Don West (educator)
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- For the television personality, see Don West (sportscaster)
Don West (1906 - September 29, 1992), was an American writer, poet, educator, trade union organizer, civil-rights activist, and a co-founder of the Highlander Folk School.
West was born in Devil's Hollow, Gilmer County, Georgia, the child of North Georgia sharecroppers. In high school he led a protest against an on-campus showing of the film The Birth of a Nation and was eventually expelled for other conflicts. He was also expelled from Lincoln Memorial University, in Harrogate, Tennessee, for leading another protest against the paternalism of the campus, though he eventually returned and graduated in 1929. He went on to study under Alva Taylor and Willard Uphaus at the Vanderbilt Divinity School 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, Tennessee, and was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee, but never testified. In the 1940s, his collection of poetry, Clods of Southern Earth, became a literary phenomenon when it sold tens of thousands of copies.
He and his wife, Connie West, invested in the establishment of the Appalachian South Folklife Center in Pipestem, Summers County, West Virginia, in 1964. One of their two daughters was Hedy West (1938 - 2005), a well-known folksinger.
West died in Charleston, West Virginia, in 1992.
[edit] Selected works
- Crab-Grass (poetry) (1931)
- Songs for Southern Workers: Songbook of the Kentucky Workers Alliance. (1937; reprinted, Huntington, WV: Appalachian Movement Press, 1973)
- Clods of Southern Earth (poetry, drawings by Harold Price) (New York: Boni and Gaer, 1946)
- No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems, ed. by Jeff Biggers and George Brosi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004)
[edit] Sources
- James J. Lorence, Biography from the New Georgia Encyclopedia [1]
- "A Radical of Long Standing," by Sheryl James, St. Petersburg Times, 1989 [2]
