Over a career that spanned more than 50 years and touched on some of the major American social movements of the 20th century, Myles Horton established himself as one of our country’s most renowned popular educators.

Horton was a key founder of the Highlander Folk School, later reformed as the Highlander Research and Education Center after it was shut down by Jim Crow officials in Tennessee in 1961. The adult education program maintained deep ties to working people in the South and played an important role in the labor upheavals of the New Deal era in the 1930s. Furthermore, by the 1940s, it had emerged as one of the few integrated institutions in the region, a place where white activists and people of color could learn and strategize together for their common liberation.

Rosa Parks famously attended Highlander before returning home and declining to give up her seat on a segregated bus. Among the other prominent names in the civil rights movement who walked its grounds were Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Septima Poinsette Clark, Andrew Young, John Lewis, and Dorothy Cotton. But Highlander’s impact is properly measured less by the luminaries it influenced than by the countless unheralded union shop stewards and local community leaders who were enriched by coming together to study and struggle with others who faced similar challenges in their lives, and who left inspired to make greater contributions to creating change.

Sometimes referred to as a “hillbilly radical” or “hillbilly intellectual,” Horton is best known as a pioneer of progressive pedagogy. But as someone who spent his life navigating the ups and downs of social movements, he also developed important insights into the cycles of mass mobilization and patient preparation that often characterize organizing life. Horton at once built a lasting movement institution and grew skeptical of organizations that became overly bureaucratic and outlived their usefulness. Understanding how he balanced these tensions, and how he believed organizers could effectively intervene at different moments in a movement’s life cycle, remains valuable for those continuing the fight for social justice today.

Myles Horton was born in 1905 in Savannah, Tennessee. His grandfather was illiterate but had a keen mind and a healthy disrespect for the habits of the area’s wealthy powerbrokers. Raised by schoolteacher parents, Horton grew up in a religious atmosphere of hard work and devotion. At age 15, he left home and supported himself by working to build crates in a tomato packing plant and taking on other odd jobs.

Always working in and among communities of people in Appalachia, he knew early on that education was a calling, and in 1924 he entered Cumberland University to pursue a degree, while continuing to spend his summers teaching Presbyterian Bible classes in the Tennessee mountains. Around 1929, Horton managed to get a spot at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City, a place that he would later claim greatly enlarged his perspective. Horton jokes that he was accepted not because he was academically prepared but as a kind of “token hillbilly”—one of the few students from the rural South. At Union he studied with renowned socialist and pacifist theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, with whom he began to wrestle with ideas of the social gospel, a Protestant movement that used Christian ideals to argue for a committed progressive assault on poverty and other social problems.

What is distinctive about Myles Horton is how he lived through several major movement cycles during his long career, worked to adapt Highlander’s role amid them, and later reflected thoughtfully on his experience.

Over time, Horton became more secular in his worldview, but these early lessons would remain. He would come to agree with Che Guevara’s famous statement: “Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love.” But for Horton, this idea was an outgrowth of his religious roots: “Love people, that’s right out of the Bible,” he explained. “You can’t be a revolutionary, you can’t want to change society if you don’t love people, there’s no point in it.”

Horton continued his education at the University of Chicago, where he studied with sociologist Robert E. Park and developed his earliest notions of forming a school. His greater influence, however, came from visiting Denmark in 1931, where he studied the country’s folk school movement. Launched in the mid-19th century by poet, philosopher, and pastor N. F. S. Grundtvig, the Danish folk schools emphasized communal, experiential learning which integrated music and folk knowledge. On his last night in Denmark, Horton wrote: “I can’t sleep, but there are dreams… You can go to school all your life, you’ll never figure it out because you are trying to get an answer that can only come from the people in the life situation.”

He left Denmark determined to start a similar school in the Southern Highlands of the United States, and he jotted a list of lessons he would bring with him:

When Highlander was founded in 1932, it would be for the training of “effective labor leadership and action” and for using “education as one of the instruments for bringing about a new social order.” This mission would soon bear fruit with the explosion of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, after 1935. Working with these unions, Highlander spearheaded a program for preparing shop stewards and labor educators. “Within two years Highlander became the official CIO educational training center for the entire South,” Horton wrote. In 1937, Horton himself helped to organize one of the first CIO locals of textile industry workers, including white and Black workers alike, in the region.

In the 1950s, after the labor insurgency lost steam, Highlander became a key support system and training ground for the growing civil rights movement. Horton worked with local activists in South Carolina to develop programs that could prepare African Americans to pass literacy tests and vote. They then brought the lessons back to Highlander and, under the leadership of Septima Poinsette Clark and Bernice Robinson, developed them into a program for spreading Citizenship Schools across the South. These initiatives became a major mechanism for recruitment and personal development in the burgeoning movement, creating a base of volunteers for activist campaigns. Highlander also played a pivotal role in the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, having served as the location of early meetings for student leaders who organized sit-ins at segregated lunch counters. Moreover, singers at Highlander were instrumental in adapting and popularizing “We Shall Overcome,” which became a central movement anthem.

