Myles' first wife, Zilphia Horton, is often credited with joining Pete Seeger, Frank Hamilton and Guy Carawan in writing new lyrics to an old religious folk tune that became the anthem of the civil rights movement, "We Shall Overcome."
Martin Luther King, Jr., former Mayor Andrew Young of Atlanta, Fanny Lou Hamer and Stokeley Carmichael were among those who attended classes or taught at the school. He worked closely with labor unions, antipoverty organizations and civil rights leaders and is often credited with being one of the sparks that ignited the civil rights movement in the United States. Over those years Myles taught thousands of blacks and whites to challenge entrenched social, economic and political strictures of a segregated society. Highlander was a controversial school in the South that for years taught leadership skills to blacks and whites in defiance of segregation laws. Myles founded the Highlander Folk School in 1932 in Monteagle, Tennessee, about 55 miles northwest of Chattanooga. His searching took him to the University of Chicago and eventually to the folk school movement in Denmark before he was ready to return to Tennessee and start his own school. At the urging of a minister and friend, he attended Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan under the mentorship of Reinhold Niebuhr. Myles began many years of searching for a plan of action. In his senior year at Cumberland and after graduation in 1928, he began organizing interracial meetings of the YMCA. Myles Horton entered Cumberland College in Tennessee in 1924 and almost immediately led a student revolt against the hazing of freshmen by fraternities.īut it was a summer job in 1927, when he was teaching Bible school classes to poor mountain people in Ozone, Tennessee, for the Presbyterian Church, that led him in his lifelong work: to build a school that would help people learn to transform the empoverished and oppressed conditions of mountain life.
Myles was born July 5, 1905, in Savannah, Tennessee. (Text adapted from an obituary in the New York Times, January 1990)
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