by Leslie Lytle, Messenger Staff Writer

A June press release announced the August opening of the historic Highlander Folk School Library in Monteagle. Tennessee Preservation Trust (TPT), which spearheaded the restoration project, has applied for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places. In an Aug. 16 interview, project director David Currey said plans for opening had changed — “I think I’m going to wait until the National Register nomination is complete. I don’t know exactly when that’s going to be.” The state of Tennessee has approved the nomination and forwarded it to the National Park Service, which gives final approval. Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tenn., has challenged the National Register nomination claiming TPT is an “unfit steward” of the Highlander legacy. Will the Center’s petition to the National Park Service to “Reject the Nomination of the Highlander Folk School Library to the National Register of Historic Places” stymie approval of the TPT application and plans to open the site to visitors? Highlander Center’s legacy and historic relationship to Highlander Folk School has bearing on the question.

For the most part, the TPT and Highlander Center accounts of the school’s history agree. The school opened in the Summerfield community of Monteagle in 1932 to educate the region’s miners and other exploited laborers and help them organize for better wages and working conditions. In its focus on labor struggles, the school held integrated workshops as early as 1944, rare in the South, and in the 1950s took up the cause of civil rights. Citizenship Schools throughout the southeast taught literacy skills needed to vote, while in Monteagle up and coming civil rights leaders learned strategies for non-violent civil disobedience. Rosa Parks spent two weeks at Highlander before refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. A photo of Martin Luther King, Jr. at a workshop led to Highlander being targeted as a communist training school. In 1961, the state revoked the school’s charter and confiscated the property. The very next day, Highlander renamed itself Highlander Research and Education Center and reopened at a new location in Knoxville. Repeated racial harassment throughout the 1960s prompted the Center to relocate to its current headquarters in New Market in 1971.

The Center’s challenge to TPT’s application for inclusion in the National Register argues the Center was never “formally notified” of TPT’s plans to purchase the Highlander Folk School property and seek National Register inclusion, yet TPT used text from the Center’s website for the nomination form; TPT has not involved the Center in planning, fundraising or programming for the historic library site; the TPT nomination form contains historical inaccuracies; and the Center holds exclusive rights to the name “Highlander” and “Harry Lasker Memorial Library” — the alternative name listed for the library on the TPT nomination form and a name still in use at the Center’s New Market location.

Currey said TPT would not have become involved if the organization had not been contacted in 2013 by the Tennessee Parks and Greenway Foundation and concerned citizens. The property’s historic value had been undermined by past owners and the property was again listed for sale. Currey contends the Highlander Center participated in some of the early phone conversations among the parties involved. “In 2013, nobody stepped up to the plate to save this property, and TPT did.”

In response to rumors TPT was dissolving, Currey said the president of the board’s battle with cancer and subsequent death led to a lapse in tax filings, but TPT was in the process of securing reinstatement of its nonprofit status.

The Highlander Center maintains, since 1932, Highlander has “directly-impacted people in our region, knowing that together, we have the solutions to address the challenges we face in our communities and to build more just, equitable, and sustainable systems and structures … TPT is best known for its efforts to preserve Civil War history … wholly disconnected from Highlander’s multiracial and working-class history, as reflected in its board of directors and leadership that is overwhelmingly white.”