Don West (educator)

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Note: For Don West, the television personality, see Don West (sportscaster).

Don West (born Devil's Hollow, Gilmer County, Georgia, 1906 - died Charleston, West Virginia, September 29, 1992), was an American writer, poet, educator, trade union organizer, Civil Rights activist, and a co-founder of the Highlander Folk School.

The child of North Georgia sharecroppers, West was expelled from high school for leading a protest against the on-campus showing of the film Birth of a Nation and he was expelled from his college, Lincoln Memorial University for leading another protest, though he eventually returned and graduated in 1929. He went on to study under Alva Taylor and Willard Uphaus at the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and was influenced by the Social Gospel movement. While a student, he became a Socialist and participated in labor strikes in textile factories and coal mines. Like his eventual collaborator Myles Horton he travelled to Denmark to tour the Danish folk schools, and upon their return they co-founded the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. West only stayed there a year, before leaving to found his own Southern Folk School and Libraries in Kennesaw, Georgia.

During the 1930s, he became a Communist and devoted himself to writing, lectures, and social causes, including the defense of Angelo Herndon, and he was an organizational director of the Kentucky Workers Alliance. He later worked in churches in Ohio and Georgia, taught and became a school superintendent, and eventually joined the faculty of Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. Forced to leave Oglethorpe during the period of Red-baiting, he continued to edit religious publications and teach creative writing. He testified before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in Memphis, and was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee, but never testified.

He and his wife, Connie West, invested in the establishment of the Appalachian South Folklife Center in Pipestem, Summers County, W.V., in 1964. One of their two daughters was Hedy West (1938-2005), a well-known folksinger.

[edit] Anthologies

Crab-Grass, 1931, poetry
Clods of Southern Earth, 1946, poetry
No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems, ed. by Jeff Biggers and George Brosi. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.