New Testament Reading—Matthew 9: 9-13
Who was Myles Horton? He was a white Southerner from the Appalachian mountains. He was born in Savannah, Tennessee in 1905. To get by, his parents did everything from sharecropping to working in a canning factory. By their actions, his parents taught him the value of service to others and of education as a means to that end. His mother would sometimes go to a cotton mill town nearby where poverty, illiteracy, and illness ran high. She would bring food and hold a Bible class. On those days, supper in the Horton household would be light, but Myles never resented it. He knew how much helping others meant to his mother.
When he was growing up, Myles once found some old theology books in his grandparents’ attic. He started to read them and soon confessed to his mother that predestination didn’t make much sense to him. He said, “I don’t believe any of this. I guess I shouldn’t be in this church.” His mother laughed and said, “Don’t bother about that, that’s not important, that’s just preachers’ talk. The only thing that’s important is you’ve got to love your neighbor.” Years later, Myles came to more fully appreciate his mother’s “nondoctrinaire” theology. He sought to build on it. He believed that if you were to treat people humanely, you had to not only love and respect them, you had “to think in terms of building a society” that strived for the common good and made equality a core principle.
Myles learned from more than just his mother. He learned something from the factory owner who insulted his workers. He learned that he wasn’t inferior to the owner. He was “just as smart,” in fact smarter. Who was [the factory owner] to talk about him and his family like that? Myles asserted that his beliefs were hammered out as much from those life pitted against him as from those who were positive influences.
Who was Myles Horton? After going to school at Cumberland University in Tennessee, Myles worked as a YMCA student field secretary. He was against racial segregation and decided to do something about it through his new job. One of his responsibilities was to organize the YMCA state high school convention. The YMCA had branches at high schools throughout the state. Some were at black high schools. Some were at white high schools. None of them were integrated. At the time, it was illegal for blacks and whites to meet and eat together. Still, Myles went about organizing an integrated conference without telling anyone his plans. The conference was held in the very city where our own high school youth will be going this summer: Knoxville, Tennessee.
No one realized it was to be an integrated gathering until they arrived for the opening banquet dinner. After the students had entered into the dining room, “the black kids started looking around and the white kids started looking around.” But soon “they did what they were used to doing in a dining room—they sat down to eat.” The waiters who were black came in and said, “We can’t serve you because we can’t serve black and white people together.” Eventually, after some insistence and the threat of going elsewhere, all 120 of the students were fed. The year was 1928. Twenty-six years before Brown versus the Board of Education.
Who was Myles Horton? After attending Union Theological Seminary in New York and the University of Chicago and after visiting the innovative folk high schools of Denmark, he returned to the South and to the Appalachian mountains, where he joined with others to found Highlander Folk School. The mission of the school was to provide a place of learning for the poor and the oppressed of the region, but whereas the poor and oppressed had long been told that their life experiences were as good as “dirt and that only teachers and experts knew what was good for them,” Highlander set out to create a place where the poor and oppressed could “learn to value their own experience, to analyze their own experience and to know how to make decisions.”
Myles explained why making decisions was so crucial. He said, “Many take it for granted that people can make decisions, but actually, the majority of us are not allowed to make decisions about most of the things that are important.” This could be at one’s workplace or in the broader society. It could be about one’s tasks and responsibilities on the job. It could be about the distribution of income in our country. Myles believed that the best way to learn how to make decisions was “by actually making real decisions.” On the first day the students arrived, they were told that they would be running the school while they were there. It was suggested that they begin by following the advice left for them by the previous group of students who had been there. On that first night, they would then start making decisions about the curriculum, discipline, “who was going to speak and what the topic would be.” “They would elect committees to take over all the responsibilities.” Sounds a bit like a Congregational church.
The biggest stumbling block Highlander faced in its early years was that the founders all “had academic backgrounds.” They thought that what they had to do was tailor what they had already learned to the lives of poor people in Appalachia. They believed that their job was to give the students information about what they “thought would be good for them.” Myles recalled, “We ended up doing what most people do when they come to a place like Appalachia: we saw problems that we thought we had the answers to, rather than seeing the problems and the answers that the people had themselves.” Once one understands that one doesn’t have the answers. Whole “new ways of doing things” open up.
