The Highlander Folk School: Its Students, Its Destruction, and the Long Shadow of Racial Restriction

I finished from Fisk University in Nashville, TN, and during my time there gone through Monteagle, TN, a number of times, 90 miles east on I- 24 heading to Chattanooga, Atlanta, and various other factors I had cause to check out. I bear in mind Monteagle as the high point of the mountains in between Nashville and Chattanooga, which, depending upon the direction took a trip, suggested either leveling out after a steep incline or the start of a lengthy drop. I constantly paid attention when getting to Monteagle, yet not as a result of the importance of the Highlander Folk College once located there. The next time I pass through, it will be the school I think of.

The Highlander People Institution, established in 1932 in Monteagle, Tennessee, was never ever a college in the official feeling, but it operated as an institution in the inmost democratic tradition: an area where working individuals, Black sharecroppers, union organizers, and young civil‑rights protestors found out how to examine power, challenge fascism, and build movements that might alter the country. Its trainees went on to improve American life. Its adversaries went on to shed it down, take its land, and offer that land under conditions that reflected the racial caste system Highlander had spent years dealing with.

Highlander was established by Myles Horton, a young Tennessean that had researched theology and social values at Union Theological Academy in New York. Horton believed that education was not a top‑down procedure but a collective one: people found out best by analyzing their own lives, areas, and has a hard time. Motivated by Danish individual schools– rural establishments created to empower farmers and workers– Horton returned to Tennessee identified to develop a similar design in the American South.

He discovered allies in educator Don West and activist teacher James Dombrowski. Together they established the Highlander Individual Institution on a 200 acre system of land in Grundy Region. The school’s goal was extreme for its time: to bring Black and white Southerners with each other to pick up from each other, to challenge partition, and to construct interracial unions capable of changing the area.

Highlander was not a college. It did not provide degrees. It did not have a registrar’s office or a football group. What it had was much more harmful to the Jim Crow South: a pedagogy rooted in equality, a curriculum developed around collective problem‑solving, and a willingness to allow Black and white individuals rest together, consume with each other, and strategize with each other.

In the 1930 s and 1940 s, Highlander came to be a training ground for labor organizers. Fabric workers, miners, and farm workers concerned Monteagle to find out exactly how to discuss contracts, challenge abusive companies, and construct unions. The CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) relied upon Highlander as a Southern training hub. The institution’s interracial workshops were a direct affront to segregationist regulation and personalized. Horton and his colleagues rejected to set apart class, eating halls, or dorm rooms. They insisted that democracy can not be instructed in segregated room.

Highlander’s most renowned trainees originated from the Civil Rights Movement. The college’s function in the movement is so substantial that it is impossible to tell the tale of mid‑century Black liberty without going through Monteagle.

In the summer of 1955, months prior to she declined to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, Rosa Parks attended a workshop at Highlander. She came as part of her deal with the NAACP Young People Council. At Highlander, Parks experienced something she had actually never seen in Alabama: Black and white people living, discovering, and planning with each other as amounts to. She later said that Highlander “gave me the nerve to do what I did.” Her act of defiance was educated by years of advocacy, and sharpened by her time at Highlander.

“At Highlander, I located I can share myself easily. It was the first time I had been in an integrated situation where I really felt totally all-natural.”– Rosa Parks

Septima Poinsette Clark, typically called the “Mommy of the Movement,” became one of Highlander’s most prominent instructors. A South Carolina instructor fired for declining to renounce the NAACP, Clark created literacy programs at Highlander that came to be the foundation of the Citizenship Schools– grassroots establishments that taught Black Southerners how to read, create, and register to elect. These institutions assisted 10s of hundreds of Black people get rid of proficiency tests designed to disenfranchise them. Clark’s operate at Highlander aided lay the foundation for the Ballot Civil Liberty Act of 1965

Who Promotes the : Septima Poinsette Clark|by William Spivey|Black Background Month 365|Medium

John Lewis, after that a young protestor from Troy, Alabama, participated in Highlander workshops as component of his early training with the Pupil Nonviolent Coordinating Board (SNCC). Highlander aided form his approach of pacifist resistance and his understanding of grassroots organizing. Lewis would go on to become one of the most vital civil‑rights leaders in American history– a Flexibility Cyclist, a speaker at the March on Washington, a leader on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and a member of Congress for greater than 3 years.

King went to Highlander in 1957, speaking at the school’s 25 th wedding anniversary party. Segregationists utilized his presence to smear him as a communist sympathizer, yet King recognized Highlander’s significance. He praised the institution for its dedication to justice and its readiness to test partition directly.

“I have lengthy appreciated the noble function and imaginative work of this establishment. For twenty‑five years you have stood with dauntless nerve and fearless determination. You have provided the South a few of its most accountable leaders in this excellent duration of transition.”– Martin Luther King, Jr

Many SNCC protestors gone through Highlander’s workshops, discovering techniques for sit‑ins, Flexibility Rides, and voter‑registration drives. Highlander’s focus on cumulative management and participatory democracy deeply influenced SNCC’s organizational style.

