Stephen Preskill - Education in Black and White: Myles Horton and the Highlander Centers Vision for Social Justice

Not long after Myles Horton died in 1990, activist Anne Braden paid tribute to Horton for his commitment to doing the impossible. As she saw it, establishing the Highlander Folk School in 1932 in the depths of the Great Depression and in a profoundly impoverished part of rural Tennessee epitomized the impossible. Just as improbably, Horton chose to make Highlander a center for adult learning where subjugated southern workers, both black and white, could meet in a spirit of equality and mutual respect. Few places in the world were as inhospitable to workers rights and racial justice as the rural South in the 1930s. Jim Crow segregation engulfed the region, and workers who organized for higher wages and better working conditions risked being branded as Communists. Braden called it an impossible mission at an impossible time. Nor did she underestimate its perils: One did not challenge the Souths way of life without risking ones own life in the process.

From the beginning, sociologist Aldon Morris affirmed, Highlander was a rarity. In the midst of worker oppression, racism, and lynchings, Highlander unflinchingly communicated to the world that it was an island of decency that would never betray its humanitarian vision.

As director of Highlander over the course of some forty years, Horton had a hand in fueling two of the twentieth centurys greatest social movements: the crusade for organized labor and the freedom struggle for civil rights. Because of Highlander, thousands of people gained the determination and the skills to make change for the common good in their communities. At the heart of Highlanders educational approach stood its commitment to democracy, which Horton saw as much more than casting a ballot or majority rule. For him, it meant nothing less than carving out a free space for people to learn, play, and work together and to gain greater control over their collective lives.

In his 1952 book South of Freedom, which examined life under Jim Crow, black journalist Carl Rowan identified a handful of white southerners actively working for racial justice. Horton was one of these. Rowan admired him for spearheading one of the few meeting places in the South that insisted on racial integration, and for being willing to denounce racial segregation as the root and perpetrator of all the evils plaguing the South.

In November 2016, leaders in the Black Lives Matter movement chose the Highlander Research and Education Center as the site for an important organizational gathering because they knew about Highlanders relentless commitment to social justice. They knew that Highlander had fearlessly taken the side of the disempowered and the dispossessed for over eighty years. And they knew that when the civil rights movement reached its height, Highlander remained one of the few places in the South that embraced freedom fighters like Rosa Parks, Septima Clark, Ella Baker, Dorothy Cotton, Andrew Young, and Dr. Martin Luther King. All came to Highlander to continue the struggle for human rights, and all aligned themselves with Highlander in promoting participatory democracy and social change from the bottom up. Highlanders legacy lives on in the hearts of some of Americas most dedicated racial justice activists.