Highlander Research and Education Center

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 attacks 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 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 potential as books or lectures. Doing these activities together, the founders reasoned, was the means by which people learned the power of unity and organization and prefigured the transformative social worlds they sought to someday realize. And when enough “students,” all deliberately recruited from “the underclass,” put these lessons into action, the founders’ vision for a socialist revolution would come to fruition.

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.

In 1959, Highlander Folk School was raided and padlocked during an interracial voter-education workshop. After a long, losing court fight, Highlander Research and Education Center opened in an abandoned brothel 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.

Attacks on Highlander continued to mark its more recent history. In 2019, white supremacists set the main offices of Highlander on fire, destroying decades of historical documents, speeches, and artifacts. But this arson attack only momentarily paused the educational work of Highlander. Leadership and staff at Highlander sang freedom songs alongside Appalachian prison abolitionists, continuing the vital work of education and organizing even as the physical structure of Highlander smoldered in the morning light. Such uncompromising commitments to continue the work of learning from and standing alongside those engaged in struggles for a more just world demonstrate the persistent, long haul spirit of Highlander.

The school’s pedagogy, which predates what has come to be called the Freirean 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. At the heart of this pedagogy – what elsewhere has been referred to as the “Highlander idea” – is a deep faith in people as experts of their own lives. At Highlander, the curriculum emanates from and responds to the lived realities and experiences of participants. Consonant with the Mike Alewitz’s mural at Highlander, “Without Action there is No Education,” staff at Highlander facilitate the collective capacities of participants to analyze, speak, and act for themselves.

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, gender – and more recently, Indigenous, queer, dis/ability, and citizenship – as yet eludes the still-functioning school. Such aims have taken on increasingly multifaceted and intersectional complexity, and yet are buoyed by the center’s commitments to continually drawing its insights from those engaged in multi-issue struggles across the world.

Highlander outlived its peers, including many of the better known and connected among them, such as Brookwood, the Work People’s College, and Commonwealth. It not only outlived but also aimed to expand its operations, including a new Septima Clark Learning Center, which honors Clark’s extraordinary educational and organizing work by extending participatory research and popular education approaches to a new generation of educators and activists. The unexpected survival and thriving of Highlander for over a half-century may be its most important achievement.

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.

Horton, M. The Myles Horton Reader: Education for Social Change. Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 2003.

Phenix, L. M., & Selver, V. You got to move: Stories of change in the South. Milestone Film & Video, 2009.

Highlander Research and Education Center. Website. https://www.highlandercenter.org