Beyond the Civil Liberty Movement, Highlander educated generations of labor organizers, Appalachian neighborhood leaders, ecological lobbyists, and anti‑poverty advocates. It came to be a center for Southern grassroots motions long before “grassroots” became a political buzzword.

Highlander’s pupils ended up being union leaders, civil‑rights strategists, elected authorities, and motion elders. They lugged Highlander’s ideology into every edge of American public life.

Highlander’s interracial workshops made it a target from the beginning. Segregationists accused the school of communism, immorality, and racial blending– all code name for the exact same concern: that Highlander was showing Black Southerners just how to test white supremacy.

“Highlander Folk Institution: Communist Training School.”- Georgia Commission on Education

In 1961, the Tennessee legislature launched a worked with strike on the college. State authorities plundered Highlander, confiscated records, apprehended team, and charged the school with breaching alcohol legislations, a pretext commonly understood to be made. The state revoked Highlander’s charter, took its land, and closed the institution down.

“Today condition of the examination is a referral from the state legislature that legal process be taken to cancel Highlander’s charter and to discover me and put me in jail if the proof warrants. They dropped the fees of subversion and just chose to shut Highlander anyway.”– Myles Horton

Shortly later, one of Highlander’s main buildings burned. The fire was extensively thought to be arson, though nobody was ever before charged. The devastation of the structure represented the state’s broader goal: to ruin Highlander’s impact, erase its visibility, and scatter its area.

Highlander’s team collected yourself and reopened as the Highlander Research and Education Facility in Knoxville, later on relocating to New Market, Tennessee. Yet the initial Monteagle school, the land where Parks, Clark, Lewis, and King had walked, was gone.

After the state took Highlander’s 200 acres, it subdivided the land and sold it off. The sales happened throughout a period when racially restrictive agreements prevailed across the South, lawful conditions that restricted Black families from acquiring, leasing, or inhabiting land. These commitments were made use of to preserve partition, protect white building values, and avoid Black communities from obtaining grips in preferable areas.

While the reporting does not price estimate the exact language of the covenants used on Highlander’s former land, it documents the racialized control of the residential or commercial property and the exclusion of Highlander’s community, which included several Black lobbyists, from recovering it. The land passed into the hands of white preservationists and personal owners who kept control for years. Highlander itself was prevented from returning.

It took more than sixty years for Highlander to reclaim even a section of its original campus. In 2024, the company finally obtained 8 5 acres of the land that had actually been drawn from it, a little however meaningful reclamation of its background.

The Highlander Folk Institution’s heritage is not gauged in structures or acreage. It is gauged in the motions it assisted construct, the leaders it educated, and the democratic practices it supported. Highlander taught that regular people could evaluate their own conditions, challenge their own fascism, and build their own options. It taught that interracial cooperation was not only possible yet essential. It educated that freedom was not a viewer sport.

The college’s destruction, the fire, the raid, the land seizure, the racially restrictive sales– discloses just how harmful that vision was to the Jim Crow South. Highlander was not shut down because of alcohol violations. It was shut down since it was showing Black and white Southerners how to take down partition.

The land’s destiny shows the broader history of racial exclusion in America. Also after the institution was gone, the land itself became a site of racial control– a tip that white superiority is not just applied through legislations and violence yet with building, possession, and access.

Today, Highlander proceeds its operate in New Market, Tennessee, supporting activities for racial justice, labor legal rights, immigrant legal rights, environmental protection, and LGBTQ+ freedom. Its workshops currently train a new generation of coordinators, people battling citizen suppression, authorities violence, climate injustice, and financial inequality. The school’s history is not a relic. It is a blueprint.

The Highlander Folk College was melted, raided, closed down, and stripped of its land. But it was never ever defeated. Its students brought its lessons right into the streets of Montgomery, the bridges of Selma, the buses of the Flexibility Rides, the halls of Congress, and the class of America. Its approach that freedom must be discovered, exercised, and lived continues to form activities today.

The land where Highlander when stood narrates of resistance and suppression, of interracial collaboration and racial exemption, of democratic possibility and tyrannical reaction. It informs the story of the South, not as a monolith, however as a battlefield.

Highlander’s history reminds us that education is dangerous when it instructs individuals to question power. It advises us that land is political, that possession is a type of control, and that racial limitations do not disappear merely because laws alter. It advises us that activities are constructed not just in marches and speeches however in classrooms, workshops, and quiet discussions among individuals learning exactly how to eliminate for their very own freedom.

Most importantly, Highlander’s background reminds us that freedom is not inherited. It is taught. And in some cases, the locations where it is instructed must be rebuilt– repeatedly– on whatever land continues to be.

I’ve never been to New Market, TN, the current home of the Highlander Research and Education And Learning Facility. It’s someplace near Knoxville that I have actually driven via. Need to I be in the location, I’ll make it an indicate visit where history is still being made.