LIANE HANSEN, host:
Hundreds of social activists are spending this Labor Day weekend in the rural community of New Market, Tennessee. They're celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Highlander Center. The center has a rich history of labor union activism in the south. But it's probably better known for its role in the civil rights era, when such movement icons as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks passed through its doors.
NPR's Audie Cornish has this story about the Highlander Center's future, present and past.
AUDIE CORNISH: In 1932, the Highlander Folk Center started out an adult education program for the poor in the foothills of Appalachia. But from the start, it's curriculum was unusual. No books, no tests and no professors, says George Barrett.
Mr. GEORGE BARRETT: These are one and two-week intensive courses on such things as parliamentary law, how to conduct a meeting, how to organize, how to run a local union, how to keep the books so you don't get in trouble and sort of (unintelligible) other things. It fuses the spirit of solidarity.
CORNISH: Barrett attended residential seminars and later became the center's lawyer. Highlander was infamous for its aggressive role in the southern labor movement, supporting coalmining strikes, train porter unions and more. The school was designed to bring poor people together to discuss the problems in their communities then share stories and ideas on how to change things. As a result, Highlander was of a few integrated places in the south.
Representative JOHN LEWIS (Democrat, Georgia): Growing up in rural Alabama, I had never had an opportunity to be involved into racial setting, not even to have a meal with another person of another race.
CORNISH: That's Georgia Congressman John Lewis. He says Highlander was a place people could come together without fear.
Rep. LEWIS: Long before we started sitting in, long before we've been on a freedom ride, some of us got our foundation, got our beginning, our start, at Highlander.
CORNISH: In 1952, Highlander began adding how-to seminars on passive resistance and voter registration drive. In doing so, it became one of the educational centers of the civil rights movements, as history professor John Glenn of Indiana's Ball State University.
Professor JOHN GLENN (History, Ball State University): I think it's placed in southern history in that it represents an alternative to the generalization that all white southerners were opposed to labor unions, all white southerners were opposed to racial integration, all white southerners are in support of economic development no matter what the cost. And Highlander represents an alternative.
CORNISH: When Congressman Lewis visited, he was a college student in Nashville who became involved in lunch counter protests and SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. There, he sat elbow-to-elbow with civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Julian Bond and Ralph Abernathy.
(Soundbite of song "We Shall Overcome")
Unidentified Man: (Singing) We shall overcome.
CORNISH: And if you recognize this song, you've been touched by the work of the school as well. Because the protest lyrics to this gospel tune were developed and spread through pupils of Highlander.
(Soundbite of song "We Shall Overcome")
Unidentified Man: (Singing) …someday.
CORNISH: As a result, the school became a lightning rod for segregationists who condemned it a radical breeding ground. The school's former attorney, George Barrett, says the Klan attacked the staff, the state police raided it and nearby governors railed against it.
Mr. BARRETT: You had bubbling up in the South all these sorts of sovereignty commissions and all that who are going to keep us pure and white and save us from the communists. And this became - Highlander became a focal point for them to zero in on because of the labor connections and the civil rights connections.
CORNISH: After congressional and state investigative hearings Tennessee officials shut Highlander down on charges it was improperly run. The school's founder died in 1990. But in a 1981 television interview, Myles Horton recalled the day when the police closed it down.
Mr. MYLES HORTON (Founder, Highlander Folk School): He said, what are you laughing about. I said, my friend here, you know, he thinks he's padlocking Highlander. But I said, you know, Highlander is an idea. You can't padlock an idea.
CORNISH: Horton reopened it as the Highlander Research and Education Center, and it has outlived its segregationist foes.
(Soundbite of group singing)
CORNISH: Today, there's an annual teen activist camp, seminars on bilingual labor organizing, immigration, globalization, lesbian and gay rights and environmental issues. It seems scatter-shot. But Highlander's new director, Pam McMichael, disagrees.
Ms. PAM McMICHAEL (Director, Highlander Research and Education Center): It's a recurring conversation because the kind of moment's shift and good organizing is knowing when you shift with those moments and what in the next moment's coming that you need to pay attention to that you can both be a catalyst to and also support.
CORNISH: No doubt, McMichael says, there'll be a lot of discussion this weekend about where the Highlanders Center is going and why. But that too is part of its tradition.
Audie Cornish, NPR News, Nashville.
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