Myles Horton

[2] They included Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks (who studied with Horton shortly before her decision to keep her seat on the Montgomery, Alabama, bus in 1955), John Lewis, James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, and others who would create the Nashville Student Movement, Ralph Abernathy, John B. Thompson, and many others.

A poor white man from Savannah in West Tennessee, Horton's social and political views were strongly influenced by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, under whom he studied at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

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: "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's fledgling southern organizing drives."

He applied this concept to the Highlander School in order to create an atmosphere for social change (Ayers 1091).

Horton's quest to create and maintain the Highlander School was opposed by Southern law enforcement.

In their 1985 documentary You Got to Move, Lucy Massie Phenix and Veronica Selver prominently featured Horton and the Highlander School.

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.

He left home at the young age of fifteen to attend high school and supported himself through working in a sawmill and then a box factory.

During his teenage years, Horton experienced union organization by holding jobs at a sawmill and as a packer at factories.

[2] In 1929, Horton became familiar with social gospel philosophy while studying in New York City at the Union Theological Seminary.