Highlander Folk School

Highlander Folk School, interracial adult education center in Mounteagle, Tennessee, where some of the most important figures of the Civil Rights Movement studied.

In 1932 educator Myles Horton founded the Highlander Folk School. It was loosely modeled on Danish folk schools, which provided adult education, especially in history and government, to raise the consciousness of students. Because of Horton's belief in education as an instrument for social change, Highlander offered leadership training courses to classes that were integrated in the segregated Tennessee of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.

Highlander focused on empowering ordinary citizens by teaching them the skills to organize and advocate for themselves. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Highlander helped the unemployed and impoverished in nearby Cumberland Mountain communities. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Highlander worked with the industrial union movement in the South, and in the late 1940s, it worked with the National Farmers Union.

It is best known, however, for its association with the Civil Rights Movement. Civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Stokely Carmichael, Fanny Lou Hamer, Andrew Young, and Septima Clark all studied at Highlander.

Clark became Highlander's director of education, and she developed the Highlander concept of citizenship schools, which proliferated in the South and provided instruction in everything from balancing a checkbook to registering to vote to reading. But the main objective of the schools was to motivate students to embrace political activism. As Horton said, students learned that they "couldn't read and write their way into freedom. They had to fight for that and they had to do it as part of a group, not as an individual."

Highlander's success in developing leaders in oppressed communities led to harassment, particularly from the Tennessee state government, which sought to close the school. In 1982 Highlander celebrated its 50th anniversary—confirming Horton’s observation that "You can't padlock an idea."