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Erik Loomis

@erikloomis.bsky.social

15K followers 410 following 9.3K posts

Labor and environmental historian. Writer of books, teacher of American horrors, talker on labor movement. Beer, country music, and football are not just for the right wingers. Cats. The West. Music. Graves. Writes at https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/

www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 22h

Back tomorrow to discuss sex work in the early 20th century.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 22h

In the last twenty years or so, it has moved heavily into organizing the large Latin American immigrant communities that have moved to east Tennessee and throughout the South.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 22h

Now called the Highlander Center, it remains committed to organizing workers and people of color today.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 22h

So it took the building over and closed it down. This did not stop Horton or Clark or Carawan or the others so committed to the project. The next day, it reopened in a building it rented in Knoxville and later moved to another rural location, in Haymarket, Tennessee.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 22h

Using all sorts of ridiculous laws, such as claiming it improperly served alcohol, Tennessee sought to take over the property. It claimed that Highlander was registered as a nonprofit and therefore could not sell anything.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 22h

The CIO stuff made Tennessee officials nervous. They could barely tolerate it so long as it focused on workers. But when it focused explicitly on training the Black freedom struggle, that became a fundamental threat to the white supremacy that was the South’s ruling ideology.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 22h

In fact, Parks had her training at Highlander four months before she refused to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery. This wasn’t some tired old woman. This was a trained civil rights organizer.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 22h

It was here where Guy Carawan reworked the old spiritual “We Shall Overcome” to create the anthem of the civil rights movement.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 22h

While Highlander played an invaluable role in helping to organize the South’s workers, it became far more famous for its civil rights organizing. Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King trained there. So did John Lewis and Julian Bond. People such as Septima Clark taught there.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 22h

So that was the challenge of organizing in America, and not only in the South. Eventually, the CIO moved away from supporting Highlander at all. The school had to refocus its efforts away from the labor movement.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 22h

Highlander said that if whites wanted to sit by themselves at meals they could, but it wasn’t going to force anything. But still, this really undermined the atmosphere. It later turned out that one of the angry white workers was a Ku Klux Klan supporter and possibly a member.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 22h

But a lot of times, white workers really weren’t prepared for the integrated environment. At the 1946 worker training school, a group of white workers basically freaked out over integration and demanded segregation or they would leave.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 22h

In short, it was an agenda that combined traditional southern issues with modern industrial organizing efforts.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 22h

What Highlander taught workers was a combination of labor history, radical economics, racial harmony, public speaking, parliamentary law, shop-steward training, and farmer-labor cooperation.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 22h

It feared being labeled as communist and it prioritized the economic needs of its rank and file than the large scale change Horton and company attempted to foster.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 22h

Highlander had held various training classes for workers throughout World War II but the CIO became more concerned with controlling its rank and file than with engaging in radical organizing of the type happening in rural Tennessee.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 22h

In fact, the CIO was already started to disinvest in Highlander by 1946.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 22h

Highlander had shown that workers of both races would in fact work together, or at least sit in the same room together while they learned. This wasn’t exactly a solution for the racial divisions of the southern working class, but it went farther than anyone else had.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 22h

So it downplayed its civil rights unionism, despite many of its organizations believing strongly in that. That managed to alienate Black workers while never alleviating the suspicions of racist white workers. But this was not the fault of the Highlander Folk School.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 22h

Now, Operation Dixie did not go well because the CIO hedged on the race question in a way that undermined the entire idea. Basically, the workers most excited to join unions were Black. But the CIO wanted to organize white workers too.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 22h

At the end of World War II, the CIO knew it had to organize the South or all the union jobs it had organized over the past decade would start moving to the South, which is of course exactly what happened. So it engaged in Operation Dixie, a widespread attempt to organize the region.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 22h

Nonetheless, the Folk School soon became the de facto organizing center for the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the South.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 22h

This was an unusual place for what would become a leftist center of organizing. It was a poor reason at the southern tip of Appalachia and had a local organizing tradition in the coal industry, but was also a heavily evangelical area with a strong racial hierarchy.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 22h

In 1932, Horton, along with his friends Don West and Jim Dombroski decided to give it a shot. They opened the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, a tiny town on the Cumberland Plateau northwest of Chattanooga.

Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 22h

He continued training for this, studying at the University of Chicago, spending time at Hull House (Jane Addams was still running it as an old woman), and then going to Denmark to study the Danish folk school tradition.