Case Study 1: Highlander Folk School — Education as Organizing

A School Where Nobody Lectured

In the fall of 1932, a twenty-seven-year-old Tennessean named Myles Horton opened a school in a donated house on a mountaintop in Monteagle, Tennessee. He had $1,300, a few allies, and an idea that was either brilliant or insane, depending on who you asked.

The idea was this: the people who face a problem are the ones best equipped to solve it. The role of the educator is not to deliver answers but to create a space where people can think together, share what they know, and figure out what to do. The teacher should not lecture. The teacher should listen.

This was the founding premise of the Highlander Folk School, and over the next nine decades it would produce an educational legacy that connected Appalachian labor organizing to the civil rights movement, trained Rosa Parks and Septima Clark and hundreds of other activists, pioneered the Citizenship Schools that registered tens of thousands of Black voters across the South, and demonstrated that education could be an instrument of liberation rather than an instrument of control.

Myles Horton and the Danish Connection

Myles Horton was born in 1905 in Savannah, Tennessee, in the western part of the state. His parents were public school teachers — committed, modestly compensated, and deeply aware of the connection between education and community empowerment. Horton attended Cumberland University, where he organized a vacation Bible school program that brought him into contact with poor rural communities for the first time. The experience radicalized him — not through ideology but through observation. He saw that the people he was supposed to be teaching knew more about their own lives than he did, and that the standard educational model — expert delivers knowledge to passive recipients — was fundamentally backwards.

Horton pursued graduate studies at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he encountered Reinhold Niebuhr, the most influential American theologian of the era, who encouraged him to connect his educational vision to social action. But the most transformative experience of Horton's intellectual development was a trip to Denmark, where he visited the Danish folk high schools — residential adult education institutions that had been operating since the mid-nineteenth century.

The Danish folk schools were not vocational institutions. They were places where adults came together to discuss, debate, and learn — with an emphasis on democratic participation, cooperative economics, and cultural identity. The schools had been credited with transforming Danish rural society, creating a politically engaged peasant class that demanded and won democratic reforms. The teachers did not lecture from prepared materials. They facilitated discussions in which the students' own experiences were the primary curriculum.

Horton returned to Tennessee determined to create something similar in the Appalachian South — a school that would serve the same function for mountain and mill workers that the Danish schools had served for Danish farmers. The result was Highlander.

The Labor Workshops: 1932–1950

Highlander's early years were focused on labor education — providing training, analysis, and strategic support for workers organizing unions in the industries of the Appalachian South: coal, textiles, lumber, and hosiery.

The format was the residential workshop — participants would come to Highlander for periods ranging from a few days to several weeks, living together in integrated facilities (Black and white together, years before this was common anywhere in the South), sharing meals, and participating in intensive sessions that combined discussion, role-playing, strategy planning, and cultural activities.

The workshops were unlike anything the participants had experienced in formal education. There were no lectures, no textbooks, no exams. Horton and his colleagues would begin a session by asking the participants to describe their situation — what were the conditions in their workplaces, what had they tried, what had worked, what had failed. The discussion that followed drew connections between individual experiences and broader patterns, between local struggles and national labor history, between the immediate problem and the systemic structures that produced it.

"We never had a curriculum in the traditional sense," Horton explained in a 1976 interview. "The curriculum was the people's experience. They came in with problems. Real problems. Not textbook problems. And we helped them think about those problems in new ways — to see the connections, to develop strategies, to go back and organize."

The approach was remarkably effective. Workers who arrived at Highlander uncertain and isolated left with a framework for understanding their situation, a set of organizing skills, and — perhaps most importantly — a network of allies who were facing similar challenges. The connections forged at Highlander workshops persisted long after the participants went home, creating an informal network of labor activists across the Appalachian South.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Highlander provided training and support for organizing drives in industries across the region. Textile workers from North Carolina, hosiery workers from Tennessee, and coal miners from Kentucky and West Virginia came to Highlander, learned from each other, and returned to their communities to organize. Highlander staff also traveled to communities, conducting workshops on-site at union halls, churches, and private homes.

"We Shall Overcome"

One of Highlander's most enduring contributions to American culture emerged from its labor education workshops. The song "We Shall Overcome" — which would become the anthem of the civil rights movement — was adapted at Highlander from a hymn and labor song.

Zilphia Horton, Myles Horton's wife and Highlander's music director, learned a version of the song from striking tobacco workers in Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1940s. The workers sang "We Will Overcome" on the picket line. Zilphia Horton brought the song back to Highlander, where it was taught at workshops and gradually transformed — Pete Seeger changed "will" to "shall" and added verses, and Guy Carawan, who succeeded Zilphia as Highlander's music director, popularized the version that would be sung at civil rights demonstrations across the South.

The song's journey from a labor picket line in Charleston to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial — where it was sung at the March on Washington in 1963 — illustrates the connection that Highlander facilitated between the labor movement and the civil rights movement. The two struggles were not separate in Highlander's analysis. They were manifestations of the same underlying dynamic: the concentration of power in the hands of the few at the expense of the many.

Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Workshop

In the summer of 1955, a quiet, dignified woman named Rosa Parks traveled from Montgomery, Alabama, to attend a workshop at Highlander on desegregating public schools. Parks was forty-two years old and had been active in the NAACP in Montgomery for more than a decade. She was tired — tired of the daily indignities of racial segregation, tired of the fear, tired of the acquiescence.

