Highlander Folk School 1932-1962

Highlander gave no grades, credits or degrees. Its residential workshops ran from two days to eight weeks, drawing fifteen to forty organizers who analyzed a concrete problem and went home to act on it. Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. attended shortly before the Montgomery bus boycott, and its Citizenship Schools taught thousands of Black Southerners the literacy needed to vote. After a legislative investigation, a police raid and two trials, Tennessee revoked its charter and seized the property in 1962, and the work continued as the Highlander Research and Education Center.

What the plaque says

Highlander Folk School 1932-1962 In 1932, Myles Horton and Don West founded Highlander Folk School, located ½ mile north of this site. It quickly became one of the few schools in the South committed to the cause of organized labor, economic justice. and an end to racial segregation. Courses included labor issues, literacy, leadership, and non-violent desegregation strategies, with workshops led by Septima Clark. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, John Lewis, and Eleanor Roosevelt found inspiration for the modern civil rights movement there. Opponents of its causes tried to close the school. Following a 1959-60 trial in Grundy County, the State of Tennessee revoked the school's charter. It was adjudged to have violated segregation laws, sold beer without a license. and conveyed property to Myles Horton for his home. When the sheriff padlocked the school, Horton proclaimed Highlander to be an idea rather than simply a group of buildings. adding: "You can't padlock an idea." In a 1979 Ford Foundation Report, Highlander was singled out as the most notable American experiment in adult education for social change.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sewanee: The University of the South — 7.3 mi
  The Episcopal university on the Cumberland Plateau, founded in 1857 as a school for the slaveholding South and now examining that history through its own Roberson Project.
• Savage Gulf State Park — 16 mi
  Roughly 19,000 acres of gorge and sandstone bluff on the western edge of the Cumberland Plateau, a state park of its own since 2022, with the Stone Door and a National Natural Landmark.
• Old Stone Fort State Archaeological Park — 23 mi
  A 2,000-year-old enclosure of piled stone and earth on the bluffs above the forks of the Duck River, built by Native people between about 80 and 550 A.D., with a museum and waterfall trails.
• Tims Ford State Park — 25 mi
  A lake park on the Elk River below the Cumberland Plateau, made by a 1970 TVA dam on land the Cherokee and Chickasaw ceded by treaty in the early 1800s.

More markers nearby

• Crossroads of War — 1.5 mi
• Monteagle Sunday School Assembly — 2.1 mi
• Struggling Through the Mountains — 3.2 mi
• Fiery Gizzard — 3.9 mi