Monteagle - The greatest untold civil rights story

Since coal was discovered here in the mid 1800's, my little mountain retreat town has had an interesting and colorful history. This particular story has always fascinated me.

Your kind ain't welcome here

As a freshman state representative, this week in 1959, Shelby Rhinehart (D-Spencer) knew a subversive when he saw one. At the Highlander Folk School, outside Monteagle, he saw plenty.
Civil-rights activists have been gathering for years to conduct workshops on nonviolent resistance at the school. On its board were such dangerous radicals as Eleanor Roosevelt and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Then there was Rosa Parks, who was an unknown seamstress at a Montgomery department store when she first visited Highlander. And that rabble-rousing preacher from Alabama, M.L. King, was a board member and regular visitor too.

At the urging ot Rhinehart and other legislators, a state investigation of "subversive activities" at Highlander held its first public hearings on March 11, 1959. "The people in my area," Rhinehart declared, "are happy over the investigation and hope it will serve to rid the area" — all-white Grundy County — "of the school."

With the accusations of subversive activity at Highlander making national news, an FBI agent reported back to Washington that there were no official suspicions about the school.
"We have conducted an investigation of it in the past in view of allegations received that it was the headquarters for communist activities in East Tennessee," the agent wrote. "Our investigation failed to substantiate the allegations." (Redacted versions of the FBI's files on Highlander, released via the Freedom of Information act, are at this link.If you have an afternoon or evening free, these files are incredibly interesting.)

More prevalent, though, were attitudes like those of Vanderbilt English Professor Donald Davidson. He had been a member of the Fugitive poets and Agrarian essayists years earlier, alongside Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate and other luminaries of Southern literature. In the run-up to the hearings, Davidson authored a press release for a group called Tennessee Citizens for Constitutional Government, "heartily" commending the legislature's action.

The press release suggested that meetings at Highlander in the summer of 1957, "attended by a number of well-known Communists, fellow-travelers, leftists and well-known agitators," might have led to the violent outbursts that accompanied desegregation of public schools months later in Little Rock, Nashville and other Southern locales."When the facts have been duly determined," Davidson concluded, the authorities could decide whether Highlander's leaders ought to be "subject to prosecution for creating a public nuisance and constituting a threat to the peace and tranquility of Tennessee."

The legislative hearings, which Niebuhr denounced publicly as "shocking political blackmail," did not in themselves accomplish the purpose of making Highlander go away. Several months later, though, the state would find a way to get that task done.
A police raid discovered beer on the premises, as well as a bottle of gin in school director Myles Horton's home and what was described in news accounts as a "keg containing whiskey." Calling Highlander an "integrated whorehouse" and accusing it of unlawful liquor sales, prosecutor Ab Sloan ordered it shut down.

The investigators discovered the supposed whiskey barrel in the basement of Horton's house, as he recalled in a 1978 interview with Nashville author John Egerton. A policeman thought he smelled whiskey when he sniffed the barrel, so he poured a little water into it and then took a taste. He later testified that its flavor was booze-like and horrific.
After Horton got a look at the barrel, and then ran into the cop the next day, he couldn't resist having a chat. "You know what you drank?" he asked. "You drank mouse turd soup." The officer turned pale.

In April 1960, as Nashville attorney Cecil Branstetter waged a court battle against state efforts to revoke the school's tax-exempt status, songwriter Pete Seeger and other Highlanders would adapt an old hymn, "We Shall Overcome," for use in their protests. It would quickly catch on as the anthem of the civil rights movement.

The state would win its case and auction off the school's property in 1961. Horton relocated to east Tennessee, where the school faced further harassment for violating race codes. Arsonists burned it down in 1963. Horton rebuilt it. In 1990, at the age of 84, he died at Highlander. The school has lived on, celebrating its 75th birthday last year.