Myles Horton

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Myles Horton (July 5, 1905 - January 1990) was an American educator and cofounder of the Highlander Folk School, famous for its role in the Civil Rights Movement.

A poor white from Savannah in western Tennessee, his social and political views were strongly influenced by radical Social Gospel theologian Reinhold Niebuhr under whom he studied at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Along with Don West and Methodist minister James A. Dombrowski of New Orleans, he founded the Highlander Folk School (now Highlander Research and Education Center) in his native Tennessee. The school based itself in 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." (McWhorter)

Horton was the inspiration for the founding of the Myles Horton Organization at the University of Tennessee in 1986 by three undergraduate students named John Meeks, Jack Hale and Anthony Mark Happel. The M.H.O. was designed to carry on the civil rights work started by Horton and his comrades at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. 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. Eventually, the M.H.O. was absorbed into another student/community organization called the People's Justice Alliance. The founding members went their separate ways in the early 1990s.

[edit] References

McWhorter, Diane. Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climatic Struggle of the Civil Rights Revolution. New York: Touchstone, 2001. p. 91-95. ISBN 0743217721
Gemma, Peter B., ed. Shots Fired: Sam Francis on America's Culture War. Vienna, VA: Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation Books, 2006, pp. 162-164.
Adams, Frank, with Horton, Myles. Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander. Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 1975. ISBN 0-89587-019-3
Glen, John M. Highlander: No Ordinary School. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996. ISBN 0-87049-928-9

[edit] Further Reading

Horton, Myles, With Judith & Herbert Kohl. The Long Haul: An Autobiography. 1990; New York: Teachers College Press, 1998. ISBN 0385263139
Horton, Myles and Paulo Freire. We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990. ISBN 0-87722-775-6

[edit] Video References

We Shall Overcome, Ginger Group Productions, 1988; PBS Home Video 174, 58 min. Myles Horton discusses Highlander's role, through his wife Zilphia Horton's music program, in promoting the song "We Shall Overcome" to the Southern labor movement in the 1930s, and then to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 60s.