Martin Luther King, Jr. was 28 years old in 1957, when he visited the Highlander Folk School and gave the speech, ‘A Look to the Future’. He was coming into prominence as the civil rights movement in the South was galvanized around the Montgomery Bus Boycott that had lasted from 5 December 1955 to 20 December 1956. King, through a series of circumstances gained the confidence of prominent leaders in the black community, including Pastor Ralph Abernathy and E.W. Nixon of the Montgomery National Association of Coloured People (NAACP). His non-controversial persona and his gifts as an orator and preacher qualified him to be elected the spokesman for the black community during the protracted bus boycott that helped define the civil rights movement. He was perhaps an unlikely choice since he had been in Montgomery only fifteen months having been appointed pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Although young in years, King was very well educated with three university degrees. He represented a particular segment of the black elite coming from a lineage of Baptist pastors; his father was pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church that his grandfather had founded.

King was invited by Highlander director Myles Horton to give the closing address celebrating Highlander’s twenty-five years of activity promoting what would be called today popular education for social change.¹ Myles Horton and Don West² founded the Highlander Folk School in 1932 in Grundy County, near Monteagle, Tennessee. The idea for the centre came about when Horton visited Denmark in the 1930s and was impressed by the Danish Folk Schools that offered a unique programme of adult education and preservation of local folkways. He saw this model of democratic education as a way out of the rural poverty that had become even more extreme in the South during the Great Depression than in other regions of the country. By the 1950s Highlander shifted focus from poverty reduction in Appalachia towards labour issues and worker education.

Horton was born in Savannah, Tennessee and graduated from Cumberland University. He always considered himself a mountain boy and identified with the poor and disempowered although he studied at the University of Chicago and Union Theological Seminary in New York. Strongly influenced by philosopher and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, his teacher at Union Theological and by his earlier experiences in Tennessee, Horton decided to establish a school in the mountains, a school that would teach the people what they needed to know to gain power over their own lives. When speaking with Bill Moyers about the early influences in his education, Horton expressed his appreciation for Niebuhr as a person, ‘…He [Niebuhr] was there [Union Theological] for the first year, and he was a flaming Socialist, a pacifist, with a lot of qualifications, and explored other things. But most of all, he’d run a workers’ church in Detroit, and he was just made for me, and he took me under his wing – not as a token person, but somebody.’³

 

The North had been the centre of union organizing since after the First World War, but in the 1930s unions began organizing in the South. Southern states, often under the auspices of the governors, began promoting the advantages of tapping into the large, unorganized labour pool. Dire economic circumstances of many southerners and the rise of a southern petite bourgeoisie created a situation without safety regulations and work weeks that were between sixty and seventy hours. In addition, compensation was not uniformly regulated and strikes were virtually inexistent.⁴

During this period Highlander began offering six week residencies on ‘labour education; staff assistance in union organizing, particularly in textile and hosiery mills; and community work. The community work included a variety of projects ranging from teaching singing classes to organizing cooperatives to gaining control of the county’s political structure.’⁵ This format remained for a number of years and as word spread that Highlander was a union organizing school, its ties deepened with the labour unions.

 

Horton always denied that Highlander was a centre for union recruitment. He insisted that the programme was one of empowering adults to create their own future by building on their experiences. In an interview with Bill Moyers, Horton explained the educational philosophy of Highlander: ‘[People] they start doing things, asserting their rights, for example, working people asserting their rights to have a union, asserting their rights to be treated decently, people in the mountains assert their rights to be left alone to live their own way if they want to without having the absentee landowners run them out of their holdings, their heritage. And we try to help people, you know, stand up against this kind of thing. We try to help people become empowered so they themselves can do things, and that’s very irritating.’⁶ His ideas were influenced by his mentor at Union Theological Seminary, Reinhold Niebuhr and by John Dewey’s theory of liberal democracy and education. The idea of creating a democratic space for people to do what they wanted to do and to create programmes that reflected the needs of the community often put Horton at odds with local labour leaders as well as with the conservative government officials in the South.

Consistent with the idea that people identify and solve their own problems, labour issues and labour education became increasingly important at Highlander. Horton always maintained that while many who were trained at Highlander did eventually become labour organizers, the Folk School was not dedicated to labour organization. From the mid-1930s, Highlander worked closely with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and was their main workshop organizer until 1947 when the CIO took over the worker education programme. In 1949 the relationship with the CIO was dissolved. According to Aimee Horton, Highlander did not want ‘to compromise its broad goals for political and social as well as economic democracy in the South.’⁷ This was the result of the CIO, in response to growing anti-communist fervour in the country, requesting that Highlander also comply by adding an anti-communists statement to their charter.

