Educating for activism in the radical south.

THE MYLES HORTON READER: EDUCATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE Ed. by Dale Jacobs. University of Tennessee Press, 2003.

NO LONESOME ROAD: SELECTED PROSE AND POEMS By Don West; eds. Jeff Biggers and George Brosi. University of Illinois Press, 2004.

REFUSING RACISM: WHITE ALLIES AND THE STRUGGLE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS By Cynthia Stokes Brown. Teachers College Press, 2002.

These three books are united in their subject matter--radical southern and Appalachian educators and activists--but offer varying approaches. The first, The Myles Horton Reader, demonstrates the evolution of Myles Horton's democratizing educational practices through collecting Horton's articles, interviews, and talks about education over a period of sixty years. The second, No Lonesome Road, gathers selections from Don West's prose and poetry, whose rhetorical maneuvers were geared to communicate with (and educate) a particular set of the public, who may be generally described as members of the working class south. The third, Refusing Racism, provides moral biographies of four "whites allies" (Virginia Foster Durr [AL b. 1903, d. 1999], J. Waties Waring [SC b. 1880, d. 1968], Anne Braden [AL and KY, b. 1924], and Herbert Kohl [NY and CA, b. 1937]), whose lives became committed to the work of equalizing African-American social, political, and educational possibilities.

These books give voice to seven interconnected activist/educators all of whom have played central roles in influencing the direction of racial and class discourse in America. Of great value for their individual projects (which gather together otherwise inaccessible materials), these books taken together provide important models of educational practice for our classrooms: inspiration (via biographical testimony), action (via rhetorical intervention), and democratizing education (via its history, theory, and practice). Moreover, these books demonstrate that organic educators (that wonderful subvariety of organic intellectuals!) have been nurturing grassroots resistance throughout the 20th century American south.

For educators meditating upon their own liberatory practices, the most important book to begin with will be The Myles Horton Reader. Horton (and the Highlander Center, which he directed from 1932 through the 1980s) helped empower members of the labor and civil rights movements as well as people throughout Appalachia. And the book is framed by Jacobs's inquiry into the similarity of Horton's approach to empowering citizens and progressive pedagogy as practiced in higher education (i.e., critical theory via Friere and Shot with whose names Horton's is not often studied). Hence, the book is designed for the readership of Radical Teacher, for whom Jacobs culls work from the scattered archives of Horton's publications, speeches, and interviews. On the positive side, the principles of education (and critical theory) are challenged by Horton's profound mistrust of education in schools; on the negative side, the focus on such a specific audience might limit the books' readership to those in higher education who will be unable to fully employ Horton's approach.

Horton's essential gift to educators can be summarized as a lesson in adaptive belief. Horton described himself as fostering participation in "democracy," but he saw that word as applying well beyond a narrow focus on politics. Horton is a pragmatist (in the tradition of John Dewey) who sought to empower the working class as decision-making participants in America's civil, social, and cultural order. But he did so by a purely contingent intervention, starting with the "students'" understanding of their circumstances and assisting them to set up a plan of action. Although constantly adapting to new situations, a few constants run through all the iterations of Horton's practice. First, Horton believes in all people's ability to learn when they become self-directing decision makers. As participants learn to work together, this path fosters mutual, moral participation, which Horton demonstrated by showing his belief, love, trust, and faith in each participant and their capacity to affect their circumstances. Horton's general approaches to educating for social change are easily listed (if not enacted): (1) Let participants decide their own focus; (2) Regardless of experience, education, or age, have everyone participate from a place of equal status; (3) Help participants value their own experience; (4) From that experience, focus on the goal of discovering what actions need to be taken; (5) Come up with plans to enact that action based on the "students'" analysis of the circumstances; (6) In addition to the "class," people also eat, play, sing, and clean together; (7) The moderator (the teacher) only asks questions, encourages voices, facilitates conversation, and keeps the group on track.

The difficulties of transposing that schema into school education are many. Students generally have few, if any, common problems or common identity (beyond their presence in the classroom, which might count for both!). Moreover, in the students' experience (let alone the experience of the administration), classroom education is not about decision-making or about democracy. Yet we have a few inroads. In "service learning" trails have already begun to be blazed that knock down the boundaries of hierarchy and school isolation--and an infusion of Horton's ideas might also overcome service learning's subservience to pre-existing, approved agencies.

