Highlights Archives
Images of the Highlander Folk School
The Highlander Folk School, and later the Highlander Research and Education Center, began in the 1930s as a social leadership center focused on labor organization in Monteagle, Tennessee. In 1953 Highlander shifted focus to civil rights, reflecting an underlying belief that advances in labor depended greatly on defeating segregation. The shift to civil rights attracted activists like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks, and provoked a backlash among white supremacists that earned the school a reputation as a communist breeding ground. The distinguished and tumultuous history of the Highlander Folk School is the subject of this month's featured gallery from Wisconsin Historical Images, the Society's online image database.
Myles Horton and Don West created the Highlander Folk School in 1932 to educate rural and industrial leaders for what they called "a new social order." Through the mid-1940s, Highlander worked primarily to build a labor movement among farmers, laborers, miners and woodcutters by supporting strikes and training workers to take leadership roles.
Shifting to civil rights in 1953, Highlander drew the ire of the press during its 25th anniversary in 1957. Speakers at the event, who included Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks and Aubrey Williams, were accused of inciting racial strife throughout the south. After the event, the Georgia Commission on Education published a propaganda piece titled "Highlander Folk School: Communist Training School, Monteagle, Tennessee" that contained a photograph of a black man dancing with a white woman. The document outraged supremacist groups and set in motion a series of events that culminated in revocation of the school's charter by the state of Tennessee in 1961. To ensure that the school's operation would cease, the state took possession of the land and locked its doors.
Ever resilient, however, Horton and other leaders at the school reorganized as the Highlander Research and Education Center and moved the school from Monteagle to Knoxville, Tennessee. Highlander moved to its current location in New Market in 1971.
Throughout its 75-year history, Highlander has provided a critical voice for social and economic justice. Interspersed within the images of union workshops and daily life are portraits of some of America's most revered social activists, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Septima Clark, and May Justus. The Civil Rights anthem, "We Shall Overcome," was first brought to Highlander by Zilphia Horton, where it gained national importance in the hands of folk singers Pete Seeger and Guy Carawan, both frequent guests at Highlander. That this voice persists today serves as a testament to the vitality of American egalitarian ideals and as a reminder that the forces of inequality have yet to be fully silenced.
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:: Posted December 12, 2007
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