Highlander Research and Education Center
Founded in 1932 by activist Myles Horton, educator Don West, and Methodist minister James A. Dombrowski, it was originally located in the community of Summerfield in Grundy County, Tennessee, between Monteagle and Tracy City.
It trained civil rights leader Rosa Parks prior to her historic role in the Montgomery bus boycott, as well as providing training for many other movement activists, including members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Septima Clark, Anne Braden, Martin Luther King Jr., James Bevel, Hollis Watkins, Bernard Lafayette, Ralph Abernathy and John Lewis in the mid- and-late 1950s.
Highlander's archives reside at the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Louis Round Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The Highlander Folk School was originally established in Grundy County, Tennessee, on land donated for this purpose by educator Lilian Wyckoff Johnson.
Against that backdrop, Horton, West and Dombrowski created the Highlander School "to provide an educational center in the South for the training of rural and industrial leaders, and for the conservation and enrichment of the indigenous cultural values of the mountains."
The Citizenship Education Schools coordinated by Septima Clark with assistance from Bernice Robinson spread widely throughout the South and helped thousands of Blacks register to vote.
[4] Later, the program was transferred to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), led by Martin Luther King Jr., because the state of Tennessee was threatening to close the school.
Civil rights activists, most notably King, Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, Rosa Parks, John Lewis, and Julian Bond, came to the Center at different times.
He continued, "Highlander was the place that Rosa Parks witnessed a demonstration of equality that helped inspire her to keep her seat on a Montgomery bus, just a few weeks after her first visit.
[8] A controversial photograph of Martin Luther King Jr. with writer, trade union organizer, civil rights activist and co-founder of the Highlander School Donald Lee West, was published.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Highlander broadened their base into broader regional, national, and international environmentalism; struggles against the negative effects of globalization; grassroots leadership development in under-resourced communities.
[15] In the 1970s, Highlander staff began to plan and facilitate participatory projects surrounding topics that are often complex for non-expert audiences such as environmental risk and corporate land ownership.
[17] In line with its stated mission of "supporting [peoples'] efforts to take collective action to shape their own destiny,"[18] many Highlander projects incorporate popular education strategies.
