Bill Moyers Journal; 725; The Adventures of a Radical Hillbilly Part 1

Funding for this program is provided by this station and other public television stations and by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. If you don't know fear, it's just like having a sense of touch, so when you burn your finger, you know, it hurts. If you didn't have that, you'd burn your finger off. You know, you wouldn't, or you put your hand in the buzz saw, you wouldn't know it was you'd be looking off and you cut it off. If you don't know fear, in this kind of business, if you're playing on a cutting edge of social change in conflict situations, whether, you know, whether the size aligned up in its balance all the time, you know, you better, you better, you better learn to know it. Tonight, part one of a visit with the Radical Hillbilly Miles Horton. I'm Bill Moyers.

A few people I know have seen as much change in the American South are helped to bring it about as Miles Horton. He's been beaten up, locked up, put a pawn and rail against by racists, toughs, demagogues and governors. But for almost 50 years now, he has gone on with his special kind of teaching, helping people to discover within themselves the courage and ability to confront reality and change it. Miles Horton came to his mission from a childhood among the mountain people of Appalachia, a land rich in beauty but a colony of poverty. Nothing will change, said Horton to himself, until we change, until we throw off our dependence

and act for ourselves. So in 1932, in the mountains west of Chattanooga, in one of America's poorest counties, Miles Horton founded the Highlander Folk School, dedicated to the belief that poor working class people, adults, could learn to take charge of their lives and circumstance. At first he ran workshops to train organizers for the CIO, Jim Crow laws for bad integration, but Horton invited blacks and whites alike, and Highlander became one of the few places in the South where the two races could meet under the same roof. In the early 1950s, Horton turned the emphasis of his workshop from union organizing to civil rights. Highlander was now a principal gathering place of the moving forces of the Black Revolution. Martin Luther King came, so did Rosa Parks, Andrew Young, Julian Bond, Stokely Carmichael, and scores of unsung foot soldiers in the long march of southern black swore equality. The state tried to close it down, the plan harassed it.

Eight troopers raided it, but Highlander seemed indestructible and so did Miles Horton. He's 75 now, and his school, from which he has stepped aside as leader and favor of younger colleagues, is preparing to celebrate its 50th anniversary next year. I thought it a good time to pay a visit to Miles Horton at Highlander, now located on the farm near Knoxville. Miles, you've upset a lot of people down here over the years. The mill owners said that Highlander was about the boldest and most insulting thing, the Anglo-Saxon South that has yet been done. One Georgia governor said you were a cancerous group spreading throughout the South. The state of Tennessee closed you down, confiscated your property, and sold it at auction. The crew cuts clan, beat up your staff, and burned your buildings. The United States Senator had you ejected from his hearings, and he was a nice man like you doing upsetting all those people. Well, I don't try to upset people.

I try to help people grow and be creative and fulfill themselves as people, and in the process of doing that, they upset a lot of people. They really start doing things, starting their rights, for example, of working people, starting their rights to have a union, starting their rights to be treated decently. People in the mountains are starting their rights to be left alone to live their own way, if they want to, without having the absentee landowners run them out of their holdings, their heritage. And we try to help people stand up against this kind of thing. We try to help people become empowered so they themselves can do things, and that's very irritating. One of the reasons they confiscated Hounder was because the charge was made by the governor of Georgia that this cancerous ghost was spreading over the south, and that the civil rights

movement teamed out of Hounder, and only a racist white person could make that assumption that some white people had to be doing that kind of thing. So they assumed that since a lot of the black people had been at Hounder long before the civil rights movement, during the civil rights movement, blacks couldn't do anything themselves, so it had to be some white people. So they got four or five other governors together, and they closed Hounder, and it was only after they closed it, they found out that they didn't do the civil rights movement, the black people run the civil rights movement. I think that's what really upset a lot of people. And they got terribly upset, I think, when they found out they couldn't stop it by confiscating Hounder, when they first came, they came and pedlocked the building. And some of the news reporters said, what are you laughing about? I was standing outside laughing, and they took a picture of me standing there laughing at the sheriff pedlocking the building. I said, my friend here, he thinks he's pedlocking Hounder, but I said, you know, Hounder's an idea, you can't pedlock an idea.

You say Hounder's an idea. What's the idea? Well, we have a philosophy that we know that we can identify. We believe that we believe in people, our loyalty is to people not institutions or structures. And we try to translate that belief and trust in people's ability to learn into facilitating people's learning. You don't teach people things, particularly adults, that you help them learn. And insofar as you learn how people learn, you can help. And that's a powerful dynamic force when you realize that people themselves, in these horrors and these factories and these minds, you know, can take much more control of their lives and they themselves realize. How does it work?

