Myles Horton
Encyclopedia
Civil rights movement
The civil rights movement was a worldwide political movement for equality before the law occurring between approximately 1950 and 1980. In many situations it took the form of campaigns of civil resistance aimed at achieving change by nonviolent forms of resistance. In some situations it was...
(Movement leader James Bevel
James Bevel
James L. Bevel was an American minister and leader of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement who, as the Director of Direct Action and Director of Nonviolent Education of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference initiated, strategized, directed, and developed SCLC's three major successes of the era:...
called Horton "The Father of the Civil Rights Movement"). Horton taught and heavily influenced most of the era's leaders. They included Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was an African-American civil rights activist, whom the U.S. Congress called "the first lady of civil rights", and "the mother of the freedom movement"....
(who studied with Horton shortly before her decision to keep her seat on the Montgomery, Alabama
Montgomery, Alabama
Montgomery is the capital of the U.S. state of Alabama, and is the county seat of Montgomery County. It is located on the Alabama River southeast of the center of the state, in the Gulf Coastal Plain. As of the 2010 census, Montgomery had a population of 205,764 making it the second-largest city...
bus in 1955), John Lewis
John Lewis (politician)
John Robert Lewis is the U.S. Representative for , serving since 1987. He was a leader in the American Civil Rights Movement and chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee , playing a key role in the struggle to end segregation...
, James Bevel
James Bevel
James L. Bevel was an American minister and leader of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement who, as the Director of Direct Action and Director of Nonviolent Education of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference initiated, strategized, directed, and developed SCLC's three major successes of the era:...
, Bernard Lafayette
Bernard Lafayette
Bernard Lafayette Jr. is a longtime civil rights activist and organizer, who was a leader in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement...
, Ralph Abernathy
Ralph Abernathy
Ralph David Abernathy, Sr. was a leader of the American Civil Rights Movement, a minister, and a close associate of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Following King's assassination, Dr. Abernathy took up the leadership of the SCLC Poor People's Campaign and...
, John B. Thompson, and many others.
Highlander co-founder
A poor white man from SavannahSavannah, Tennessee
Savannah is a city in Hardin County, Tennessee, United States. The population was 6,917 at the 2000 census and the 2007 population estimate was 7,262. It is the county seat of Hardin County. Savannah hosted the NAIA college football national championship game from 1996-2007. Savannah is home to...
in West Tennessee
West Tennessee
West Tennessee is one of the three Grand Divisions of the State of Tennessee. Of the three, it is the one that is most sharply defined geographically. Its boundaries are the Mississippi River on the west and the Tennessee River on the east...
, Horton's social and political views were strongly influenced by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr
Reinhold Niebuhr
Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr was an American theologian and commentator on public affairs. Starting as a leftist minister in the 1920s indebted to theological liberalism, he shifted to the new Neo-Orthodox theology in the 1930s, explaining how the sin of pride created evil in the world...
, under whom he studied at the Union Theological Seminary
Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York
Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York is a preeminent independent graduate school of theology, located in Manhattan between Claremont Avenue and Broadway, 120th to 122nd Streets. The seminary was founded in 1836 under the Presbyterian Church, and is affiliated with nearby Columbia...
in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. Along with educator Don West
Don West (educator)
Don West was an American writer, poet, educator, trade union organizer, civil-rights activist and a co-founder of the Highlander Folk School.-Early life and career:...
and Methodist minister James A. Dombrowski
James A. Dombrowski
James Anderson Dombrowski was a southern white Methodist minister and intellectual who was active in the African American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s...
of New Orleans, Horton founded the Highlander Folk School (now Highlander Research and Education Center
Highlander Research and Education Center
The Highlander Research and Education Center, formerly known as the Highlander Folk School, is a social justice leadership training school and cultural center located in New Market, Tennessee. Founded in 1932 by activist Myles Horton, educator Don West, and Methodist minister James A. Dombrowski,...
) in his native Tennessee
Tennessee
Tennessee is a U.S. state located in the Southeastern United States. It has a population of 6,346,105, making it the nation's 17th-largest state by population, and covers , making it the 36th-largest by total land area...
in 1932. He remained its director until 1973, traveling with it to reorganize in Knoxville after the state shut it down in 1961.