 

In addition to working with the CIO, Highlander led workshops in worker education and leadership development with the United Packing House Workers (UPWA) between 1944 and 1950. Considered at the time a radical union that was concerned not only with workers’ rights but also community development, the UPWA fostered an interracial model and one that supported equality for women. Based in Chicago, the Union supported a policy that coincided with beliefs espoused by Horton. They recruited and held workshops throughout the South and worked side by side with African Americans even where the law supported workplace and educational segregation.

J. Edgar Hoover, founding Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), saw Communists infiltrating the government and institutions such as the labour unions; he increasingly targeted the labour movement and the unions during the period following the Second World War. Hoover’s biographers cite the unethical means he sometimes used in trying to discredit influential leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr. and labour organizations that did not take an anti-Communist pledge. As has been noted, Horton refused to do so and his open forums at seminars and workshops created numerous problems for Highlander as anti-Communist fervour spread in the US.

 

During his university studies, King was exposed to ideas that addressed inequality along with labour issues. His interest in Marxist theory is documented in the interviews quoted by David Garrow⁸ who described Martin Luther King, Jr.’s close reading of Marx while taking a course at the University of Pennsylvania. King was an intellectual capable of astute analysis of the influence labour had on distribution of wealth and opportunity. African Americans had an uneasy relationship with the labour unions and the divide between unions in the North and those in the South was evident. Some unions like the UPWA were active in their recruitment that was conscious of including African Americans and women, while other unions were accused of protecting White workers’ jobs through exclusionary practices towards African Americans. The industrialization of the South that took off after World War II saw the growth of factories in the region. The CIO and the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) developed a strong affi-liation with Highlander serving as an education centre for both these organizations.

 

In many places in the South the growth of the NAACP was tied to unionization of workers. The example of the tobacco industry in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, serves as an illustration. Prior to the work of the CIO in the area, the NAACP saw little growth as it was seen as a radical movement more allied with confronting the courts than working towards direct social change. The needed impetus for growth happened only when the unions became active. ‘The Winston-Salem NAACP became a mass organization only after Local 22 [CIO] conducted its own campaign for the city branch. As tobacco workers poured in, the local NAACP reached a membership of 1,991 by 1946, making it the largest unit in North Carolina… As part of the CIO Political Action Committee’s voter registration and mobilization drive, Local 22 inaugurated citizenship classes, political rallies, and citywide mass meetings.’⁹

Union members and labour organizers were constantly accused of being Communists. As relations between the Soviet Union and the United States became increasingly hostile during the 1950s, any activity or organization that was associated with a socialist philosophy was presumed by many in the government and among the public to be aligned with the USSR and thus suspect of anti-American motives.

When King moved back to the South on receiving his PhD. in 1955 after being named pastor of the Montgomery Drexel Baptist Church, he joined the local NAACP. Shortly thereafter Rosa Parks invited him to become a member of the Executive Committee, which he accepted. But he refused to take on the office of Chapter President estimating that his family and church obligations were already too heavy.¹⁰

 

Martin Luther King, Jr. was first and foremost a man of religion and faith. His actions were guided by principles aligned with his spiritual beliefs. Other leaders, including Myles Horton were moved to action by their rational belief in the dignity of all human beings and made realist thought the root of political and social action for change or praxis. King sought answers to the moral and emotional dilemmas he faced through prayer and the spiritual revelation that came at moments of heightened despair.

The well known moment of doubt at the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott is a good example of King’s strong spiritual belief. The boycott was becoming successful and King was the recognized leader; as such, he was the target of police and white citizen harassment. One night after coming home late he received a threatening phone call. He described this moment of epiphany some years later:

‘I prayed a prayer, and I prayed out loud that night. I said, "Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. I think I’m right. I think the cause that we represent is right. But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now. I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage. And I can’t let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage, they will begin to get weak."

‘Then it happened: And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, "Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world." …I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to go on. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No never alone. No never alone. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.’¹¹

Similar moments of prayer can be seen throughout King’s work and signal his deep and abiding faith along with his deep sense of mission.

 

The twenty-fifth anniversary seminar at Highlander, titled ‘The South Thinking Ahead’, was a celebration of the work being carried out at Highlander to further social change in communities. The event provided a visible example of how people working together regardless of race, class and gender could overcome prejudice and institutionalized inequality. Among the group of 179 present who listened to Martin Luther King, Jr. give the closing address were many prominent community and labour leaders. In the audience were prominent personalities in the civil rights and union movements. King recognized his friends and close advisors.

