>we need new ways to do theoretical education.
***** Highlander Folk School was founded in rural Tennessee during the early 1930s by Myles Horton, Don West, Elizabeth Hawes, James Dombrowski, and others committed to establishing a progressive labor education center in the South. Blending religious and Marxist perspectives, they attracted support from such figures as Reinhold Niebuhr, Norman Thomas, and John Dewey.
Highlander was designed "to educate rural and industrial leaders for a new social order," particularly in union organizing efforts that would advance what Horton called "conscious class action." West explained that Highlander "educates for a socialized nation" in which "human justice, cooperation, a livelihood for every man and a fair distribution of wealth" would replace the present system of "graft, exploitation, and private profit."
Hawes noted the school's "revolutionary purpose" to help bring its students to an awareness of the need for, and the skills needed to struggle for, "a classless society." At the same time, as Horton later explained, it was informed by the insight that "people have to believe that you genuinely respect their ideas and that your involvement with them is not just an academic exercise."[See note 13]
>From the early 1930s the school viewed the necessity of cooperation
among Black and white workers in order to advance the needs of both.
Highlander's central role as a school for CIO workers in the South
from the late 1930s through the late 1940s was disrupted by the Cold
War, when Communist-influenced unions were driven out of, and
left-wing influences in general dramatically marginalized within,
labor's mainstream.
By the early 1950s, Highlander shifted "to extend its activities into wider fields of democratization," and in the wake of the Supreme Court's 1954 decision on school desegregation it became a center for education and training to assist the civil rights movement. Among those attending Highlander workshops were people who initiated the Montgomery Bus Boycott, such as NAACP activists Rosa Parks and E.D. Nixon.
Highlander staff member Septima Clark, who became director of those workshops in 1954, developed a Citizenship Education Program that combined teaching literacy and voter registration information with fundamental discussions on social, economic and political questions.[See note 14]
Highlander pioneer James Dombrowski also played a central role in creating the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF). Dombrowski, whose 1936 study Early Days of Christian Socialism in America remains a minor classic, was a protegé of Rev. Harry F. Ward, furthest to the left of all the faculty at Union Theological Seminary (eventually gravitating too close to the Communist Party to be tolerated by most of his seminarian colleagues).
Dombrowski served as director of the left-liberal Southern Conference for Human Welfare, and was a prominent supporter of the Progressive Party campaign of 1948. When he initiated SCEF in the late 1940s, he was able to attract such prominent African-American supporters as Benjamin Mays of Morehouse College, who served as SCEF vice-president until 1954.
Several years later, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, centrally involved in the Birmingham, Alabama civil rights struggles and a close associate of Martin Luther King, would become SCEF's president, defending SCEF staffers Carl and Anne Braden when they were attacked by the House Un-American Activities Committee. The Bradens were independent-minded socialists who had worked for left-led unions, been involved with the Progressive Party, and courageously challenged segregated housing where they lived in Louisville, Kentucky.
They edited the SCEF monthly journal The Southern Patriot, which played a significant role in the early civil rights movement. It was Anne Braden who drove Martin Luther King, Jr. from a 1957 conference at Highlander Folk School where, among other things, he first heard the song "We Shall Overcome," sung by Pete Seeger. King commented, "There's something about that song that haunts you."[See note 15]
(Paul Le Blanc, "The Radical Roots of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Christian Core, Socialist Bedrock," <http://solidarity.igc.org/atc/96MLK.html>) ***** -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>