The Highlander Folk School

     

Student Group at Highlander

       Northwest of Chattanooga, high on the Cumberland Plateau, is Monteagle Tennessee. Many times, driving from Atlanta to Kansas City we have taken the long uphill Interstate 24 up over the plateau and then on to Nashville, wondering what was on either side of the highway.  One time we even drove off the Interstate and passed by the University of the South. Little did we know that Monteagle had been the site of a tremendously influential, little known community organizing school for the activists of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s Civil Rights Movements.  The Highlander Folk School began in 1932 as a labor school for southern workers in the depths of the Great Depression.  Founder Myles Horton envisioned the school as a place where people learned to take control of their life, a place with projects based on the needs of the people instead of fixed specific programs (Hughes 244).

        Prior to World War II the school supported southern workers with organization efforts, labor education programs and aid for striking workers. They advocated for racially integrated labor unions that would counteract the company instigated conflict between white workers and black workers. In practice, the ideal of racial integration was difficult. Reactions from the surrounding communities endangered black speakers and students. White students rebelled at sharing quarters with black students. Nevertheless, the staff and faculty persisted and racial integration, if not perfect, was a policy(Glen 2-5, 30).

          As Brown v. Board wound its way through the courts, the Highlander Folk School was in transition.  The changes brought about by the policies of the New Deal, the build-up to World War II and the war’s aftermath, plus changing relationships with unions called for a new focus. Race was seen as the most important and complex problem in the South. In 1953 Highlander decided to start preparation for school desegregation (Glen 2). Kept intact for the racial integration work was the “Drip” Theory in union organizing that had been taught at Highlander which relied upon ways to “develop widespread local leadership using a small central staff” (Horton 309).  Racially mixed workshops on “The Supreme Court Decisions and the Public Schools” were started in anticipation of the Brown ruling (Glen 130).

      In the summer of 1955, prior to her December 1 arrest, Rosa Parks was convinced to attend an integration workshop. John M. Glen, author of Highlander No Ordinary School 1932-1961 contends the summer workshop was one of many experiences, including belonging to the Montgomery NAACP, that gave Parks the courage to stay seated.  After the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Parks returned to Highlander to share experiences (135,140).

Rosa Parks at Highlander

     Along with the desegregation workshops Highlander also started annual college workshops in 1954 training both black and white college students for leadership in combating racial discrimination in the South. Many of the young civil rights leaders of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s were influenced by these workshops. During this period some of the Highlander supporters were Eleanor Roosevelt, A. Philip Randolph, Jackie Robinson, Harry Belafonte and Martin Luther King, Jr. just to name a few (Glen 151 and 199). King participated in a 25^th Anniversary workshop in 1957.

Check from Eleanor Roosevelt to support Highlander

     The Feb. 1, 1960 sit-ins in Greensboro, NC brought another change to Highlander. Galvanized, young people across the south conducted other sit-ins in more than a hundred communities (Glen 145).  The Highlander workshop of April 1-3, 1960 was attended by veterans of these sit-ins, both black and white, from colleges across the south. Named “The New Generation Fights for Equality” the workshops gave the students opportunity to sort out their role in the struggle for civil rights. The sit-ins marked a shift from legal approaches to direct action and from established organizations to student led actions. Two weeks later many of these students would gather at Rusk College in Raleigh, NC to form the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (Glen 146-148).

     Then, just the next month, May, 1960, Ella Baker along with Fred Shuttlesworth attended  “The Place of the White Southerner in the Current Struggle for Justice”. Baker had brought the students together in Raleigh with the message that they were capable of making their own path. Shuttlesworth, a leading minister from Birmingham, was a leader in the 1963 “Birmingham Campaign”. The purpose of the workshop, evident in its title, was the best way for whites to work in the struggle. Again, the attendees were both black and white, with more white than black.

Ella Baker at Highlander

          Baker was back at Highlander the following year, in April 1961. This workshop was titled “New Frontiers for College Students”.  Glen notes that, while there were real differences in organizing concepts, commitment to direct action, and the role of whites, the opportunity for an honest exchange was appreciated and valued. Some of these students would ride the buses in the 1961 “Freedom Rides” (150).

          It was at the August, 1961 SNCC meeting at Highlander that Baker kept the group from splitting into two camps. Her proposal that SNCC take up both direct action and voter registration was accepted, keeping SNCC one entity, reflecting Highlanders philosophy that the person with the problem is best able to find the solution (Moses 44).

          The Highlander Folk School has had a turbulent history. Accused of being a Communist Training school they suffered attacks over the entire span of their existence (Glen 1). At the time Baker was preventing the SNCC split she was also working with Myles Horton to keep the school open. The school was shut down in the fall of 1961 and a new organization with the same ideals was opened in Knoxville by Horton. The Highlander Research and Education Center today is a “catalyst for grassroots organizing and movement building in Appalachia and the South” (Mission).

          This school is important to school desegregation, early 60’s activism and the rallying “We Shall Overcome.”  C. Alvin Hughes, in his paper about the role and influences of the school contends that without the school desegregation would have been even slower, the 1960’s student movements might have taken another path and we might not know of the anthem to Civil Rights.

Pete Seeger, who with Zilphia Horton, made
"We Shall Overcome" the anthem of the Civil Rights Movement

Hughes, C. Alvin. "A New Agenda for the South: The Role and Influence of the Highlander Folk School, 1953-1961." Phylon 46.3 (1985): 242- 250. Print.

Glen, John M. Highlander, No Ordinary School, 1932-1962. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1988. Print. 

"Mission." Highlander Research and Education Center. Highlander Research and Education Center. n.d. Web. 3 May, 2014.