Appalachian History Series – Highlander Folk School in Monteagle: Labor Education and Civil Rights Organizing on the Cumberland Plateau
If you follow old U.S. 41 up Monteagle Mountain, you climb out of the Sequatchie Valley into a high, wooded plateau that feels apart from the rest of Tennessee. Near the community of Summerfield in Grundy County, a small campus once sat among the oaks and sandstone outcrops. From the road it looked like any other cluster of low stone and frame buildings. Inside its workshops and library, however, coal miners, textile workers, and civil rights organizers were quietly learning how to challenge the power structures that defined the twentieth century South.
The Highlander Folk School began there in 1932 and for thirty years its Monteagle campus was one of the most influential, and controversial, educational experiments in Appalachian history.
A Folk School on the Cumberland Plateau
Highlander was founded in 1932 by Myles Horton, a young Tennessean who had grown up in a family that took faith, work, and public service seriously. After studying theology and social ethics in New York and traveling to Denmark to observe folk schools for adults, Horton returned home convinced that mountain people did not need outside experts to tell them what to think. Instead, he believed they needed a place where they could put their own experiences at the center of learning and work out strategies together.
With the help of poet and organizer Don West and Methodist minister James Dombrowski, Horton opened Highlander on land donated by educator Lillian Wyckoff Johnson in the Summerfield community just north of Monteagle. The new school sat within Grundy County, which is part of the Appalachian Regional Commission area, and drew on the culture of the Cumberland Plateau: small farms, coal camps, and sawmill towns scattered along the mountain.
From the beginning, Highlander’s mission was not to grant degrees or train children. It offered short, intensive courses for adults who were already involved in labor or community struggles. Early classes mixed discussion of economics and politics with songs, storytelling, and shared meals that cut across class and denominational lines. Participants and staff slept in simple dorms, washed dishes together, and stayed up late in the library talking about how to change the conditions they faced at home.
Coal Strikes and the Wilder Connection
Highlander’s first major test came almost immediately. In the summer of 1932 miners in Wilder, a company town about one hundred miles northwest on the Cumberland Plateau, went on strike after the Fentress Coal and Coke Company demanded deep wage cuts and continued to pay in company scrip. Violence followed, bridges and tracks were sabotaged, and the state sent in National Guard troops.
Horton and other Highlander staff traveled to Wilder, listened to the miners, and began raising food, clothes, and money for their families. Highlander students helped gather donations and spread stories of the strike to sympathetic churches and union locals. The school’s leaders also organized study sessions with miners, connecting their daily experiences in the coal camp to broader questions of power, law, and organizing.
The Wilder strike ended in defeat and tragedy when union leader Barney Graham was shot and killed. For Highlander, the episode confirmed both the risks of siding with working people and the importance of an educational center that did not flinch from those risks. Horton later said that what he saw in Wilder pushed him further toward radical democracy, because it showed how far coal companies and local authorities would go to keep miners in line.
“People of the Cumberland” and Labor Education
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Highlander was best known as a labor school. It welcomed coal miners from eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, textile workers from the Carolinas, and packinghouse and sawmill workers from across the South. Classes were not lectures in the traditional sense. Organizers mapped out problems in their workplaces, analyzed contracts, and practiced how to speak up at meetings or negotiate with management.
The school’s work with unions at places like Wilder and in other coal and textile towns drew national attention. In 1937 an eighteen minute film titled “People of the Cumberland” portrayed the economic and environmental toll of extractive industry in rural Tennessee and highlighted Highlander as one of the tools local people were using to push back. The film showed how the school blended discussion, music, and dramatizations to give workers confidence in their own voices.
This period tied Highlander closely to Appalachian coal country. Many of the men and women who came to Monteagle had grown up in hollows and on ridges where land was steep, opportunities were limited, and large corporations controlled the only paycheck in town. For them, the plateau campus was both familiar and startling. It looked like the mountains they knew, yet it invited them to ask questions that were discouraged at home.
