Profiles in Character #29: Myles Horton Empowers People to Help Themselves

In 1961, the state of Tennessee sued the Highlander Folk School, which had operated in the rural mountains of Monteagle since 1932.  The white power structure considered Highlander a “training school for communists” where blacks and whites learned together in defiance of segregation laws.  It was past time, they felt, to shut it down.

Myles Horton, called by some a “radical hillbilly,” was neither a communist nor surprised.  He believed in helping poor people of all races organize to help themselves.  “People can take much more control of their lives than they realize,” he told journalist Bill Moyers in a 1981 interview.  The key to taking control was to help them learn to think differently.  “Education is supposed to prepare people to live in whatever system the educational school system is about . . . to prepare people to support the system,” he said, but “Highlander says ‘no,’ you can’t use people that way.”

Inspired by educator John Dewey, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the rural Danish folk school movement, and Hull House’s Jane Addams, among others, the young Horton who grew up in poverty set as his goal helping others rise out of it.  Highlander’s short workshops engaged participants in learning together, not from teachers but from their own lived experiences. “Everyone in the circle is part of a peer teaching group . . .  I don’t believe in training people to do things.  You liberate them and they train themselves.”

“I’m an instrument,” Horton said, “and try to make Highlander an instrument of empowering people to understand and be creative and imagine that they don’t have to put up with the system the way it is.”  In the 1930s and 1940s, Highlander focused on helping workers organize and confront poor wages and working conditions.  As he helped those who labored, he drew the ire of their employers.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the focus turned to combating segregation.  Rosa Parks attended Highlander in August 1955 and credits it with inspiring her to realize that changing Montgomery’s bus segregation laws was possible.  Others who came through Highlander included Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Stokely Carmichael, Ralph Bunche and Julian Bond.  Another Highlander alumnus, future civil rights pioneer and Congressman John Lewis, said “I had never eaten a meal in the company of black and white diners” until Highlander.   The focus,” Morton said, was always on working with small, 20-30 person groups so people could engage in settings that encouraged sharing experiences and that would breed leaders “who multiply themselves” when they go back home.

This empowerment is captured in “We Shall Overcome,” the “anthem” of the civil rights movement.  It was Zilphia Horton, Myles’s wife, who adapted and simplified an older hymn and taught it at Highlander to the leaders of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Carmichael’s Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee among others. 

Highlander and Myles paid a price for “radicalism.”  Demanding to know why he was being arrested in 1933, Myles said he was told “You’re arrested for coming here and getting information and going back and teaching it.”  When Highlander’s focus on labor organizing was just too much for some, a contract on him was put out and four men with guns drove to the motel where he was staying.  Seeing them, Myles talked them out of it by asking them to discuss with each other which of them wanted to be killed first when they barged through the door and faced his gun. Threats from the Klan were not uncommon, nor was an occasional beating.  “Even the beatings I never took personally,” he said.  “I represented a challenge to their whole way of life – I was a symbol that represented something they hated.  As he told Moyers “That’s not the price you pay, that’s the privilege you have” for doing the work of helping people free themselves.

The state succeeded in its suit against Highlander.  The court - unsurprisingly - concluded that Myles operated Highlander for “personal and private gain,” in violation of its charter, though he insisted he never took a salary.  It concluded that “large quantities of beer were possessed and sold promiscuously to the students as well as the teachers,” though “selling” – and only for adults - consisted simply of dropping a quarter in a jar for each beer so the kitty could be replenished when it came time to buy more.  

The state confiscated and padlocked the property.  Myles’s response was: “You can’t padlock an idea.”  The very next day it opened under a new charter near Knoxville as the Highlander Research and Education Center.  It continues today.

Myles Horton is buried near the original Monteagle site.  His life is captured well in a Langston Hughes poem he often carried with him.  “I, too, sing America” tells of the “darker brother” sent “to eat in the kitchen when company comes” and ends:

“Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—“