Rosa Parks was in the audience. Her refusal to move to the back of the bus launched the Montgomery Boycott. Mrs. Parks had attended a Highlander workshop just two weeks before she took her fateful act. Also present was Septima Clark who was a mentor for Rosa Parks. Clark developed and spread the model for the Freedom Schools while she was working at Highlander.

Before King began his talk he greeted his closest friend, fellow Baptist pastor Ralph Abernathy, who worked alongside King in Montgomery and who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) with him. Abernathy was King’s intimate confidant who would be with him when he was assassinated on 4 April 1968. UPWA leaders, E.K. Steele and Ralph Helstein, long-time friends of Highlander, represented the natural alliance that needed to be formed between labour and civil rights, a perspective that both Horton and King shared. Aubrey Williams, president of the Southern Conference Education Fund, and a powerful supporter of integration and youth empowerment was present as well as John B. Thompson, an original Highlander’s staff member and Dean of the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. The folk singer, Pete Seeger, performed the now emblematic ‘We Shall Overcome’. This was the first time King had heard the song outside the Baptist churches where it had been a perennial spiritual calling for salvation. Now it was to become the civil rights hymn.

 

In his speech, titled, ‘A Look to the Future’¹² King addressed many of the themes that would become familiar to his audiences. The text reveals the scholar that he was; yet the orator and preacher that made King’s speeches so passionate and thus memorable is also present. For example, after chronicling the long historic journey of the Negro¹³ and identifying the challenges ahead and the precise conditions that needed to he recognized, the orator Martin Luther King celebrated the promise of the struggle for freedom by telling the audience, ‘This is a great time to be alive. Let us not despair. Let us realize that as we struggle for justice and freedom we have cosmic companionship. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. We can imagine that this last image – ‘the moral arc bending towards justice’ – made a powerful impression on the listeners.

 

King addressed the current situation of the African American (and all Americans) by first tracing the history of ‘race relations’ as marked by three specific periods, each culminating in a Supreme Court decision. The first was the period of slavery in the colonies and in the nation, slavery that was legally sanctioned by the 1857 Dred Scott decision.¹⁴ The second was the period of segregation marked by the Plessy v. Ferguson decision¹⁵ that upheld segregation as the legal norm by declaring that segregation was lawful as a practice of ‘separate but equal’. King roundly condemned segregation, which in 1957 was still practiced in many places in the South although the unanimous Supreme Court decision of 17 May 1954 made segregation unlawful. The court decision proclaimed, ‘Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.’

King then directed his audience to consider the monumental importance of the court decision of Brown v. the Board of Education that he likened to having left the wilderness ‘and now we stand on the border of the promised land of integration.’¹⁶ Allusion to the ‘wilderness’ was a Biblical reference to the Israelites wandering for forty years in the wilderness before reaching the Promised Land. But King warned that the journey of the African Americans was not over; the challenges remained many and he warned the people that the revival of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Council were obstacles on the way to freedom and equality. King and others in the civil rights movement saw the Citizens Councils that were established across the South and a few places in the North as more dangerous than the Klan because whereas the Klan represented the lower and working class, the Citizens Councils often had members from the upstanding middle class community, including teachers, lawyers, mayors, etc. Both organizations opposed integration and the advancement of the black community.

 

Notwithstanding the challenges, the times held considerable signs of progress. King then identified two of the strongest allies in the struggle of African Americans to gain their civil rights – the labour unions and the federal courts. The development of a modernized economy and the related upsurge of the labour movement signalled an end to the old South which King characterized as, ‘a system of human values that came into being under a feudalistic plantation system.’¹⁷

Post-war economic development in the South was the result of factories moving into the southern states for several reasons, including improved transportation, both waterways and roads, a plentiful workforce including African Americans and what was called the ‘clean slate’ effect, referring to the lack of unionized institutions in the South.¹⁸ Conditions such as these, gave rise to at least a temporary revitalization of the economy and, as King indicated, would change the face of the South from a mainly rural landscape to an urban and industrialized region. King recognized the relationship between civil rights and economic rights. Both Myles Horton and the Highlander School and Martin Luther King, Jr. and leaders of the Civil Rights movement were of a mind that the alliance of labour and civil rights would be mutually beneficial.