Turning Toward Civil Rights
By the early 1950s the center of gravity at Highlander shifted from labor organizing to race relations and school desegregation. Court decisions, including Brown v. Board of Education, were colliding with the reality of Jim Crow in southern towns. Highlander began inviting Black community leaders from across the South, especially from coastal South Carolina and urban centers, to weeklong and two week workshops that focused on nonviolent direct action and voter registration.
One of the most important figures in this new phase was educator Septima Clark of Charleston. Working with Horton and local leader Esau Jenkins from Johns Island, Clark developed “citizenship schools” that taught adults to read registration forms, understand their rights, and organize in their communities. The first of these experiments took shape at Highlander and later spread across the South under the umbrella of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
In August 1955, Montgomery NAACP secretary Rosa Parks attended a desegregation workshop at Highlander. Her trip was arranged with the help of white allies Virginia and Clifford Durr, who secured a scholarship and bus fare. At Monteagle she spent two weeks in integrated meetings, listening to Clark and others discuss how ordinary people could confront segregation. Later, Parks recalled that it was the first time she had lived, worked, and relaxed in a setting where Black and white people were treated as equals, and that the experience strengthened her resolve for the struggles ahead. She took part in the Montgomery bus protest only a few months after returning home.
Other visitors included Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, John Lewis, and many lesser known organizers whose influence was felt through local boycotts, sit ins, and registration drives. In photographs taken by the FBI, you can see King, Parks, Lewis, and singer Pete Seeger standing together on the Monteagle campus, a visual reminder of how a small Appalachian school became a national crossroads.
Music, Memory, and “We Shall Overcome”
Highlander’s work was never just talk. Music director Zilphia Horton, Myles’s wife, paid close attention to the songs that workers and church members brought with them. During a tobacco workers strike in Charleston, South Carolina, she heard a gospel styled piece with the refrain “We will overcome.” She adapted it, and later folksinger Pete Seeger and others shaped it into the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” In 1959 Guy Carawan, who succeeded Zilphia as Highlander’s music director, taught the song to student activists who were forming the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
For many visitors the act of singing together in an integrated space on a rural Tennessee mountaintop was as radical as the words themselves. The songs helped people remember that they were part of a wider struggle even after they returned to small towns where they might feel isolated or outnumbered.
“You Cannot Padlock an Idea”
Highlander’s work with Black activists and interracial workshops drew sharp backlash from segregationists. In 1957 the Georgia Commission on Education circulated a pamphlet accusing the school of being a Communist training center, and southern newspapers stoked fears that outside agitators in Grundy County were stirring up racial trouble.
State officials in Tennessee eventually launched investigations that focused not on the content of Highlander’s teaching but on alleged violations of its nonprofit charter and accusations that beer had been sold without a license during fundraisers. After a series of raids, hearings, and court cases, the state revoked Highlander’s charter in 1961 and ordered its property seized and auctioned.
Sheriff’s deputies padlocked the doors at Monteagle, and the buildings passed into other hands. Horton famously responded that you could padlock a school, but you could not padlock an idea. Within a short time Highlander reorganized as the Highlander Research and Education Center, first in Knoxville and later in New Market in East Tennessee, where it continues to work on labor, environmental, and social justice issues across Appalachia and the broader South.
Highlander’s Later Appalachian Work
From its new home in East Tennessee, Highlander remained rooted in Appalachian struggles. In the 1970s and 1980s staff helped coalfield and rural communities document corporate land ownership, understand the health effects of strip mining and pollution, and organize around issues like school consolidation and plant closings. Workshops often used “popular education” methods in which local people mapped their own communities, gathered oral histories, and turned that knowledge into campaigns for change.
Highlander also became a place where Appalachian activists met farmers from Central America, urban organizers from Detroit, and Indigenous leaders from the Southeast. Those gatherings complicated the old image of Appalachian isolation. They showed that what was happening on Pine Mountain or the Cumberland Plateau was connected to land, labor, and democracy fights worldwide.