How do you help people to learn something like that? Well, first thing you have to clarify is that you have to understand, you have to know that people, working people, common people, the uncommon, common people, you know, the most uncommon people in the world, the common people, have mainly a past, they're adults. Unlike children in the regular school system who have practically no past and are told with the schools that their present didn't worth anything, they're taught about the future, they're prepared for the future. Adults come out of the past with their experiences, so you run a program and how they're based on their experiences, their experience of learning, from which they may not have learned very much because they haven't learned how to analyze it, but it's there, you know, the risk for the mill is there. And our job is to help them understand if they can analyze their experiences and build on those experiences, maybe transform those experiences even, then they have a power they're comfortable with.

So people, first I should tell you that not only are people adults with a past, with experiences, but they're leaders in their communities. I don't mean official leaders, but grassroots leaders. You mean not bankers? No, they're the people in the people's organization like the labor unions or community organizations, various kinds, well, those people come and we say, okay, what are your experiences that relate to this topic, not all your experiences, but the experience you relate to this topic. Now they haven't considered those experiences to important, they haven't thought of as being very important. We say, this is very important because that's the curriculum, that's the building stones that we're going to use here. And it's something you take back with you because you brought it here. So we start out, I didn't know it when they got it. They haven't learned to analyze other experiences so they can learn from them. People say, you learn from the experiences, you only learn from experiences that you learn from, you know. It's not all experiences. And we try to help them learn from their experiences in such a way that they go back, they continue to learn.

But we have to also learn from our experiences and one of the things we have to do, in addition to what they have to do, is to learn how to relate our experiences to theirs. And you do that by analogy, or you know, you do, you know, by storytelling. You don't get off the look here, some facts, or dump on you, we say, oh, you might consider this. And then you get into somebody kind of like you in a different situation. So we get them doing the same thing with each other, get peer teaching going where everybody is in the circle. It's part of a peer teaching group. What's radical about that? What was radical about it back and not terribly radical because education, it goes against what education is supposed to, education is supposed to prepare people to live in whatever system the educational school system is about. Like in our system, it's, prepare people to live under capitalism and be, you know, fit into that system in the Soviet Union, to prepare people to live in that system and fit in that system. That's what educational, official education is all about, to prepare people to fit into the system and support the system. And Hollander?

And turn them, really it is to turn them into nuts and boasts to keep the system together you see. Whatever kind of system it is. Hollander says, no, you can't use people that way. People are, you know, creative, you've got to allow them to do a lot of things that don't fit any kind of system. And you've got to have a lot of deviation, we believe in a lot of pluralism. We believe in people keeping a lot of their old customs and add new ones. And we say, that's what enriches life. So we're going to focus on that, where there's a lot of dynamics and a lot of power in that that scares people. When people, people in the South, before the Civil Rights Administration, begin to feel that they could do something, inspire the laws, inspire the nation and start doing it. And you know, all hell broke loose. We had experienced earlier in the 30s, we started back in the Depression in the pre-industrial union movement, this kind of before the C.I. was started. And many of our students who had been Hollander before, you know, became leaders in the unions in the early days when it's rough.

And when we first started organizing, it was illegal to have a picket line. And a lot of our activities were illegal. Hollander itself was illegal up until about four years ago. We defied the state law on segregation in private schools, which stayed on the books long after the public schools were in grade. You know, we had to work that way to live up to our principles. So I get off the subject a little bit, but the people have all this power. But it's suppressed by the public school system and by the institutions. We, we, we, having lowered the people, not the institutions, you know, always try to, to throw our weight on the side of the people and help them do things that are right. And you can't get people to do something that they think is wrong. You know, you can't, you know, people say, well, Hollander's a propaganda answer. You get all these ideas and people's heads and they go out and do things that they learn at Hollander.

You know, that's not the way things are. They were in there. They're in their minds. They're seeds. What you do, you, you, you, you, you, you develop those seeds, they're crusted over, you know, with all kind of things and the people don't even know they're there. We know they're there. We dig for them. And we cultivate those seeds. We help, you know, prepare the ground for them to grow and we help people learn they can learn from each other that their stronger individualism is, is, is, is, is, is, is enhanced by being part of a group, you know, individuality, I guess would be a better way of saying, is enhanced by being part of a group instead of telling people they're there, they're, they should go out alone. They should be competitive. They should, you know, compete with their fellow men and we say work together and, and you'll be a better person. What started you thinking radical thoughts a long time ago? Well, Bill, I was, I was asked that story by, asked that question by a priest back in the C.O. days when, when a lot of efforts to have labor schools and Hollander was, was, we were, we were physically, we were officially designated as the C.O. school of the South.

