Horton, Myles

HORTON, MYLES (1905–1990). Little in Myles Horton’s heritage suggested his subsequent lifetime of activism, either as an organizer or founder of Highlander Research and Education Center. He was born on July 5, 1905 in Savannah, Tennessee, the first of four children. At times, his father taught school, sold insurance, or was a county clerk. His mother taught school, too, before rearing children. The family was Cumberland Presbyterian, a restrained, virtuous faith with small-town, superficial concern for surrounding poverty but which ignored equally evident segregation or exploited labor. In 1928, as the South’s economy was collapsing, Horton graduated from Cumberland Presbyterian College. He got work with the Young Men’s Christian Association but soon enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

As a seminarian, Horton encountered the ideas of Christian socialism and Marx, other equally serious southerners, the Danish Folk High School movement, and Dr. Harry F. Ward’s unremitting calls for ethical service and labor. Horton returned to Tennessee dedicated to teaching a social gospel blending these influences. With other southerners, including Don West, James A. Dombrowski, and John Thompson, he founded Highlander Folk School in 1932 at Monteagle, Tennessee. His propelling impulse was a mixture of Christ’s teachings with socialist theories. In his endeavors at Highlander, he worked hand-in-hand with folklorist and civil rights activist Zilphia Mae Horton, whom he married in 1935.

Horton quickly became a controversial figure, first during a bloody miners’ strike only weeks after Highlander opened, but subsequently as well, during the drive by the Congress of Industrial Organizations to organize the South, in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the McCarthyism of the 1950s, and the Eastland hearings into subversion and the civil rights movement. Often at odds with allies on the left, Horton, a radical individualist in spirit and deed, remained unswerving in his faith that collective action could, and did, issue from hard-pressed people learning from their daily struggles. This stubborn belief reinforced his reputation as a loner undisciplined by ideology.

By 1982, when Highlander celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, Horton had been arrested, beaten, smeared as a Red, rebuked by union leaders and socialists, hated by segregationists, observed by government agents, and feared. He had seen the vision of interracial coalitions battered, if not set aside, and any hope of a thoroughgoing social reorganization postponed, if not daunted. Highlander had been fire-bombed, seized by the state of Tennessee, which sold the school and its possessions at public auction, and ousted by the city of Knoxville through a fraudulent urban renewal scheme. The school then moved to New Market, Tennessee.

Frustrated by biracial quiescence in the South, and labor’s diminished role within Appalachia, Horton sought peripatetically to link Highlander with revolutionary struggles in Cuba, China, and Central and Latin America. During these travels, he won deserved recognition, chiefly within the field of adult education.

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

Horton, Myles. The Long Haul: An Autobiography. New York: Doubleday, 1990.

Jacobs, Dales, ed., The Myles Horton Reader: Education for Social Change. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003).