Officially, Horton retired in the early 1970s, handing off the management of Highlander to younger colleagues. Yet he remained an active participant in the center’s programs, and he was an important voice in international discussions about popular education until his death in 1990.

Many social movement theorists and practitioners—Sidney Tarrow and Bill Moyer notable among them—have written on how movements progress through up-and-down cycles. What is distinctive about Myles Horton is how he lived through several major movement cycles during his long career, worked to adapt Highlander’s role amid them, and later reflected thoughtfully on his experience.

“Highlander’s always been in the mountainous part of the United States,” the educator once stated, “and our history at Highlander has been an up and down history, peaks and valleys and hills and hollers.” Horton believed that the course of social movements mirrored this hilly topography. And he used the metaphor of peaks and valleys to describe these different movement periods.

At the peak were what Horton called “movement times,” or periods of intensive social movement mobilization. He contrasted these with the valleys in between, slower and less dynamic times which he called “organizational periods.” Knowing which type of time period they are living through helps social movement participants determine what avenues for productive activity are open to them.

Horton wrote, “The best educational work at Highlander has always taken place when there is social movement. We’ve guessed right on two social movements—the labor movement in the 1930s and 1940s, and the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. During movement times, the people involved have the same problems and can go from one community to the next, start a conversation in one place, and finish it in another.”

These periods do not last forever, though. After the disbanding of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, which amassed in Washington, DC for several months in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Horton saw Highlander as primarily working in valleys. He wrote in the late 1980s about how this was distinct from a movement peak: “Now we’re in what I call an organizational period, which has limited objectives, doesn’t spread very rapidly, and has a lot of paid people and bureaucracy. It’s completely different from what takes place when there is a social movement.”

Horton did not believe you could do much to spark a new movement upsurge. But you could try to prepare for them. “During organization times you try to anticipate a social movement, and if it turns out that you’ve guessed right, then you’ll be on the inside of a movement helping with the mobilization and strategies, instead of on the outside jumping on the bandwagon and never being an important part of it,” he argued. The essence of this work is preparing “the groundwork for a larger movement. That way, you’re built into it when the momentum begins.”

Although he did not elaborate extensively on his vision for the “spadework”—as Ella Baker called it—necessary in organizational periods, he suggested that these slower times were critical for developing the consciousness and capabilities of movement participants. “The valley periods can be used just to kill time and survive, or they can be used to lay the groundwork of being inside when a movement occurs,” he said. “That’s what makes it possible for us to have peak periods.”

The Highlander Folk School welcome sign marks the original Tennessee location. (Image by Wikimedia/Bryan MacKinnon)

For those of us who study movement cycles, and particularly those who have worked to map dynamics of peak mobilizations, a number of interesting observations by Horton stand out.

Periods of intensive movement activity—what my brother Paul and I describe in our book This Is an Uprising as “moments of the whirlwind”—are often unpredictable and generally poorly understood. Many people tend to downplay their significance, including political observers outside of movements, who regard outbreaks of mass protest as fluke occurrences. But it includes many organizers as well, who see whirlwinds as unreliable and therefore unimportant.

Myles Horton did not downplay peak periods. Instead, he highlighted a variety of their distinctive characteristics.

First, he identified how mass mobilizations promote autonomous action among movement participants and members of the public. Horton saw movement times as unique periods in which ideas spread quickly and participation expands rapidly. He wrote: “It’s only in a movement that an idea is often made simple enough and direct enough that it can spread rapidly. Then your leadership multiplies very rapidly, because there’s something explosive going on.”

As much as we might like it to be, putting together a perfect coalition of groups that agree on a common set of demands is not a recipe for revolt.

Horton told the story of an older community member in a Southern town who told him about creating her own Citizenship School, teaching people to read as a means of preparing them to vote and increasing their political engagement. She was not aware that an extensive network of such schools had been developed by movement groups including Highlander and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or SCLC. Horton speculated that “she’d probably been to a conference where somebody was talking about Citizenship Schools,” and the concept was intuitive enough that “she could pick it up and make it her own.” Far from being an isolated example, it is common in mass mobilizations that tactical repertoires disseminate rapidly and are reproduced organically.

Acts of courage become contagious. “People see that other people not so different from themselves do things that they thought could never be done,” Horton explained. “They’re emboldened and challenged by that to step into the water,........

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