And, and we had more programs than anybody else. So, they had communist sponsored labor schools, Catholic sponsored labor schools and some independent schools like Hollander and a priest in Nashville who was trying to start a Catholic school, kept coming to Hollander and he says, I do, I go back, I do everything, I learned how to, I go back and I just imitate everything I learned. It doesn't work, it doesn't work. And he said, it doesn't do, there's no good, there's to look at it and there's something I don't understand. Maybe I can get at it by asking you what books influence your life, most, because I got to understand this, he said, and I said, well, I can tell you, but it won't help any, because, you know, like all people I got my own track of development and my own background is a part of it. I said, I grew up in a religious family, like most people in the South. And I said, the undowly, the first book at influence my life was a Bible, I had no question about that.

All my early influences grew out of the Bible and things like that, you know, not an elder religious family, but a conventionally religious family. And that was a values and little country towns, you know, people, church and you went to school to what anything else to do. And so I said, you know, no question, and I still have the values of the Bible, I still hold dear, I said, he said, well, what particular, and I said, okay, I said, there's two, there's a New Testament, the Old Testament, New Testament, you learn about love. And I said, you can't be a revolutionary, you can't want to change society, you don't love people, there's no point in it. So, you know, you love people, that's right out of the Bible. And the other thing is, it's Old Testament told us primarily about the creation. God was a creator, if you're going to be in people born in God's name, you've got to be creators, you can't be followers or, you know, puppets, you've got to be creators. So from the Bible, I guess people ought to be creative, or to love people, people ought to be creative, you know, while he thought that would rather skip the theological background. But anyway, I was prior to time of things that affected me, and then I said, I got so discouraged

by seeing the people in the church and the politicians know, being hypocritical, that I almost got very cynical about this side. And the way I knew that is because I used to, we're going to store, I used to do things where I knew people when I was growing up. And I just found that the leaders, you know, were these, these, were, oh, hypocrites. So I said, well, that's the way people are, so I was getting very cynical. And I decided, well, you know, what's it all about? It's a bit of a loving people and sharing with people, and it's a cynical world. So at that time, I always loved poetry, I always read a lot of poetry. And I ran into Shelley. Shelley? Shelley. And he said the same thing. He said, it's like you did. Why was it like that? What's Shelley got to do? Well, Shelley was a young rebel. You know, he died by the same age Christ time. But he wrote some wonderful poems about, you know, defying all authority, if it's wrong, to be authority, and living your own life.

And you do things without fear of punishment or for rewards, you know. And somehow... You do them for the big... You do it because they are right, you do it because they are right. And I, you know, and Shelley just hit me at the right time, and he gave me a feeling that I wasn't going to, I wasn't going to get cynical, I was going to live my own life, but it made me think independently and say, well, I'm going to create my own life. I'm not going to play the games of other people if I don't believe in them. I'm going to find a way to survive and live my own life. Shelley did that for me. Then I realized that what's good for me is not... If I just want to live my own life, I've got to think everybody should have the same rights I have, you know, or universality of rights. They're right for me. Then I've got to work for them to be right for everybody else. I have no right to them. You do believe there are certain truths and rights self-evident. Yeah, and those have to be shared. They can't be for me. I can't have something it isn't for you or from the poorest person, you know, in the world. I believe there.

I believe you've got to work for that. Well, I had nothing in my background that prepared me to work for things like that. You know, I didn't have any understanding. I'd gone to a little liberal, presbyterian college, and had all the kind of academic background that anybody would have. And so there's nothing, my schooling had helped me on that, nothing in my background, nothing in the Bible, nothing in the Shelley. And it was then that I discovered about Marxism and analysis of society on a class basis. I'd discovered that first, not by knowing about Marx, but by the Federalist papers when Hamilton talked about classes. That's when I first got the oldest thing of classes from Alexander Hamilton. He says if the workers would vote there and as the farmers there, as the merchants there. That was the first insight I had. Then I found Marx at the same thing a little more elaborately. So I found out that for Marx I could get tools, not blueprints, tools that I could use for analysis, analyzing society.

