Restrictions to Access

Use of audio recordings may require production of listening copies.

Copyright Notice

Copyright is retained by the authors of items in these papers, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.

Preferred Citation

[Identification of item], in the Highlander Research and Education Center Collection #20361, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Provenance

Acquired in June 2002.

Sensitive Materials Statement

Manuscript collections and archival records may contain materials with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal or state right to privacy laws and regulations, the North Carolina Public Records Act (N.C.G.S. § 132 1 et seq.), and Article 7 of the North Carolina State Personnel Act (Privacy of State Employee Personnel Records, N.C.G.S. § 126-22 et seq.). Researchers are advised that the disclosure of certain information pertaining to identifiable living individuals represented in this collection without the consent of those individuals may have legal ramifications (e.g., a cause of action under common law for invasion of privacy may arise if facts concerning an individual's private life are published that would be deemed highly offensive to a reasonable person) for which the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill assumes no responsibility.

The following terms from Library of Congress Subject Headings suggest topics, persons, geography, etc. interspersed through the entire collection; the terms do not usually represent discrete and easily identifiable portions of the collection--such as folders or items.

These and related materials may be found under the following headings in online catalogs.

• Adult education--United States--History.
• African Americans--Civil rights.
• African Americans--Religion.
• African Americans--Songs and music.
• Civil rights movements--Songs and music.
• Civil rights--United States.
• Clark, Septima Poinsette, 1898-1987.
• Folk music--United States.
• Highlander Folk School (Monteagle, Tenn.).
• Highlander Research and Education Center (Knoxville, Tenn.).
• Horton, Myles, 1905- .
• Horton, Zilphia, 1910-1956.
• Jenkins, Esau.
• Labor--Songs and music.
• Parks, Rosa, 1913- .
• Protest songs--United States.
• Radio programs--United States.
• Social movements--Songs and music.
• Social movements--United States.
• Working class--Songs and music.

• Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project Collection (#20004)
• Guy and Candie Carawan Collection (#20008)

Myles Horton founded the Highlander Folk School in 1932 as an adult education institution based on the principle of empowerment. Horton (1905-1991) was born and raised among the Appalachian Mountains in Savannah, Tenn. He grew up in a working-class family that believed in education and community service. His parents were schoolteachers until the late 1920s, after which they worked for the Works Progress Administration and other employers. Horton began working in packing plants before graduating from high school. During this time, he staged a tomato packers' strike and negotiated raises for workers.

In 1924, Horton attended Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tenn. He later studied at Union Theological Seminary and traveled to Denmark to explore educational reform. He investigated the work of Jane Addams and John Dewey and came to believe that the way to affect change in society was to give the poor and disenfranchised a place to organize and to tell their stories.

In 1932, the Highlander Folk School began to take form in Monteagle, Tenn. Horton and other School members worked towards mobilizing labor unions in the 1930s and Citizenship Schools during the civil rights movement beginning in the late 1950s. They worked with Martin Luther King, Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Guy and Candie Carawan, Septima Clark, and Rosa Parks, among others. Parks attended a workshop at the Highlander Folk School shortly before refusing to give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery, Ala. Zilphia Horton, the music and drama director at Highlander and Myles Horton's wife, heard the song "We Shall Overcome" at a workshop at the School. She later taught the song to Pete Seeger who popularized it around the country. "We Shall Overcome" became one of the anthems of the civil rights movement. Zilphia Horton died in 1955 in an accident

In 1959, the School was investigated for Communist activities. The investigation led to the School's confiscation by the state of Tennessee. Soon after, its buildings mysteriously burned to the ground.

The Highlander Folk School was re-chartered in 1971 as the Highlander Research and Education Center near Knoxville, Tenn., where it continued to provide education and support to poor and working-class people fighting economic injustice, poverty, prejudice, and environmental destruction and to help grassroots leaders create tools for building broad-based movements for change.

The collection of acetate and transcription discs from the Highlander Research and Education Center near Knoxville, Tenn. (formerly the Highland Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn.) documents the struggle for justice through political and social activism. Recordings of folk music, protest songs, labor songs, and African American religious songs were a large part of this movement and appear here. Acetate discs contain radio programs, recorded songs, and voices of leaders from the civil rights movement, including Esau Jenkins, Septima Clark, Rosa Parks, Miles Horton, and Zilphia Horton. Electrical transcription discs contain a variety of radio programs on issues related to the work at the Highlander Folk School (e.g., the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) worked closely with the Highlander Folk School on labor issues and is represented in the transcription disc collection).

The Highlander Research and Education Center Collection was chosen for the National Recording Registry.

Items are separated according to their format (FDs and TRs).