Nutshell Biographies #3 Center for Learning Through Community Service Myles Horton and Highlander Bill Moyers writes in the preface to Myles Horton's autobiography, "The Long Haul" that few people have seen as much change in the American South or helped to bring it about as Myles Horton. "He was beaten up, locked up, put upon and railed against by racists, toughs, demagogues and governors. But for more than fifty years, Horton went on with his special kind of teaching -- helping people to discover within themselves the courage and ability to confront reality and change it." Myles Horton came to his mission from a childhood among the mountain people of Appalachia, a land rich in natural beauty but a colony of poverty. "Nothing will change," said Horton to himself, "until we change -- until we throw off our dependence and act for ourselves." So in 1932, in the mountains west of Chattanooga, in one of American's poorest counties, Myles Horton founded the Highlander Folk School, dedicated to the belief that poor working-class people -- adults -- could learn to take charge of their lives and circumstances. At first he ran workshops to train union organizers for the CIO. Jim Crow laws forbade integration, but Horton, a white man, invited blacks and whites alike, and Highlander became one of the few places in the South where the two races could meet under the same roof. In the early 1950s, Horton turned the emphasis of his workshops from union organizing to civil rights. Highlander was now the principal gathering place of the moving forces of the Black revolution. Martin Luther King Jr. came. So did Rosa Parks, Andrew Young, Julian Bond, Stokeley Carmicheal, and scores of others. The state tried to close it down, the Klan harassed it, state troopers raided it. But Highlander was indestructible. Now located in New Market, Tennessee, Highlander remains a training ground for community leaders from all over the world.(1) Myles lived to his early nineties, working quietly to help people develop the capacity to make decisions and take responsibility for their communities. "A good radical education, Myles once said," wouldn't be anything about methods or techniques: it would be loving people first... And that means all people everywhere, not just your family or your own countrymen or your own color. And wanting for them what you want for yourself. And then next is respect for people's abilities to learn and to act and to shape their own lives. You have to have confidence that people can do that... The third thing is valuing their experiences. You can't say you respect people if you don't respect their experience."(2) Indeed, folks who spend time at Highlander learn most from sitting in the circle of rocking chairs in the big common room, telling stories about their own communities, gathering strength from each other's successes, consoling each other in their setbacks. When Myles was facilitating workshops, he would stay in the background, keeping the discussion on track, encouraging people to make plans and take action, refusing to bring in experts to tell people what to do. So seriously did he take the idea that people should learn to trust their own experiences that one night, during the height of the union organizing, he found himself in a motel room with a strike committee in crisis. It seems that the highway patrol had been escorting scab workers across picket lines and little by little, this tactic had eroded the strikers' solidarity. After discussing different actions to take, none of which seemed feasible, they turned to Myles and said, 'Well now, you've had more experience than we have. You've got to tell us what to do. You're the expert.' 'In the first place, I don't know what to do,' Myles replied, 'and if I did know, I wouldn't tell you because if I had to tell you today, then I'd have to tell you tomorrow, and when I'm gone you'd have to get somebody else to tell you.' This so infuriated one of the organizers that he pulled a gun out of his pocket and said, 'Goddamn you, if you don't tell us I'm going to kill you!' But Myles kept his cool, even though, as he remarked later, "I was tempted to become an instant expert, right on the spot! But I know that if I did that, all would be lost, so I said, 'No, go ahead and shoot if you want to, but I'm not going to tell you.' And the others calmed him down."(3) Despite his philosophy of non-intervention, Myles held strong political and moral convictions and encouraged others to do the same. "You have to take sides and know why you're taking sides," Myles often said. "There can be no such thing as neutrality. It's a code word for the existing system. "(4) Reflecting back on his youth, Myles remembered how he had become inspired to devote his life to social action. "I'd get ideas from reading," he said. "I'd get emboldened by it, especially poetry." He re-read the young poet Shelley, who spoke passionately for social justice, and decided he wouldn't let himself be subverted from what he knew was right. "I was going to going to do what I wanted to do regardless of anything, and the way to do it was not to be afraid of punishment and not to be tempted by rewards, not to want to be famous, nor get rich, have power, or be afraid of hell or threats and ostracism. And at that time I said, "It's not important to be good, it's important to be good for something."(5) Materials about Myles Horton and Highlander Horton, Myles (1990) The long haul, An autobiography. NY: Doubleday. Horton, Myles and Freire, Paulo. (1990) We make the road by walking: Conversations on education and social change. Temple University Press. Glen, John. (1988) Highlander: No ordinary school. University Press of Kentucky. Community Economic Development Workshop (1991) Coming up the rough side of the mountain: Community Development Workshop, New Market, TN: Highlander Center Highlander Research and Education Center, Knoxville, TN. (1985). Working Paper Series. Water: "You have to drink it with a fork..." Stories and resources from a water workshop at Highlander Center. Highlander Research and Education Center (1980). "We're tired of being guinea pigs!": A handbook for citizens on environmental health in Appalachia. New Market, TN. You've got to move: Stories of change in the South. (video, 87 minutes) NY: First Run/Features 1985. Adventures of a radical hillbilly. (video, 118 minutes) NY: WNET/13 TV 1981. Notes (1) The preceeding text has been adapted from Bill Moyers' Preface to Myles Horton's Autobiography: The long haul. NY: Doubleday, 1990. (2) Horton, Myles and Paulo Freire (1990) We make the road by walking: Conversations on education and social change. p.177 (3) ibid. p.125-6 (4) ibid. p.102 (5) ibid. p.35