only controversial but also a violation of Tennessee’s laws.
Highlander began holding workshops on public school desegregation in 1953, nearly a year before the US Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling and two years before the Montgomery bus boycott. Highlander became a magnet for people concerned about racial injustice and civil rights. It attracted people from high schools and colleges, churches, YMCAs, unions, and social clubs. It also sponsored racially integrated children’s camps. In 1957 the twentyeight-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. attended a Highlander workshop. Many people who became local leaders in the civil rights movement spent time at Highlander, as did other prominent leaders, including Andrew Young, Fannie Lou Hamer, Stokely Carmichael, James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, Ralph Abernathy, and John Lewis, who would become a congressman from Atlanta. Eleanor Roosevelt was a longtime supporter and an occasional visitor. After attending a Highlander workshop, two black community leaders from South Carolina—Esau Jenkins and Septima Clark—organized Citizenship Schools where black adults could learn to read and write and thus qualify to vote.
Highlander inevitably stirred controversy. In 1954 Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, a segregationist, held Senate hearings to uncover “subversive” activities, including at Highlander. In 1957 Georgia’s Commission on Education, created to counter school desegregation efforts, distributed 250,000 copies of a four-page report, “Highlander Folk School: Communist Training School,” with photos of Highlander’s interracial meetings. Southern newspapers labeled Highlander a Communist training camp promoting racial integration. The right-wing John Birch Society put up billboards across the South with a photo of Martin Luther King at Highlander and the caption “Martin Luther King at Communist Training School.” Highlander’s insurance company canceled its fire insurance, which Horton suspected was the work of segregationists trying to put Highlander out of business.
Between 1957 and 1971 the Internal Revenue Service revoked Highlander’s tax-exempt status three times, a form of harassment meant to undermine its fund-raising efforts. The Ku Klux Klan marched in front of the school. In 1960 Tennessee courts ordered Highlander closed on the grounds that it had violated its charter by “permitting integration in its school work.” Horton immediately relocated the school to Knoxville, Tennessee, and changed the name to Highlander Research and Education Center. In 1971 the school moved to a 100-acre mountainside farm in New Market, Tennessee.
Horton retired from Highlander in 1971, traveled around the world to explain the Highlander idea to educators, wrote his autobiography The Long Haul, and died in 1990. Highlander has continued as a center for social activism. It helped spawn a grassroots environmental justice movement across the South, opposing strip mining, advocating for worker health and safety, fighting pollution and toxic dumping, and supporting the antiglobalization movement by sponsoring workshops on economic human rights and fair trade.