Jacobs's selections follow the development and reiteration of Horton's core ideas through their sixty-year evolution. The work of categorizing and commenting on Horton's ideas is difficult because of their localized and holistic nature: Horton rarely wrote for national publication but instead spoke to audiences for specific purposes, and his talks fluidly spill between varied topics and anecdotes. Horton's seemingly happenstance mode of explanation will frustrate readers who desire straight answers about his methods, but when Horton gives direct answers (usually taken from earlier in his career), the answers are brittle. Jacobs organizes Horton's ideas by setting the book into four sections--"The Idea of Highlander," "The Labor Movement," "The Civil Rights Movement," and "Educational Philosophy"--arranged in overlapping chronological order. In reading the work, one gets a sense of the history of how Horton's educational practices and ideas adapted to the history of the nation as Highlander continuously sought to refocus its endeavors. Horton's work with Appalachia is sadly buried in Jacobs's organizational scheme that focuses on Highlander's successes in fostering the civil rights movement (Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks, for instance, both worked with Highlander). The last part of Horton's career with Highlander focused on sowing the seeds of democracy in the Appalachian mountains, a movement which never garnered national attention but which dramatically affected the shape of life in the mountains. We hardly have words to discuss Horton's Appalachian work, which existed (and exists) outside of easily exportable categories within a melange of issues: environmental, political, economic, localized control. Yet major sections of each piece are given over to Horton's discussion of his work to foster a movement from Appalachia's scattered, localized energies--circumstances much closer to most of our own. (But the next movement may well be nigh: take a look at Highlander's website for their current focus on issues faced by Latino immigrants). Finally, for those of you who want to learn more, Jacobs provides a good bibliography of relevant books and an excellent set of notes, but what is missing is a list of Horton's publications in periodicals and newspapers. Such are the challenges of collecting the work of a radical organic educator.

Myles Horton and Highlander rest at the unspoken center of Brown's Refusing Racism. Brown had a chapter on Horton, but Teachers College Press did not include it because they had earlier published Horton's autobiography The Long Haul (1990, 1998). Notably, Herb Kohl, the subject of Brown's fourth biography, acted as Horton's editor for his autobiography. Given the zigzag nature of Horton's approach, I appreciated Refusing Racisms clear point of inquiry: what is it that has led some whites to be able and pivotal participants in the struggle against racism? As a frame for the book, Brown quickly and clearly lays out the connection between racism in the United States and its connection to the development of American capital and imperialism. Thereafter, she conducts focused biographies (25 pages each) of important whites in the civil rights movement. We begin with the life of Virginia Foster Durr. Durr grew up as a privileged white in Alabama before World War II, but she would go on to lead the coalition that helped to rescind the poll tax in four southern states and the military. The second portrait tells the unexpected (and important) story of J. Waties Waring, a traditional South Carolina lawyer who, upon becoming a federal judge, suddenly led the judicial fight for desegregation starting in 1946. The third tale brings us into the life of Anne Braden's own path of becoming an activist who fought (and fights) for fairness in housing and education from 1954 to the current day in Louisville, Kentucky. The last biography is one of particular interest to educators--Herbert Kohl. One of Kohl's great mentors was Myles Horton through whom Kohl met Septima Clark, Rosa Parks, and others deeply engaged in the fight for civil rights. Kohl's biography is of particular importance for those of us trying to figure out how to link our own careers in education to social justice.

In conducting her life-portraits Brown lays forth the influences and events that affected their moral infrastructure: where they grew up, what their families were like, their relationship to religion, their influential teachers, their own marriages (and loves), their losses and grief, their first awareness of racism, their first act against racism, and their paths into participating as "white allies" against racism (and the repercussions and bounty of those acts). She finds little commonality between them beyond crucial external support ("the unwavering loyalty of spouses" and the ability to "create a community of friends") and internal verve (142). Yet for all their different perspectives, each "felt they had no choice" in their actions because "their self-identity was so closely aligned with their moral principles" (140). So what point is there in providing such an absolute answer to just who became an interracial ally? Brown's style is designed for accessibility: she wants as many people as possible to find inspiration (and moral introspection) in these stories. But telling such a clear story of life facts often allows her to skip the gaps of moral crisis where active change is realized. Yet as Brown shows, such action is built upon an infrastructure of influences-teachers, friendships, religion, law, etc. While we cannot usually be present with our students at such times of decision, we can provide these life histories as practical inspiration for people who come to act outside of their class and racial identity for common justice.