Who was Myles Horton? He was someone who devoted himself to many causes, including racial equality. Years before the civil rights movement started, Highlander was integrated during the time of Jim Crow. As a result, the school had a “monopoly” on the social equality business. Highlander also set itself apart from others working on issues of race by focusing itself on action. Highlander was involved in the founding of the first Citizenship School that taught black adults in the South Carolina Sea Islands how to read so that they could register to vote, but the goal was never to just get people to vote. About voting, those at Highlander would say, “That’s the first step, but it’s only the first step. If you’re black, white folks aren’t going to pay any attention to you even if you can vote. Sure, get in there and vote, but then you’ve got to demonstrate.” Even before the Citizenship School students finished their classes on how to read, they would come to this realization and they would start going to Charleston to demonstrate and demand that the public facilities be opened to them. Myles observed, “These were people who only a short time ago had believed they couldn’t do anything. They felt confident now; they were being challenged; and most of all, they were forcing whites to treat them with respect.”
Other people “had been working for years on race relations,” but the ear
lier programs had focused on “trying to change the antiblack feelings of white folks by changing their attitudes. Highlander’s program was based on the belief that only action would change people’s attitudes toward one another.” Myles declared, “When the civil rights movement came along, these white people who were struggling with their souls got those souls right in a hurry.” In 1952, Carl Rowan wrote that there were only seven white people in all of the South “who publicly advocated social equality.” In 1965, 13 years later, Myles “stood up near the speaker’s platform after the Selma march…and looked out over the audience.” There he saw “hundreds of whites, many of them Southerners.” He realized that “all those people didn’t get changed one by one. They got changed because black people said they were not going to take it any longer.” Myles recalls, “Blacks started moving, and they saved not only their own souls but some of ours as well.”
Who was Myles Horton? He was someone privileged to be a part of the inner workings of two of the greatest social movements in the 20th century: the industrial labor movement in the 1930s and then later the civil rights movement. Not long before December of 1955, the president of the NAACP in Alabama along with a white woman from that same state sent a black seamstress to Highlander for a workshop. At the end of the workshop, the seamstress along with the other participants was asked what she would do when she went home. She replied that she didn’t know what she could do in “the cradle of the Confederacy.” Later, however, she would reflect back on her experience at the workshop and say:
At Highlander, I found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society, that there was such a thing as people of different races and backgrounds meeting together in workshops, and living together in peace and harmony. It was a place I was very reluctant to leave. I gained there the strength to persevere in my work for freedom, not just for blacks, but for all oppressed people.
That seamstress was Rosa Parks, and soon after attending her first workshop at Highlander “she refused to move so that a white man could have her seat on the bus.”
Who was Myles Horton? Early in his life Myles “learned from Jesus the risks you’ve got to take if you’re going to act.” At times, he put his life on the line. He was shot at with laborers. On one occasion, all of Highlander was burned to the ground. But in the end, those risks paid off. In his autobiography, Myles tells the story of how he learned to ride the rails so that he could travel through the South recruiting students and raising money. His instructors were a group of hoboes. From them, he learned that in jumping onto a moving freight train, you could literally risk losing your life or some of your limbs. Before you jumped, you had to pace yourself to run at the same speed as the train. “If you get on a train that’s going faster than you are, it will swing your body around and your legs will flop out.” What Myles did in his work at Highlander was try to get a sense of what train would speed up next, what social movement would be next. He would then hop onboard before it really took off. The benefit was that if he guessed the right train he would then be on the “inside of a movement helping with the mobilization and strategies, instead of on the outside jumping on the bandwagon and never being an important part of it.”
Who was Myles Horton? He was a 20th Century Matthew. Matthew was a tax collector, a beneficiary of the Roman Empire, but when he heard about what Jesus and his followers were doing, he got up and left his job, he left all of his privileges behind, he took a risk, and he jumped on board. What risks might we take today? What train might we jump on board? Who was Myles Horton? He was someone all of us should know. Amen.
Endnote: This sermon is based entirely on the following book: Myles Horton with Judith Kohl and Herbert Kohl, The Long Haul: An Autobiography, (New York: Teachers College Press, 1998).