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

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

Between 1953-1961 Highlander developed 3 major educational programs to encourage and strengthen Black Southerners' efforts to achieve their full rights as citizens. In 1953, in anticipation of the Supreme Court's ruling to desegregate schools, Highlander began having workshops on school desegregation. In the same year, at the urging of Esau Jenkins and Septima Clark, Highlander applied for and won a three year grant to study the need for night schools on St. Johns Island to help Blacks become voting citizens. My les set up a school in Jenkins store, in back, with no books or curriculum, and he didn't use regular teachers. He figured out the unsuccessful programs were embarrassing and humiliating to the citizens; their dignity as adults and their reason for wanting to learn how to read was being ignored. The teacher had to be a peer. They talked Septima Clark's niece, Bernice Robinson, a seamstress and black beautician, into being the teacher. Bernice had a lot of status in the Black community because she was an independent business person who didn't need Whites. The first school was a great success. Illiterate Blacks learned how to read and write so they could pass the citizenship tests and qualify to register to vote.

The Citizenship Schools were run by African Americans from the very beginning, at very low cost ($8.00/pupil). The teachers were trained at Highlander. The people who attended Highlander during this time-frame included: Septima Clark, Rosa Parks, Bernice Robinson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Esau Jenkins, and Andrew Young, people who sparked the Civil Rights Movement. In 1960 Highlander also began to sponsor workshops related to the Southern Student Movement, and these were the students who began lunch counter protests in restaurants that refused to serve Blacks. Like what happened with the union organizing education, when Septima Clark, director of education for Highlander, and Andrew Young went to work for Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1961, Highlander transferred the Citizenship School Program over to them. Again, the Highlander staff felt that they had done their job and the people directly involved and effected should keep the work alive. By 1965 over 50,000 African Americans successfully registered to vote and in 1970 Clark estimated 100,000 had learned to read and write through the Citizenship Schools. Highlander's work was so successful it triggered the closing of the school by racist Southerners who did not want to give up their racist ways.

By 1964 Myles was trying to get Highlander out of the Civil Rights movement and back into Appalachia, the nation's poor, as part of the national War on Poverty. Later the school got involved in helping people protest environmental destruction that was occurring in poor areas of Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Carolinas, where large manufacturing companies were dumping toxic wastes into land fills in their mountainous areas and poisoning the water, etc. More recently, under the directorship of its first woman, Suzanne Pharr, Highlander has been involved in gay rights issues and women's issues, and has worked with Mexican migrant workers to help them organize.