Brown undertakes her work with humility--she carefully asks how whites can be part of the struggle rather than co-opt it, and she helped Septima Clark edit her own involvement with civil rights in the book Ready from Within. At the end of Refusing Racism, Brown provides an appendix sketching out the lives of 24 other "white allies" (to which I wished to add another four without hesitation!). One of these figures is Don West, selections of whose writings have been collected by Jeff Biggers and George Brosi in No Lonesome Road. Much like Myles Horton, with whom West founded the Highlander in 1932, West dedicated himself to fighting with and for the southern working class (blacks, lowland whites, Appalachians, Latinos). As a preacher, an educator, a poet, a farmer, and an organizer, West spoke and wrote directly to the people he came into contact with. Hence, West's poems and essays were primarily published in venues dedicated to immediate communication rather than to preservation in the vaults of high culture. In his commitment to local communication and action, much like Horton, West provides a crucial challenge for our own classrooms. After reading West, one asks how one can help one's own students not only value their experience but how they can put their literacy and learning into service within their own communities.

A life-long political activist who grew up on a farm in the mountains of north Georgia, West wrote to other members of the working class about their common plight, seeking to mobilize them to action by reinforcing their cultural connections across race and locality. If I were to compare West to a contemporary cultural figure, it would be rapper KRS-One, but I would also place West in the company of figures such as Martin Espada, Sonia Sanchez, Wendell Berry, Adrienne Rich, and Joy Harjo. Each of these figures has fought against the limits and dismissals of the literary establishment, but more importantly, each has spoken to their own and fought alongside of them. Why then is West generally unknown?

The details of West's life are carefully mustered by Jeff Biggers in his extended introductory biography (akin in many ways to Brown's essays). These facts take on ever-greater life with West's own words, and West's prose sets the framework of his childhood and education in the Appalachian mountains, from whence he became a Congregationalist preacher and a communist organizer. Due to West's work to testify to a particular audience, each essay is introduced with a description of where and when it was published. At first, contemporary national readers may be taken off guard by West's techniques and diction, but when one recalls that West was writing for the disempowered Southern working class, the communicative power of his writing is staggering. What has hidden West (and so many others from view) is that he dared to write about people in ways (with diction, tropes, and styles) that they could understand about things that they cared. West did so from his position as a preacher, a communist organizer in the 1930s, as a school superintendent in Northern Georgia in the early 1940s, as a professor of citizenship in Atlanta in the late 1940s, as a progressive newspaper editor in the 1950s, or as the leader of the Appalachian South Folklife Center in Pipe Stem, West Virginia from 1964 until his death in 1992.

At the heart of West's life was his poetry. Poetry is often dismissed as the least pertinent of all cultural forms to social struggle, but West's life shows that poetry is anything but removed from people's daily struggles (indeed, poetry was a common cement of events at Highlander). Thus, the third part of No Lonesome Road provides selections of his poems, which he read at rallies and meetings throughout his life as a potent tool. Consider this poem, "What Shall a Poet Sing" (1940):

   What is a poet saying
   Down by a Georgia pine
   Where a broken body's swaying
   Hung to a cotton line ...?
   With his folk all burdened
     down,
   Pinched by hunger's pang,
   Whether he's white or brown,
   What shall a poet sing? (120)

I encourage readers to read West's poetry with the essays that were being written at the same moment. Although I'm minimizing my discussion of West's poetry in this review, I believe that when read (and read it aloud--it is for all its seeming vernacular roughness purposely built and nuanced), readers will rethink their own assumptions about essays as the tool of communication.

Finally, these books each questioned my own judgment of religion as a conservative force. The social gospel movement at Union Seminary further radicalized Horton, and West was politically radicalized by Alva Taylor who taught at Vanderbilt's School of Religion. To set us straight, at the end of No Lonesome Road, George Brosi writes: "Don West was a preacher, an educator, a poet, and an organizer, but these were never separate roles for him. His poetry preached and inspired his audience to action. He educated like a true minister, seeking creative ways to build awareness for the need for justice and sustainable communities. He organized people into movements that had artistic, spiritual, and educational substance.... He was one of the most patriotic Americans I ever knew, and he was more often 'green' than 'red' and always more 'Christian' than 'Marxist'" (201-03). Perhaps even more than the active repression of HUAC, West's life work is unknown because his labors for justice are not easily categorized. In his commitment to daily, colloquial radicalism, West's example serves as an important injunction for us to teach in lieu of our students' own unexpected and uncategorizable cores of morality and self-belief. They will create the new movement themselves.