 

Along with the need to cultivate cooperation between labour and civil rights, the call for non-violence was and would continue to be a fundamental principle in King’s philosophy. His attraction to non-violence went back to his student days at the Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, where King studied Gandhi’s writings and became deeply influenced by the Mahatma. Gandhi’s influence prevailed as King stressed that the struggle for freedom and its cost and the suffering would be great. But by using ‘the new and powerful approach’, he, ‘the Negro’ would reach his ends. King was emphatic that the key to victory lay in non-violence.¹⁹

‘Fortunately, the Negro has been willing to grapple with a new and powerful approach to his problem in the South, namely, non-violence. It is my great hope that as the Negro plunges deeper into the quest for freedom, he will plunge deeper into the philosophy of non-violence. As a race we must struggle passionately and unrelentingly to the goal of justice, but we must be sure that our hands are clean in the struggle. We must never struggle with falsehood, hate, or malice; we must never become bitter. We must never succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle, for if this happens unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.’

Near the end of the speech and as King spoke with mounting passion, he described in graphic imagery the cruelty of the oppressor: ‘You will leave him glutted with his own barbarity; you will force him to stand before the world and his God splattered with the blood and reeking with the stench of his Negro brother.’

 

King saw suffering and sacrifice as inevitable and believed that with a pure heart African Americans would achieve full rights as citizens and thus their freedom. The stoicism and unity of the black community would overcome the oppressor. King expressed his vision saying, ‘This dynamic unity, this amazing self-respect, this willingness to suffer and this refusal to hit back will soon cause the oppressor to become ashamed of his own methods.’ In some of his remarks on suffering, King almost seems to be re-enacting his own personal coming to terms with the burden of sacrifice. The incident mentioned earlier, that is often referred to as the ‘kitchen epiphany’, occurred during the Montgomery bus boycott, has a messianic ring. It is a recurring theme in his speeches, writing and personal life.

The call for non-violence was not a new strategy for King. During the Montgomery boycott in 1955, several observers who were later interviewed by David Arrow noted that King made repeated references to Gandhi.²⁰ One observer noted how King increasingly made reference to Mohandas K. Gandhi. ‘In reminding the fellowship that love will win’, editor Jackson wrote, ‘he often tells the story of how Mahatma Gandhi, the emaciated emancipator, liberated India with his non-violence campaign. What he, King, seems to be trying to do is to find a suitable adaptation of Gandhi’s philosophy and method and apply it to the Montgomery problem.’ King never veered away from the principle of non-violence, even to the hour of his assassination in 1968.

 

Myles Horton did not share King’s vision of the inherent goodness of humankind. In his interview with Bill Moyers, Horton expressed his own skepticism: ‘it’s humanity, you know, that you love. I don’t; I didn’t feel sorry for those people, you know, I’m not a good guy like Martin Luther King was, in loving all these people, you know, and thinking you could save them. I don’t think I can save them by loving them, but I think I can survive and understand who they are, and they’re unlovable, so I can’t love them. But I don’t have to hate them. I don’t have to think it’s personally directed at me. I mean I just don’t bother with them.’²¹ Their divergent views of humanity did not prevent Horton and King from working together and Highlander becoming one of the centres of the early civil rights movement.

Finally King called on his audience not to become accustomed to the persistent injustices inherent in segregation, discrimination, inequality, militarism, etc. He referred to himself as refusing to accept the world as it is: ‘But there are some things in our social system to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I suggest that you too ought to be maladjusted.’ He called upon the audience to be ‘maladjusted’ like the heroes of American history, Lincoln and Jefferson and the hero of Christianity, Jesus of Nazareth. These two examples, the secular and the religious, are emblematic of King as a spiritual activist and radical thinker. King ended his speech with the injunction to ‘Love thy enemies. Bless them that curse you. Pray for them that despitefully use you.’ He believed that only through non-violence could the civil rights movement have lasting results.

With the advantage of hindsight, Cornell West wrote in an article published in 1985 that King was the exemplary leader of the movement in the 1960s because he was able to organize and mobilize the best of resources that could promote and sustain action in the country. Those forces included, ‘the cultural potency of prophetic black churches, the skills of engaged black preachers, trade-unionists and professionals, and the spirit of rebellion and resistance of the black working poor and underclass.’²²

 

Highlander continued its mission of popular education for social change. The innovative educator and activist, Septima Clark, continued to direct the Highlander’s educational programme of the Citizenship Schools. This highly effective wing of Highlander taught adults, African Americans and whites, literacy, community mobilization, human rights and the history of civil rights. The schools spread to Johns Island in South Carolina and other places in the South. Under Clark and Esau Jenkins, an influential civil rights activist and visionary, the Citizenship Schools focused on voting rights and enabling African Americans to pass the literacy test, a requirement for the right to vote. Many civil rights leaders from both North and South and from labour, education and government attended Highlander workshops. King remained in contact with Myles Horton and often referred to Septima Clark as ‘the mother of the civil rights movement.’ In 1961 Highlander transferred the Citizenship Schools to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