Horton and West had both traveled to Denmark to study its folk schools, centers for adult education and community empowerment. The resulting school in Monteagle, Tennessee was based on a concept originating in Denmark
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...
: "that an oppressed people collectively hold strategies for liberation that are lost to its individuals . . . The Highlander School had been a haven for the South's handful of functional radicals during the thirties and the essential alma mater for the leaders of the CIO
Congress of Industrial Organizations
The Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, proposed by John L. Lewis in 1932, was a federation of unions that organized workers in industrial unions in the United States and Canada from 1935 to 1955. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 required union leaders to swear that they were not...
's fledgling southern organizing drives." (McWhorter) The school was created to educate and empower adults for social change.
In their 1985 documentary You Got to Move
You Got to Move
You Got to Move is a documentary by Lucie Massie Phenix and Veronica Selver that follows people from communities in the Southern United States in their various processes of becoming involved in social change...
, Lucy Massie Phenix and Veronica Selver prominently featured Horton and the Highlander School. Horton also inspired the founding of the Myles Horton Organization at the University of Tennessee
University of Tennessee
The University of Tennessee is a public land-grant university headquartered at Knoxville, Tennessee, United States...
in 1986. The group organized numerous protests and events in the Chattanooga, Tennessee area, including demonstrations to counter the Ku Klux Klan, and the construction of a shantytown on campus to encourage the university to divest from South Africa.
Personal life
Myles Horton was born in 1905 in Savannah, Tennessee to a poor family. His parents were former school teachers and Presbyterians. His father was a Workers’ Alliance member and his mother served as a respected and socially active community member. During his teenage years, Horton experienced union organization by holding jobs at a sawmill and as a packer at factories. As a teenager, he demonstrated his activism by holding a strike for higher wages at the tomato factory. Horton attended Cumberland College in Tennessee in 1924 and continued his work with local unions. After college, Horton went to work as a state Student YMCA secretary. In 1929, Horton became familiar with communist philosophy while studying in New York at the radical Union Theological Seminary. He wanted to find a way in which the social condition could be challenged and changed and education became his nonviolent instrument. At the University of Chicago, Horton learned about the Danish folk high schools. Inspired after his visit to these schools, Horton helped established his own education center, Highlander Folk School, in Monteagle, Tennessee in 1932.He later married Zilphia Mae Johnson
Zilphia Horton
Zilphia Horton was American musician, community organizer, educator, Civil Rights activist, and folklorist. She is best-known for her work with her husband Myles Horton at the Highlander Folk School where she is generally credited with turning such songs as "We Shall Overcome", "Keep Your Eyes on...
in 1935. Zilphia Horton was a constant collaborator with Horton until her death in 1956. Zilphia and Myles Horton had two children. In 1962, Myles Horton married Aimee Isgrig. In January of 1990, Myles Horton passed away at the age of eighty-five.
Further reading
- Horton, Myles, With Judith & Herbert Kohl. The Long Haul: An AutobiographyThe Long Haul (book)The Long Haul is an autobiography of Myles Horton, labor organizer, founder of the Highlander School and perhaps the first practitioner of what would later be called popular education...
. 1990; New York: Teachers College Press, 1998. ISBN 0385263139 - Horton, Myles and Paulo FreirePaulo FreirePaulo Reglus Neves Freire was a Brazilian educator and influential theorist of critical pedagogy.-Biography:...
. We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990. ISBN 0-87722-775-6 - Wallace, John. "Use of a Philosopher: Socrates and Myles Horton." In: Beyond the Tower: Concepts and Models for Service-Learning in Philosophy. Edited by C. David Lisman and Irene E. Harvey. Washington, D.C.: American Association for Higher Education, 2000, pp. 69-90. ISBN 1-56377-016-4
Video References
- We Shall Overcome, Ginger Group Productions, 1988; PBS Home Video 174, 58 min. Myles Horton discusses Highlander's role, through his wife Zilphia Horton's music program, in promoting the song "We Shall OvercomeWe Shall Overcome"We Shall Overcome" is a protest song that became a key anthem of the African-American Civil Rights Movement . The title and structure of the song are derived from an early gospel song by African-American composer Charles Albert Tindley...
" to the Southern labor movement in 1930s, and then to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 60s.
External links
- Video of recollections of his great uncle, Myles Horton, by writer/actor/director Robert Ben Garant