A library where Rosa Parks, John Lewis and other civil rights leaders forged strategies that would change the world is mired in controversy over who gets to tell its story.
In this undated photo provided by the Nashville Banner Archives, Nashville Public Library, Special Collections, Rosa Parks, center, and Myles Horton, right, meet at the Highlander Library in Monteagle, Tenn. The library building where Rosa Parks, John Lewis and other civil rights leaders forged strategies that would change the world is mired in controversy over who gets to tell its story.
But Highlander as an institution never really closed — it just moved locations. It lives on today as the Highlander Research and Education Center, whose leaders are rallying opposition to listing the library in the National Register of Historic Places, saying they were frozen out of the process.David Currey, a board member at the Tennessee Preservation Trust, has managed the library's restoration since the trust bought the site in 2014, saving it from redevelopment.
“Approving the nomination of the Highlander Folk School Library in its current form will allow an elite, white-led institution to coopt and control the historical narrative of a site most significant for its work with Black, multiracial, poor and working-class communities," states the letter, which also accuses trust members of having glorified the Confederacy.Currey, who is white, frames the issue much differently.
Highlander's co-founder and longtime leader, Myles Horton, a white man, created a space almost unique in the Jim Crow South, where activists white and Black could build and strengthen alliances.Parks attended a Highlander workshop a few months before refusing to move to the back of a segregated city bus in Montgomery, Alabama."It was one of the few times in my life up to that point when I did not feel hostility from white people,” she wrote in her autobiography.
“The property was stolen from us because it was bringing Black and white people together to preserve democracy,” Henderson said. “The land should be repatriated, back to the Highlander Folk School, which is now the Highlander Research and Education Center.” Currey still hopes the trust and center can work together to promote the legacy of a building both organizations see as incredibly important.
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