 

As a postscript to this historic twenty-fifth anniversary celebration at Highlander, the gathering gained notoriety when a billboard was erected outside Monteagle, Tennessee and the Highlander Folk School. The headline proclaimed Highlander to be a ‘Communist Training School’ with a photograph filling the space. The image showed the audience with an arrow pointing to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., seated near Abner Berry, editor of the Harlem Daily Worker. Berry was an unabashed Communist who did not conceal his Marxist beliefs. King and his colleagues were used to being targeted as Communists ever since the bus boycott days. The accusations were no new event for Horton and Highlander. The school was subjected to continuous harassment and was even forced to move twice as a result of false accusations. Anti-communist fervour was growing throughout the United States. Despite the attacks, both Highlander and King’s legacy within the civil rights movement have prevailed and remain an inspiration for all who value freedom and human rights.

 

Footnotes:

1. M. Horton and P. Freire, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change. 10th ed. Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1990.

2. Don West worked at Highlander for a year and then moved on leaving Horton as the sole director.

3. Bill Moyers and Myles Horton, ‘The Adventures of a Radical Hillbilly an Interview with Myles Horton’, Appalachian Journal (9)4, Summer 1982, pp. 248-285. (Accessed April 2018, 18:09 UTC)

4. K. MacLean, ‘Origins of the Southern Civil Rights Movement: Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School’, The Phi Delta Kappan 47(9), 1966, p. 487. (Accessed 30 March 2018, 17:51 UTC)

5. Wisconsin Historical Research Society, Highlander Folk School – Image Gallery Essay. Wisconsin Historical Research Center. Available at: https://www.wisconsinhistory. org/Records/Image/IM52308

6. Bill Moyers and Myles Horton, 1982, op. cit., pp. 2, 10, 39. (Accessed 30 March 2018, 17:51 UTC)

7. A. Horton, ‘An Exploration of Myles Horton’s Democratic Praxis’ in The Highlander Folk School: A History of its Major Programs, 1932-1961. Carlson Publishing, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, 1971/1989, as quoted in Barbara J. Thayer-Bacon, 1991.

8. David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. [pdf] Quill William Morrow, New York, 1999, pp. 38, 41, 51, 58. (Accessed 23 April 2018)

9. R. Korstad and N. Lichtenstein, ‘Opportunities Found and Lost: Labour, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement’, The Journal of American History 75(3), December 1988, pp. 786-811. (Accessed 9 April 2018, 18:26 UTC)

10. David J. Garrow, 1999, op. cit., p. 51.

11. Ibid., p. 58.

12. Martin Luther King, Jr., ‘A Look to the Future’, Address Delivered at Highlander Folk School’s 25th Anniversary Meeting, 1957. Labour Movement, Montgomery Bus Boycott, Nonviolence, Monteagle, Tenn, Speech.

13. King used the term ‘Negro’ throughout which was then the common designation for ‘African American’ or ‘black’ used currently.

14. Dred Scott v. Sanford, 60 US (19 How.) 393 (1857).

15. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 US 537 (1896).

16. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 US 483 (1954).

17. Clayborne Carson, Susan Carson, Adrienne Clay, Virginia Shadron and Kieran Taylor (eds.), The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr. and Kings Institute, Symbol of the Movement. Volume IV. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2000 (Available at https://kinginstitute.stanford. edu/king-papers/documents/look-future-address-delivered-highlander-folk-schools-twenty-fifth-anniversary) (Accessed 29 March 2018. 14:28 UTC)

18. J. Ros, J. Taylor and F. Bateman, ‘Did New Deal and World War II Public Capital Investments Facilitate a "Big Push" in the American South?’ Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE)/Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft [online], 165(2), 2009, p. 309.

19. Clayborne Carson, Susan Carson, Adrienne Clay, Virginia Shadron and Kieran Taylor (eds.), 2000, op. cit.

20. David J. Garrow, 1999, op. cit.

21. Bill Moyers and Myles Horton, 1999, op. cit., pp. 2, 10, 39. (Accessed 30 March 2018, 17:51 UTC)

22. C. West, ‘The Paradox of the Afro-American Rebellion’, Social Text 9/10, Spring-Summer 1984, p. 45. Available at http://www. jstor.org/stable/466534(45) (Accessed 30 March 2018, 17:51 UTC)