Myles Horton, 84; Founder of Early Civil Rights Center

Educator and political reformer Myles Horton, founder of a Tennessee training center that became an influential spawning ground for the U.S. labor and civil rights movements, has died after a 2 1/2-year battle with cancer.

Horton, 84, whose Highlander Research and Education Center survived attacks by the Ku Klux Klan, McCarthyites and Southern politicians, slipped into a coma Jan. 13 in his home at the center in Newmarket, Tenn. His son and daughter were at his side when he died there Friday, center officials said.

Horton’s students and associates included Eleanor Roosevelt, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., union leader John L. Lewis and former U.S. Ambassador Andrew Young. Seamstress Rosa Parks attended a Highlander workshop two weeks before her refusal to give her seat to a white man sparked the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala. Horton’s most controversial work was a literacy program that taught thousands of blacks to read and write so they could register to vote in the 1950s.

Horton had decided that society’s wrongs could be corrected by organizing people into unions and grass-roots groups to seek political and economic reform. He started the Highlander Folk School in 1932 on a farm in Monteagle, Tenn., a coal-mining town near Chattanooga. It soon became the main training center for union activists in the South and the desegregation movement.

The school mixed classes on politics and economics with square dances and local lore. Horton’s first wife, Zilphia Johnson Horton, adapted a black hymn, “We Shall Overcome” into the modern civil rights anthem popularized by folk singers Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.

Southern politicians branded Highlander a “finishing school for communists” and excoriated its disciples as “a cancerous growth.”

The school was raided and the property confiscated by the state in 1959 for selling liquor without a license because a seminar participant took a beer from a cooler and left behind a quarter. When Highlander was locked by police, Horton laughed and said, “You can padlock a building, but you can’t padlock an idea.”

He resurrected Highlander in 1961, and its focus shifted to environmental problems such as strip-mining in the Appalachians and toxic chemical dumping. He retired as the center’s director in 1973, but remained an active participant at its new home near Knoxville on a 104-acre hilltop farm overlooking the Great Smoky Mountains.

Candie Carawan, residential education coordinator at Highlander, said Horton underwent surgery for a cancerous brain tumor last August, and another was found in December.

Horton, who was born in 1905 in Savannah, Tenn., is survived by his son, Thorsten Horton, an educator living in Madison., Wis., and daughter, Charis Horton, a film maker living in Los Angeles.

A private burial service will be held today at a cemetery near the old school in Monteagle. Family members are planning a memorial service later this spring for his many friends and supporters, but no date has been set.