An Exploration of Myles Horton's Democratic Praxis: Highlander Folk School

Educational Foundations, Spring 2004 by Thayer-Bacon, Barbara J

Through local strikes and walkouts, the people began to learn how to act as an organization, how to help themselves and co-operate and work together. The Highlander staff and the students visited and participated in strikes and union meetings as a field method of staff development, and as hands-on experiential learning for the students. Staff and students formed close relationships with the strikers and their families. There were times in the labor movement years where the school's program took place mainly in the field, and there were times when the school offered intensive residential terms. Weekend workshops were often offered too. The staff also sought to continually broaden the social objectives and perspectives on the labor movement. They often invited guest speakers from various organizations to help stimulate concern with larger problems and issues affecting society and the labor movement.

Highlander became the main center for worker's education in the South until the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) began running their own programs in 1947. Mary Lawrence, a Highlander staff person, helped develop the educational programs for the unions in the south. She used the union meetings as her place to work/teach and she would invite promising union leaders to Highlander for residential workshops. Eventually Mary left Highlanderto work for the CIO. Aimee Horton tells us that when the CIO took over the Educational Programs for the labor movement, Highlander pulled out because it did not want "to compromise its broad goals for political and social as well as economic democracy in the South."16 Myles suggests that Highlander's work was done, they had accomplished what they set out to do.17 He never intended to stay in the business of running educational programs for the CIO, he just wanted to help people get organized until they could run their own programs. However, he adds to the story by telling us that when the CIO insisted that Highlander put in its charter an anticommunist clause, Highlander refused. This was during the Cold War and Red Scare period, after WWII, and the school was opposed to silencing anyone from participating in the unions. During the late 194Os and the early 1950s Highlander tried to help farmers organize co-operatives so they would be given a voice in the market place. This organization activity was not as successful as their union organizing, or what was to come.

We can see easily with the example of Highlander's significant contribution to union organizing in the South that Highlander did not bracket questions of political economy in its concept of democracy, thus meeting Eraser's criterion that a postsocialist democratic vision needs to address political economic questions in order to have power. Her second criterion, that a democratic theory needs to address questions of recognition, is also something Myles and Highlander addressed. We can see an indication of Highlander's commitment to diversity and to addressing questions of recognition with their refusal to silence anyone from participating in the unions including communists or Blacks. Highlander sought to include African Americans in its educational efforts from its very beginning. In fact, Myles organized an integrated conference for students during the year he worked as Student secretary of the YMCA, in 1929, when it was illegal to do so. Professor Daves and his wife, both African Americans, were invited to teach a course at Highlander in 1934, and by 1942 Highlander had distinguished Black scholars on its Board, the first being Dr. Lewis Jones. In 1940 Highlander informed the unions it served that it would no longer hold workers' educational programs for unions that discriminated against Blacks. During the textile strike in North Carolina, Horton was able to get Blacks a doubled pay raise that brought their salary up to the same level as the Whites by convincing all the workers to stick together and threaten to strike if the Blacks were fired for costing as much as White workers. It was 1944, though, before Horton was able to convince Black students to risk attending Highlander workshops with White students, in defiance of the law and custom, in order to achieve economic advantage. In 1944, Blacks and Whites studied, worked, and played together at Highlander, a new experience for those attending.