by Leslie Lytle, Messenger Staff Writer

“We have it. What do we do now?” asked historian and participatory design manager Daniel Horowitz Garcia for the Highlander Research and Education Center, addressing the Grundy County Historical Society at the June 14 annual meeting. In December, the Center reacquired nine acres of the original 200-acre Highlander Folk School property seized by the state in 1961. In the aftermath, the folk school went from Monteagle to Knoxville and from there to New Market, Tenn., changing its name, but never its mission. “Our workshops and programs bring people together across issues, across identity, across geography to share skills, knowledge and strategies to build more just, sustainable, and equitable systems,” said Highlander community organizer Jack Wallace, a Grundy County native. “Highlander Folk School was the only place in the southern United States that had integrated meetings,” said Garcia. “Those meetings were dramatically important to the history of this country. My job is to ask ‘What’s important about the land,’ both the local and national impact. Part of the reason India is free is because Gandhi studied Martin Luther King.”

“Founded in 1932, Highlander advanced the labor movement of the 1940s and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s,” said Wallace summarizing Highlander’s history. Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. studied at Highlander. A photo of King at a workshop led to Highlander being targeted as a communist training school. In 1961 the state revoked the school’s charter, confiscated the property, and sold the land and buildings at auction. The Tennessee Preservation Trust acquired a portion of the original property in 2014. In 2023, required to divest itself of its 501(c)(3) holdings, the Trust sought a buyer for the site, explained Historical Society Director Oliver Jervis. When the Trust announced a potential sale to Caverns owner Todd Mayo, the state questioned the valuation of the property. The Trust invited the Center to bid, as well, but ultimately rejected the Center’s higher bid and sold the property to Mayo. Negotiations between Mayo and the Center followed. On Dec. 20, 2024, the Center purchased the nine-acre site, several homes, and library where Highlander Folk School workshops were held.

Looking to the future, Garcia stressed, “The concept of participatory design is central to Highlander. Everybody has something to teach, everybody has something to learn. Together we can figure out the solutions to the problems. If we can figure out a good question, we can figure out a good answer.” Wallace anticipates the Center hosting a local, large scale community wide event before the end of the year to invite input. Likewise, Garcia said, plans call for a gathering in December to jump start the conversation on the national level.

The team of Garcia, Wallace, Highlander Center Special Projects Organizer Evelyn Lynn, and an additional staff member coming on board in September, will draft a proposal for the “Highlander Project” over the course of the next year and a half, with the goal of defining exactly what the Center will do with the property.

Garcia conceives of the site as a “Memory Farm.” “What is good about [the memory] and what do we want to change?” Garcia asked. “Who should come together on that land right now and what should they be talking about? What kind of questions do you want to ask people? What kind of things do you want to say to people? And how do we go about doing that?”

In response to a question about the property serving as a retreat, Garcia said, “I love the idea of people being able to stay on the land again. The [original] concept of Highlander was that it would be residential and that by living there and living on that land with other people and figuring out how you were going to treat each other, how you were going to sleep, how you were going to wake up, how were you going to do this work, and in figuring out how all this is going to happen you would build a community that would address all the problems.”

Asked if the Center would attempt to acquire more of the original 200 acres, Garcia replied, “The 200 acres shouldn’t have been taken from them. Was it legal? The supreme court said it was legal. But was it right? I don’t think it was right. Should we work to get all 200 acres? I don’t know anybody who is opposed to that.”