At Highlander, for the first time in her adult life, Parks experienced an integrated community. She ate meals with white people. She participated in discussions as an equal. She slept in the same dormitory. She was treated, in her own words, "as a human being."

The experience did not directly cause Parks to refuse to give up her bus seat on December 1, 1955 — that decision was the product of a lifetime of resistance and was part of a planned challenge to Montgomery's bus segregation. But Parks repeatedly credited Highlander with giving her the confidence and the vision of an alternative. "At Highlander," she said, "I found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society."

Parks's connection to Highlander became a weapon in the hands of segregationists, who used it to red-bait the civil rights movement. A photograph of Parks at a Highlander workshop, seated near Horton and a man identified (incorrectly, by some accounts) as a Communist Party member, was printed on billboards across the South with the caption: "Martin Luther King at Communist Training School." The billboards were a lie — King had attended a Highlander event, but the caption misidentified the specific event and the purpose — but they revealed the threat that Highlander's interracial, egalitarian model posed to the segregationist order.

The Citizenship Schools: Education for Democracy

Highlander's most measurable impact on American history may have been the Citizenship Schools program — an adult literacy initiative designed to help Black Southerners pass the literacy tests that were used as barriers to voter registration.

The program originated with Septima Clark, a veteran teacher and civil rights activist from South Carolina, who joined Highlander's staff in the mid-1950s. Clark understood that the literacy tests used across the South to prevent Black voter registration were not just educational barriers — they were instruments of political suppression. Teaching people to read and write was not just education. It was a direct challenge to white political supremacy.

The first Citizenship School was established in 1957 on Johns Island, one of the South Carolina Sea Islands, taught by Bernice Robinson, a beautician with no formal teaching credentials. Robinson was chosen precisely because she was not a professional teacher — Highlander's philosophy held that the best teachers were people who shared the students' background and understood their circumstances. Robinson taught her students to read and write using materials drawn from their own lives: their names, their addresses, the voter registration forms, the state constitution. The students learned to read not to pass a test but to claim a right.

The Citizenship Schools were extraordinarily effective. Students who had never read a word learned, in a matter of weeks, to fill out voter registration forms. The program expanded rapidly across the South Carolina coast, then to Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and beyond. By the early 1960s, the program was growing faster than Highlander could manage it. In 1961, the program was transferred to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), where Andrew Young (later the mayor of Atlanta and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations) administered it. Under SCLC, the Citizenship Schools trained thousands of voter registration workers and contributed directly to the dramatic increase in Black voter registration across the South that preceded and followed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Raid and the Rebirth

In 1959, Tennessee authorities raided Highlander. State agents descended on the campus, arrested participants, and seized the property. The official charges included selling beer without a license and operating a school in violation of the state's segregation laws. The real motivation was political: Highlander's civil rights work had made it a target for segregationist politicians who wanted it destroyed.

The Tennessee courts revoked Highlander's charter and confiscated its land and buildings. Myles Horton, characteristically, was defiant. "They can padlock a building," he said, "but they can't padlock an idea."

He was right. Horton reconstituted the organization as the Highlander Research and Education Center, relocated to Knoxville and later to New Market, Tennessee, and continued operating. The reconstituted Highlander expanded its work to include Appalachian community organizing, environmental justice, and immigration rights, while maintaining the same core principles: the people closest to the problem are the best equipped to solve it, education should serve liberation rather than conformity, and democracy is not a spectator sport.

Highlander's Legacy

Highlander did not build buildings. It did not establish a campus with manicured lawns and ivy-covered halls. It did not produce graduates with degrees or diplomas. What it produced was leaders — thousands of them, over nine decades, who went back to their communities and organized.

The roster of people who passed through Highlander workshops reads like a directory of American social movement history: Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Septima Clark, John Lewis, Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Eleanor Roosevelt (who visited and spoke there), Pete Seeger, and hundreds of labor organizers, civil rights workers, community activists, and ordinary citizens whose names never made the history books but who changed the places where they lived.

Highlander's contribution to Appalachian education was not a school in any conventional sense. It was a demonstration that education could be something other than the transmission of approved knowledge from credentialed experts to passive recipients. It was proof that the people who are most affected by injustice are the ones who understand it best, and that giving them a space to think together, strategize together, and support each other is the most powerful form of education there is.

Myles Horton died in 1990. The Highlander Research and Education Center continues his work. The idea remains unpadlocked.

Discussion Questions

1. Myles Horton believed that "the people who face a problem are the ones best equipped to solve it." How does this philosophy differ from the approach of the settlement schools described in this chapter? What are the strengths and limitations of each approach?

2. Highlander's workshops were interracial at a time when the Jim Crow South enforced rigid segregation. Why was integration central to Highlander's educational mission, not just an incidental feature? How did the experience of integration at Highlander affect participants like Rosa Parks?

3. The Citizenship Schools taught people to read and write not as an abstract educational goal but as a specific tool for voter registration. What does this connection between literacy and political power tell us about the relationship between education and democracy? Are there contemporary parallels?

4. Tennessee authorities shut down Highlander in 1959, confiscating its property and revoking its charter. Why was a small educational institution in rural Tennessee perceived as such a threat by state authorities? What does the state's response tell us about the power of Highlander's educational model?

5. Highlander's contribution to American history — training Rosa Parks, developing the Citizenship Schools, popularizing "We Shall Overcome" — originated in an Appalachian institution focused on Appalachian labor organizing. What does this connection between Appalachian labor history and the civil rights movement suggest about the relationship between different forms of social justice organizing?