The Old Campus on Old Highlander Lane
Although Highlander moved on, the original Monteagle site never completely left the region’s memory. For decades many local residents preferred not to talk about it, and some buildings were demolished or allowed to deteriorate. In recent years, however, preservation groups have worked to recognize the site’s significance. The Tennessee Preservation Trust purchased several parcels on Old Highlander Lane, including the long, low stone and frame library building where many citizenship workshops took place, and placed the campus on its list of the state’s most endangered historic places.
The library building, restored to its mid twentieth century appearance, now carries a state historical marker that explains Highlander’s role in organized labor and civil rights and lists some of the figures who passed through its doors. Myles Horton is buried in the small Summerfield cemetery near the old campus, alongside his wife and parents, tying the story of this global movement school back to one rural Appalachian county.
Controversy has not disappeared. Local and statewide debates continue over who should control the story of the Monteagle campus and how its history should be presented to visitors, a reminder that struggles over land and memory are part of the Highlander story too.
A Plateau School With a Long Shadow
Today drivers who leave Interstate 24 and follow the older road into Monteagle can still see the state marker along U.S. 41 that points toward the former Highlander Folk School. The campus is quieter now, but the questions that animated its workshops remain urgent for people across the Appalachian Regional Commission counties: Who owns the land, and who benefits from it. Who gets to learn, and whose knowledge counts. How can neighbors work together across race and class lines to defend their communities.
From coal strikes in Wilder to citizenship classes for Black elders, from union songs to civil rights anthems, Highlander shows how a small mountain school can have a long reach. It is a reminder that some of the most important chapters in American history unfolded not in capital cities but in modest rooms on the Cumberland Plateau, where ordinary people sat in circles, told their stories, and decided that they were capable of changing the world.
Sources & Further Reading
Glen, John M. Highlander: No Ordinary School, 1932–1962. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988. https://files01.core.ac.uk/download/pdf/232566255.pdf
Adams, Frank, with Myles Horton. Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander. Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 1975. https://highlandercenter.org/product/unearthing-seeds-of-fire-the-idea-of-highlander-2/
Horton, Myles, with Judith and Herbert Kohl. The Long Haul: An Autobiography. New York: Teachers College Press, 1998. https://www.tcpress.com/the-long-haul-9780807737002
Preskill, Stephen. Education in Black and White: Myles Horton and the Highlander Center’s Vision for Social Justice. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520286443/education-in-black-and-white
Schneider, Stephen A. You Can’t Padlock an Idea: Rhetorical Education at the Highlander Folk School, 1932–1961. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014. https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/isbn/9781611173826/html
“Highlander Folk School.” Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. Tennessee Historical Society and the University of Tennessee Press. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/highlander-folk-school/
“Highlander Research and Education Center.” Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. Tennessee Historical Society and the University of Tennessee Press. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/highlander-research-and-education-center/
“Highlander Research and Education Center.” BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/highlander-research-and-education-center-1932/
“Highlander Folk School.” Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/highlander-folk-school
“Highlander Folk School.” SNCC Digital Gateway. https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/alliances-relationships/highlander/
“Citizenship Schools.” Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Searchable Museum. https://www.searchablemuseum.com/citizenship-schools/
“Highlander Folk School.” Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words exhibition, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/rosa-parks-in-her-own-words/about-this-exhibition/the-bus-boycott/highlander-folk-school/
Charron, Katherine Mellen. “‘I Train the People to Do Their Own Talking’: Septima Clark and Women in the Civil Rights Movement.” Southern Cultures 15, no. 2 (2009). https://www.southerncultures.org/article/i-train-the-people-to-do-their-own-talking-septima-clark-and-women-in-the-civil-rights-movement/
