[Dialogue] anyone heard of this org?

[Lifeline248 at aol.com]

Sunny and Colleagues:
3rd try:   Here's Myles Horton's bio below.   Each of the other two 
"messages to Dialogue await moderator approval."   Ignore the wilder_horton one on 
the 1932 coal strike that I had not meant to send.   Sorry for my confusion 
with Attachments.
Lucille Chagnon

Myles Horton

Activist and founder of the Highlander Folk School, Myles Falls Horton was 
born in a log cabin near Savannah, Tennessee, on July 9, 1905. His parents, 
Elsie Falls Horton and Perry Horton, had both been school teachers before 
Horton's birth, but had lost their jobs when the requirements for teachers 
were increased to include one year of high school, which neither had. After 
that, his parents supported their family (Horton was firstborn, followed by 
brothers Delmas and Daniel, and sister Elsie Pearl) by working in factories, as 
sharecroppers, and taking other jobs when they could find them. In his 
autobiography, Horton wrote, "We didn't think of ourselves as working-class, or 
poor, we just thought of ourselves as being conventional people who didn't 
have any money" (1990a, p. 1).

The Horton family was socially active; his mother shared scarce family 
resources with and organized classes for less well-off and often illiterate 
neighbors, and his father was a member of the Worker's Alliance, the union of 
the Worker's Progress Administration (WPA). "From my mother and father," 
Horton wrote, "I learned the idea of service and the value of education. They 
taught me by their actions that you are supposed to serve your fellow men, 
you're supposed to do something worthwhile with your life, and education is 
meant to help you do something for others" (1990a, p. 2).

Horton left home at fifteen to attend high school-his hometown had no 
secondary school-and he supported himself there by working first in a saw mill 
and then a box factory, where he said he learned about organizing and the 
strength of collective action. "When I heard people insulted by the factory 
owners, it hurt me personally," he wrote in his autobiography. "I guess I got as 
much help from the opposition in firming up my beliefs as I did from more 
positive sources" (1990a, p. 8). Later, with coworkers at a crate-building 
job, he formed a union that held a successful work slowdown for a wage 
increase.

Horton read widely, and was deeply influenced by the writings of social 
critics and Marxists. He felt he could learn from many sources, but that in the 
end he was responsible to himself and his own ideals. "I have to be the 
final arbiter of my beliefs and my actions," he said, "and I can't fall back 
and justify it by saying, I'm a Marxist, I'm a Christian, I'm a technological 
expert, I'm an educator" (1990a, p.45). He worked with a wide range of 
people who shared a broad vision of a better world, but he remained a stubborn 
individualist who never joined a party. "I understood the need for 
organizations, but I was always afraid of what they did to people" (1990a, p. 49).

He attended Cumberland University, the University of Chicago, and the Union 
Theological Seminary, and sought out teachers who in many cases became 
lifelong supporters and friends; among these were Reinhold Neibuhr, John Dewey, 
Jane Addams, and George Counts. As a student in Chicago he heard about the 
Danish Folk School movement, a populist education experiment that had 
developed in opposition to the lifelessness of traditional schools and the 
detachment of academic schooling in Denmark. Danish Folk Schools encouraged students 
to broaden their experience by analyzing important questions and problems, 
and then actively participating in practical solutions. Horton resolved to 
go and see these schools himself.
University of Phoenix

In Denmark, Horton focused on a specific project: creating a school for 
life-a place where students and teachers could live together to pose and solve 
problems; an informal setting where experience could be the main teacher; a 
site for activists, organizers, and teachers for social justice. In his 
diary, Horton wrote, "The school will be for young men and women of the 
mountains and workers from the factories. Negroes would be among the students who 
will live in close personal contact with teachers. Out of their experiential 
learning through living, working, and studying together could come an 
understanding of how to take their place intelligently in the changing world" 
(1990a, p. 54). He worried that preparation to build his school might take 
forever, and although he felt inadequate to the task; he decided that the only way 
he could learn to embody his vision was to simply begin his project.

Horton opened the school, the Southern Mountains School, in 1932. A short 
time later, he and codirector Don West changed the name to the Highlander 
Folk School. At Highlander the purpose of education was to make people more 
powerful, and more capable in their work and their lives. Horton had what he 
called a "two-eye" approach to teaching: with one eye he tried to look at 
people as they were, while with the other he looked at what they might become. 
"My job as a gardener or educator is to know that the potential is there and 
that it will unfold. People have a potential for growth; it's inside, it's 
in the seed" (1990a, p. 33).

The school was a free space in an oppressive atmosphere-a place where labor 
organizers, civil rights activists, antipoverty workers, and others 
assembled to develop solutions. Through the 1930s Highlander was the education arm 
of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the South. Horton 
realized that labor would never be emancipated as long as racial 
segregation-turning workers against each other based on race privilege-remained intact, and 
he began organizing workshops designed to destroy racist social structures.

For many years Highlander was the only place in the South where white and 
African-American citizens lived and worked together, something that was 
illegal in that strictly segregated society. Highlander, Horton once claimed, 
held the record for sustained civil disobedience, breaking the Tennessee Jim 
Crow laws every day for over forty years, until the segregation laws were 
finally repealed.

The list of students at Highlander is a roll call of social activists: Rosa 
Parks, Eleanor Roosevelt, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Martin Luther King 
Jr., Andrew Young, Fanny Lou Hamer. People from the surrounding community used 
the school as well; all gathered there to give voice to the obstacles to 
their hopes and dreams, gather the conceptual, human, and material resources 
needed to continue, and to return home with a plan for forward progress. The 
school was under constant attack from white supremacists, antilabor groups, 
and the government.

Myles Horton died on January 19, 1990; his school, now known as the 
Highlander Research and Education Center, continues to be a catalyst for social 
change in the early twenty-first century.

See also: COMMUNITY-BASED ORGANIZATIONS, AGENCIES, AND GROUPS.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

BLEDSOE, THOMAS. 1969. Or We'll All Hang Separately: The Highlander Idea. 
Boston: Beacon Press.

GLEN, JOHN. 1988. Highlander: No Ordinary School 1932-1962. Lexington: 
University Press of Kentucky.

HORTON, AIMEE. 1989. The Highlander Folk School: A History of Its Major 
Programs. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson.

HORTON, MYLES. 1990a. The Long Haul: An Autobiography, with Judith Kohl and 
Herbert Kohl. New York: Doubleday Press.

HORTON, MYLES. 1990b. We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on 
Education and Social Change, ed. Brenda Bell, John Gaventa, and John Peters. 
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.


http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2072/Horton-Myles-1905-1990.html



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