Education in Black and White: Myles Horton and the Highlander Center's Vision for Social Justice

Abstract

Highlander Center has been indispensable to the struggle for social and economic justice in the US South. Founded in 1932 by Myles Horton and others as the Highlander Folk School, the center has transformed itself over the years to meet the challenges of the times. Initially, Highlander focused on the educational and organizational needs of working-class people in East Tennessee. In the late 1930s and 1940s it served primarily as a training center for CIO unions across the region. In the 1950s and 1960s, it redirected its efforts to support southern civil rights struggles. And during the last decades of the twentieth century, it was heavily involved in economic and environmental battles in Appalachia.Stephen Preskill's Education in Black and White: Myles Horton and the Highlander Center's Vision for Social Justice is the most recent book about Horton and the institution he led. Most previous books have been written by people with close ties to the center, including one by Horton himself. Preskill doesn't intend his book to be a revision of that scholarship or a comprehensive history of the man or the place. It is, instead, an exploration of the educational vision of both.The story begins in western Tennessee, where Horton grew up. His parents had eighth-grade educations and taught briefly in the public schools. But they spent most of their lives moving around the region looking for jobs to keep their family clothed and fed. One thing was constant in their migrant life: their desire for their children to get the best education possible.Horton was a good student and voracious reader, but his real education came from witnessing the poverty and racial discrimination that characterized the region. After graduating from college and teaching for a few years, Horton enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he studied with Reinhold Niebuhr as well as Columbia University's John Dewey. A year at the University of Chicago brought him in contact with the sociologist Robert Park and Hull House's Jane Addams. Uninterested in an academic career, Horton took off for Denmark to learn about the Danish folk schools and their focus on adult learning. By the end of the trip, he had developed a vision for Highlander Folk School, his institutional home for the rest of his life.Stephen Preskill argues that popular education was central to Highlander's vision throughout the transformations of the past ninety years. Popular education was not about credentials or degrees. It was a process in which people started from their own experiences, learned from each other, and then worked collaboratively toward a transformative political goal. The workshops and training sessions that brought thousands of people to Highlander were based on this principle.Preskill addresses some of the most difficult issues in Highlander's past: the slow process of racially integrating workshops and training programs; the problematic relationship between Horton and the more conservative CIO leaders of the late 1940s; and the complicated history of the founding of the citizenship schools on Johns Island in the early civil rights years.One dimension of the story that he might have stressed more is the role that Horton and others on the Highlander staff played as strategic thinkers and planners in the southern rebellions. For instance, Horton was more than a host when CIO members and staff visited Highlander. He was an adviser to the unions as they designed organizing campaigns and developed grassroots leaders to sustain their locals. The same was true of the civil rights movement. Workshops and meetings were often a cauldron of discussion, debate, and disagreement where movement leaders, rank-and-filers, and Highlander staff hashed out their differences and honed strategies for victory.After he retired as director of Highlander in 1969, Horton began to take his ideas about popular education and political change to other parts of the world. His most exciting experiences were in Nicaragua, where he witnessed the national literacy campaigns carried out by the Sandinista government. Ten of thousands of Nicaraguans gained basic literacy skills in a five-month “crusade” carried out by trained young people.In these later years, Horton also developed a close friendship with Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and theorist whose book Pedagogy of the Oppressed argued that human liberation required that oppressed people draw on their own experiences to develop an understanding of their world and use that understanding to gain their freedom. Freire's vision of education for democracy was similar to Horton's, and they collaborated on a “talking book,” titled We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change.Education in Black and White is more than an engaging study of both Horton and Highlander. It is also an accessible window into the history of social justice struggles in the South, particularly in Appalachia, over the past ninety years. The book reminds us that many of the issues that Horton and his colleagues addressed continue to plague the region, including poverty, racial discrimination, poor healthcare, limited spending on education and social welfare programs, and low rates of unionization. But this history also reinforces the power of Horton's belief that popular education is at the heart of democratic action.