Myles Horton

In their 1985 documentary You Got to Move, Lucy Massie Phenix and Veronica Selver prominently featured Horton and the Highlander School. Horton also inspired the founding of the Myles Horton Organization at the University of Tennessee in 1986. 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.

Horton’s quest to create and maintain the Highlander School was opposed by Southern law enforcement. In 1959, the school was accused of violating segregation and selling alcohol. Adults at the school were allowed to leave coins when they took beer out of the refrigerator at the school. The school was convicted and shut down. Horton immediately applied for a new charter and reopened the school (Highlander School 2).

A poor white man from Savannah in West Tennessee, Horton's social and political views were strongly influenced by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, under whom he studied at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Along with educator Don West and Methodist minister James A. Dombrowski of New Orleans, Horton founded the Highlander Folk School (now Highlander Research and Education Center) in Monteagle in his native Tennessee in 1932. He remained its director until 1973, traveling with it to reorganize in Knoxville after the state of Tennessee shut it down in 1961.

Horton sought to continue his education. He left home at the young age of fifteen to attend high school and supported himself through working in a sawmill and then a box factory. Horton learned the value of hard work through working these jobs. He attended many colleges, including Cumberland University (graduating with his undergraduate degree in 1928), the University of Chicago and the Union Theological Seminary (Brooks 407).

During his teenage years, Horton experienced union organization by holding jobs at a sawmill and as a packer at factories. As a teenager, he demonstrated his activism by holding a strike for higher wages at the tomato factory. Horton attended Cumberland University in Tennessee in 1924 and continued his work with local unions. After college, Horton went to work as a state Student YMCA secretary.[2] In 1929, Horton became familiar with social gospel philosophy while studying in New York City at the Union Theological Seminary. He wanted to find a way in which the social condition could be challenged and changed and education became his nonviolent instrument. At the University of Chicago, Horton learned about the Danish folk high schools. Inspired after his visit to these schools, Horton helped established his own education center, Highlander Folk School, in Monteagle, Tennessee in 1932.[3] He later married Zilphia Mae Johnson in 1935. Zilphia Horton was a constant collaborator with Horton until her death in 1956. Zilphia and Myles Horton had two children. In 1962, Myles Horton married Aimee Isgrig. In January 1990, Myles Horton died at the age of 84 (Ayers 1091).

Myles Falls Horton (July 9, 1905 – January 19, 1990) was an American educator, socialist, and co-founder of the Highlander Folk School, famous for its role in the Civil Rights Movement (Movement leader James Bevel called Horton "The Father of the Civil Rights Movement"). Horton taught and heavily influenced most of the era's leaders. They included Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks (who studied with Horton shortly before her decision to keep her seat on the Montgomery, Alabama, bus in 1955), John Lewis, James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, and others who would create the Nashville Student Movement, Ralph Abernathy, John B. Thompson, and many others.

Myles Horton was born in 1905 in Savannah, Tennessee to a poor family. He had two brothers, Daniel and Demas, and one sister, Elsie Pearl. He grew up near Savannah, Tennessee. His parents were Elsie Falls Horton and Perry Horton (Hale 1).