I got the call at 6 a.m. on March 29, 2019: “The office is fully engulfed in flames.”
I drove to the office, my home away from home, a place that helped shape me into the organizer I’ve become, a place where people come together, sometimes across differences, to answer questions about how to save the world: the Highlander Research and Education Center.
As the first black, female executive director of the Highlander Center, a proud Affrilachian (black Appalachian) and Southerner, and a builder of people power, I’ve inherited many things. The center, now eighty-seven years old, served as a training and meeting ground for civil-rights-era heroes including Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. But many people are now either unaware of our existence or incorrectly assume that Highlander is some sort of living museum where they can become a celebrity movement leader.
Sixty years ago, Highlander survived a raid that led to our forced removal from our original home in Tennessee.
We also inherited an organization that has weathered many storms. Sixty years ago, Highlander survived a raid that led to our forced removal from our original home in Grundy County, Tennessee. The raid was orchestrated through a multistate, Tennessee-sanctioned attempt to stop our work of organizing, educating, and building a multiracial, black-led movement to break the back of the Jim Crow South. It led to the theft of our charter and land, but not to the end of our story.
We relocated to Knoxville, Tennessee, where we were attacked by the Ku Klux Klan in 1966 and then forced by urban development and gentrification to move, along with our black neighbors, from our second home. We are now located in New Market, Tennessee, where we’ve thrived the longest.
What happened on March 29 was a continuation of this history. As reported by the Knoxville News Sentinel and in national media, on the morning our main office building burned, presumably as the result of arson, a symbol associated with the white power movement was found spray-painted in our office’s parking lot.
Saul Young/News Sentinel
A symbol connected to the white power movement was discovered Friday, March 29, 2019, at the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee. The symbol was spray-painted in a parking lot near the center’s main office, which was destroyed in a fire that same day.
It was yet another intimidation tactic meant to push us away from our work, another attempt to erase memory and our connectedness to radical movements.
We have also inherited a false national narrative that white nationalists and supremacists define our region and our constituencies—people of faith, rural areas—having given white folks in these communities a sense of belonging. This, combined with the racial demographics of the United States and the racist fervor spread by the Trump Administration, creates rich soil for overt acts of white supremacy today. If white progressives continue to concede their communities, we’ll continue to see them bamboozled by white supremacist movements, even when they are not concerned with the best interests of working-class white people.
But that’s not all Highlander has inherited. We also carry a spirit of resistance and resilience: the legacy of abolitionists and the New Left, relationships with elders from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party (which did exist in the South), and the survivors of the Greensboro Massacre. We are the descendants of those who fought coal companies and the state during the Battle of Blair Mountain.
And it’s with this inheritance that we continue our fight.