“Septima Poinsette Clark and the Citizenship Schools.” National Museum of African American History and Culture. https://nmaahc.si.edu/sites/default/files/images/black_women_civil_rights_movement_1.pdf
Leyda, Jay, et al., dirs. People of the Cumberland. Documentary film, Frontier Films, 1937. https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-28-xp6tx35q0h
Georgia Commission on Education. Highlander Folk School: Communist Training School, Monteagle, Tenn. Pamphlet, 1957. Digital reproduction, Tennessee Virtual Archive. https://teva.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15138coll18/id/184/
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “We Shall Overcome – Highlander Folk School.” Highlander Collection, Tennessee Virtual Archive. https://teva.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/highlander/id/1914/
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Press Release: Citizenship School Program.” Highlander Collection, Tennessee Virtual Archive. https://teva.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/highlander/id/1898/
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Rosa Parks at Highlander Folk School, Monteagle, Tennessee, 1955.” Highlander Collection, Tennessee Virtual Archive. https://teva.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/highlander/id/1310/
National Park Service and Tennessee Historical Commission. “National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Highlander Folk School Library Building, Grundy County, Tennessee.” November 29, 2021. https://www.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/historicalcommission/national-register-general/TN_Grundy%20County_Highlander%20Folk%20School%20Library%20Building%20for%20Web.pdf
Tennessee Historical Commission. “National Register of Historic Places News: Highlander Folk School Library Building.” The Courier (Winter 2023). https://www.tn.gov/historicalcommission/about-us/the-courier/the-courier-winter-2023/national-register-news.html
Beasley, Joy, et al. “Petition to the Keeper of the National Register of Historic Places Regarding Highlander Folk School Library Building, Monteagle, Tennessee.” Center for Constitutional Rights, August 3, 2022. https://ccrjustice.org/sites/default/files/attach/2022/08/2022-8-3%20Highlander%20petition%20to%20Keeper%20of%20NRHP%20.pdf
“Historic Highlander.” Sewanee Mountain Messenger, June 30, 2022. https://www.sewaneemessenger.com/headlines/?post_id=2392&title=historic-highlander
Sainz, Adrian. “Who Gets to Tell the Story of a Historic Civil Rights Site?” Associated Press, September 3, 2022. https://www.clickorlando.com/news/national/2022/09/03/who-gets-to-tell-the-story-of-a-historic-civil-rights-site/
Gervin, Cari Wade. “Highlander Folk School, Training Ground for Civil Rights Leaders, Fights to Regain Land.” Tennessee Lookout, September 18, 2024. https://tennesseelookout.com/2024/09/18/highlander-folk-school-training-ground-for-civil-rights-leaders-fights-to-regain-land/
Ansley, Fran, and Sue Thrasher. “Davidson–Wilder 1932: Strikes in the Coal Camps.” Southern Exposure 2, no. 4 (1974). https://www.facingsouth.org/davidson-wilder-1932-strikes-coal-camps
Ansley, Fran, and Sue Thrasher. “The Ballad of Barney Graham.” Southern Exposure 4, no. 1–2 (1976). https://www.facingsouth.org/ballad-barney-graham
“Fentress County.” Tennessee History for Kids. https://www.tnhistoryforkids.org/history/counties/fentress-county/
Tennessee Tech University Archives and Special Collections. “Wilder Commissary of the Fentress Coal and Coke Company.” Wilder–Davidson Collection. https://tntech.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16945coll1/id/23/
“Wilder, Tennessee.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilder,_Tennessee
“Highlander Folk School.” Tennessee State Museum, Junior Curators program. https://tnmuseum.org/junior-curators/posts/highlander-folk-school
Library of Congress. “Tracing the Long Journey of ‘We Shall Overcome.’” Folklife Today blog, February 6, 2014. https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2014/02/tracing-the-long-journey-of-we-shall-overcome/
“SNCC Debates Direct Action and Voter Registration at Highlander.” SNCC Digital Gateway. https://snccdigital.org/events/sncc-debates-direct-action-voter-registration-at-highlander/
“About Us – Highlander Research and Education Center.” Highlander Center official site. https://highlandercenter.org/about-us/
Author Note: As a historian writing from the Appalachian mountains, I am drawn to places like Highlander that turned small rural campuses into workshops for labor and civil rights. I hope this overview helps you see the Summerfield and Monteagle site, and Highlander’s later East Tennessee homes, as part of a longer Appalachian story about education, democracy, and community organizing.