Highlander Folk School

HIGHLANDER RESEARCH AND EDUCATION CENTER.

Highlander Folk School opened in a two-story frame house in Monteagle, Tennessee, on 1 November 1932 as a residential adult-education center. Since that time, uncounted southern activists from labor, the civil rights movement, and Appalachian mining or land struggles have used the school to learn from each other's experience demanding social change. Highlander’s purposes, the people who have learned and taught there, and the radically different educational philosophy undergirding what is taught and how, as well as its durability despite attack from government and allies, place Highlander uniquely within, yet apart from, the American Left.

Founded by southerners who met at Union Theological Seminary at a time when the nation’s economic and political institutions were in disarray, Highlander was one of nearly 250 operating labor colleges. Many had been started by the Socialist Party, unions, immigrants, or the Industrial Workers of the World to counteract the failures of public education, or to train new leadership. From the start, Highlander’s purposes differed in part. For Myles Horton, Elizabeth Hawes, James A. Dombrowski, Rupert Hampton, and Malcolm Chisholm, the founders, the school's ideology welled up from people rather than party, platform, or proclamation. They believed poor people themselves knew best what they needed to learn, and when, and could determine their own goals. Music, games, washing dishes, making a play, and traditional storytelling were as valued for their educative outcomes as books or lectures. Doing these activities together, the founders reasoned, was the means by which the poor learned the power of unity and organization, as well as the capacity of self. And when enough “students,” all deliberately recruited from “the underclass,” put these lessons into action, the founders’ vision for a socialist revolution would be realized.

Barney Graham, leader of miners striking for union recognition in Wilder, Tennessee, was one of the first persons to shape Highlander’s work and history. Besides leading the strike, Graham had been teaching Highlander students. He was shot to death by thugs on 2 May 1933. Other Highlander students experienced nonfatal intimidation while participating in historic conflicts: Paul Christopher, Esau Jenkins, Rosa Parks, Buck Maggard, Pedro Arculeta, Fanny Lou Hamer, Florence Reece, Stokely Carmichael.

With these and other equally determined activists coming and going, Highlander inevitably attracted both loyal support and fierce reaction. Perhaps as many as three thousand persons, and a handful of foundations, have kept the school in operating cash.

Others, however, including the state of Tennessee, Ku Klux Klan, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service, and several congressional investigating committees have tried to shut the school, sometimes with temporary success.

Highlander Folk School was raided and padlocked in 1959 during an interracial voter-education workshop. After a long, losing court fight, Highlander Research and Education Center opened in an abandoned whorehouse in Knoxville, Tennessee, operating there until the city used its power of eminent domain to seize the property. The school moved to New Market, Tennessee, its present location, in 1972. Internal conflicts have gripped Highlander from time to time, and were equally threatening, especially as the region's two principal social movements—the union drives of the thirties and the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties—ebbed or welled. Communists have spurned the school as reformist. Many unions repudiated Highlander as Communist controlled.

The school’s pedagogy, which predates what has come to be called the Freirian model, holds that education is a tool for social change, rather than the means by which labor and power relationships are reproduced in a capitalist wage and industrial system.

To some extent, Highlander’s original aims have been, and continue to be accomplished. New leaders have forged significant changes through unions, voter drives, music festivals, blockading strip mines, or taking polluters water they poisoned. The second aim, social reconstruction ending exploitation of labor, race, and gender, as yet eludes the stillfunctioning school.

Highlander outlived its peers, including many of the better known and connected among them, such as Brookwood, the Work People’s College, and Commonwealth. Its unexpected survival for over a half century may be its most important achievement.

[See also 

• Braden, Anne and Carl;

• Civil Rights Movement; 

• Dombrowski, James Anderson;

• Horton, Myles; 

• Southern Conference Educational Fund; 

• West, Don

.]}

FURTHER READING

Adams, Frank, and Myles Horton. Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander. New Market, Tenn.: J.F. Blair, 1975.

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

—FRANK ADAMS