Highlander: The School That Trained Rosa Parks

In April of nineteen thirty-two, a twenty-seven-year-old graduate student named Myles Horton and a minister named Don West opened a school in Monteagle, Tennessee, in a region where labor organizers were being beaten and coal-mine operators ran private security forces that functioned more like private armies. The Highlander Folk School was not a conventional institution. It had no accreditation, no endowment, no influential board of trustees. What it had was a clear purpose: teach people who had been excluded from power how to organize.

From its first year, Highlander ran integrated programs. In the state of Tennessee, in the nineteen-thirties and forties, that was illegal. Highlander did it anyway, and it paid a price for it. Tennessee state officials monitored the school. Newspapers called it a Communist front. The Ku Klux Klan made threats.

In the summer of nineteen fifty-five, a seamstress and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People secretary named Rosa Parks attended a workshop at Highlander on desegregation strategy. She was forty-two years old and had been a civil rights activist for years. Four months after her workshop ended, on December first, nineteen fifty-five, she was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus to a white passenger. The Montgomery Bus Boycott that followed lasted three hundred eighty-one days and became one of the pivotal campaigns of the Civil Rights Movement.

Pete Seeger visited Highlander and learned a version of a song called 'We Shall Overcome,' adapted from a hymn that Highlander workshop participants had been singing. His arrangement became the anthem of the movement.

The state of Tennessee shut Highlander down in nineteen sixty-one on tax charges that critics described as pretextual. The institution reorganized, moved, and continues today as the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee. Its archives are open to researchers. The building where Rosa Parks attended her workshop is gone. The work it housed is not.