For nearly nine decades, the Highlander Research Center in New Market Center, Tennessee, has fought for racial justice and civil rights. Founded in 1932 by Myles Horton, Highlander has become a force in the South, promoting a progressive outlook and organizing tools around the region.
The group uses education and popular organizing tools to connect multiple generations and demographics to the progressive movement. Highlander’s main focus is changing people’s minds through education and learning, so the group has primarily focused its efforts on developing a change in how the public interacts with one another in land use, places and language in order to effect change from unlikely places.
Blue Tent asked the group’s co-Executive Director Allyn Steele about the center, its programming, and its place in the broader regional and national efforts to effect progressive change.
The following has been condensed and edited.
The center has been a force in Appalachian politics for nine decades. Can you talk a little about that journey, briefly, and more specifically about the way you’ve approached the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century?
Highlander has been a catalyst for movements and grassroots leadership in Appalachia and the rest of the South since 1932. Everything we do seeks to expand democracy by centering the innate leadership and brilliance of those most impacted by problems created by white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism and other interlocking oppressive systems of dominance.
Our educational work accompanies leaders, organizers and formations on virtually every social movement frontline, ranging from the Movement 4 Black Lives to the creative efforts to imagine and build new social solidarity economies.
Put simply, Highlander is a school and always has been. Our educational work in the 21st century moves in the legacy of the support we gave to the labor movements of the 1930s to the 1940s, the Black Freedom Movement of the 1950s-1960s, and environmental, LGBTQ+, youth, immigrant/refugee rights, and anti-globalization movements of the last quarter of the 20th century.
The challenges we face today are in helping people release themselves from the false dichotomies often presented in social change work—build up or tear down? Electoral work or direct action?
In order to effectively dismantle the grip that white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism has on our bodies, minds and imaginations, we need all strategies and tactics, and we need people to follow the present and future leadership of those on the margins into the transformed future we all deserve.
What lessons should other organizers draw from your approach?
Highlander knows a lot and knows a little. We know a lot because of how long we’ve been around, because of the nearly 6,000 people who connect and come through Highlander’s work annually, and because those people trust us with their stories. What all of that teaches us is that regular people know the way forward but often need the connections and resources to work together in a way that’s not rushed by the anxieties of shallow reform or white liberalism, but rather anchored in the discipline and rigor of the indigenous, Black radical and working-class organizing traditions that have been fighting for (and winning) liberation in the South for several centuries.
At our best, Highlander listens and moves with people to shift and transform culture. That is what is radical. Other organizers should know that the South and Appalachia have centuries of front-line resistance struggles, alternative social and political economies, spiritual and cultural traditions and a range of other tools and stories that could teach everyone else a thing or two about how to build a new world that doesn’t just benefit elites.
People often tell us that Highlander is a moral authority for the work. That might be true, and if so, it’s true because we listen to people and create containers for people to do life-changing and life-saving work in their own lives and homes and communities that they can bring back to Highlander and connect with others and keep learning revolution together.
Where do you put Highlander in the context of the nationwide movement to address issues around social justice? The movement in the South?
Highlander is a school and meeting place for anyone interested in building social and economic democracy that expands what’s possible for regular people to collectively determine their own destinies.
We especially welcome Appalachian and other Southern folks to come through and learn together, and we invite all people of goodwill from outside the region, especially our movement family and friends from the Global South, to join together at or through Highlander to sing and eat together and figure out how to create a new world together.
As we’ve been for 88 years, Highlander will continue to challenge people to think bigger while also adding capacity to the grassroots struggles of everyday folks.
What are the mid-term/long-term goals of the Highlander at this point?
Highlander plans to turn 90 years old with style and 100 years old with no apologies. This means making Highlander a place where all people interested in expanding and deepening democracy can visit, feel nourished, and expand their revolutionary imaginations to the fullest.
It means sharpening our educational work to have the most radical and relevant impact on existing and emerging movements, especially those meeting the unique needs of people impacted by the current and coming political, social, economic and ecological disasters of the 21st century.