That helped me analyze. Then I had to get a synthesis of my religious background and my understanding of economic forces. And then I started trying to work on a synthesis. And that's how I kind of got those of the things that helped kind of get me to think and gave me some kind of guidance. Now I've never been a doctor in there, you know, a religious person, a doctor in there, a Shelley advocate or a doctor in there, Marxist. But you know, I've got from all those things, the ideas that helped me. I thought maybe you might have become a Christian poet activist. Well, you know, a lot of poetry in life. You know, I think somebody said, you know, Hollywood is a myth. And I said, well, you know, it's a pull-up, too. It's a picture. It's because it's not of anything that's a number of here, but the people who've come here made a mosaic out of Hollywood. And it's a poetry is a beautiful thing, you know. The segregationists and the clanners and the politicians were fond in the old days

of calling Hollywood a communist, calling you a communist. Were you ever a communist? I was never a member of the communist party. And I was invited to be a member of the communist party. And then I was told two years later that I couldn't be a member of the communist party by the head of the communist party. And I was said, why? Well, I asked him the same question. And he said, well, when we first wanted to be a member of the communist party, you know, you were a radical activist. I was active in college and we thought, you know, you'd be a good communist, but he says, now, if you start hounder and begin to get ideas of your own, you wouldn't be trustworthy, because you'd want to do things that you wouldn't follow the discipline. You couldn't accept any system without challenging it, because any doctor knew it. You know, I said, you know, when they first talked to me, I said, well, I like a lot of things that communist believe in. It's like I like a lot of things that a lot of groups believe in.

I like what Chris Dandes supposed to be. Those things are not practiced, but I like the ideals. But I said, you know, I come down to Southern mountains, and you know, when I guess maybe it's part of my background, I couldn't take any kind of authoritarian, and nobody could, I couldn't say that any, any, any group in the organization I will do, but you want me to do, I'll have to do what I want to do. My conscience has to, has to be my guy. That's what I told Senator Easton. Senator Easton? Yes. Senator Easton. He's educated, but he's the Senate internal security, I guess, internal security, but but Easton, and Easton says that if you, if you're not going to answer these questions, he says, you know, you can just take the fourth amendment, you know, and protect yourself. Fifth amendment. Fifth amendment. I said, look, I got all, I got good legal advisors. I've had to advise by all the lawyers that I could do that. But I said, that's not my way of work. I always talk about what I want to talk about, and I don't want to talk about, I don't want to talk about, I'm going to do that right here.

And he said, well, you can't do that. And I said, well, I said, I believe I can, because in the beginning of this country, there's a revolution, and people had all the rights, and they delegated rights to the state, they delegated rights to the federal government, but they reserved under themselves one right. That's freedom of speech. So that's still reserved. I'm part of the people. That's reserved. I use it the way I please. And nobody can tell me how to use my right to speak or not to speak. He wanted me to talk about other people, and I said, he wanted you to name other people who... He said, he said, he wanted to ask if certain people had been in high order and certain people were by new certain people. And I said, I speak for myself. I choose to say what I believe, yes. Any question about me, you want all answered, but I will not answer a question of anybody else. I'll say I have to answer for themselves. It's like I answered for myself, so I will answer no question about anybody. The first person I asked about was my wife. I said, I speak for nobody, but my wife is there. And then he gave me this song and dance, I just told you.

And I said, no. I asked about me. I left to talk about what I believe, and that's what I've been doing all my gut life. And he said, throw him out. Throw him out. He had the guards. Take me and throw me out. It's only time I ever made the front page of New York Times. Look, Miles, if everyone made a private heresy out of challenging the system, how would society... I believe in laws, but I know that the only way laws can have any meaning, they have to be just laws. So for just laws to have a meaning and to have a society of laws, you've got to challenge unjust laws. This concept is provided for it by the amendment to the Constitution, you know, or a cross where you could appeal. This is not a kind of outside reality as it seems to people. You think that's what Jefferson might admit when he said that every generation ought to entertain the possibility of its own revolution? That's right. I've, according to that many times, I said, you know, I started out, I thought you ought to be a revolution in this country.

I mean, a revolution that, you know, is run democratically, that I believe in democracy. We don't have it, and none of the countries I know of it, I know what it is. We don't have democracy, that all day. We have some trimmings of democracy. We have some, like the part of an electoral system, which might have worked in the early days when you had a handful of people, but, you know, people don't have anything to say about the people they elect today, you know, then. That's why only small percentage of people vote, and they know that their thing is set up. That's too far away from them. We have to really examine all of our structures in this country to make them more democratic. You can't have democracy. You can't have democracy at the workplace when a system is run for the benefit of the profit of somebody, instead of for the benefit of all the people. You know, so we can't, we can't have economic democracy under a profit-taking system. We can't have political democracy when we don't have some kind of decentralization as

brands go closer to the people. Six hours like Reagan, you know, but you do have to have, you do have to break the system down to where people can have more say about their own lives. Might be less efficient, but people were creative and meaningful. I believe in a kind of a pluralistic sort of society. We've never, no country, no system has, has to my mind, you know, thought too seriously about how you do this, and I think it's one of the things we ought to be about in this country. On your journey to Highlander, you were studying in New York at Union Theological Seminary under Rhino Niebuhr. I went up there, I tell you what happened. I was, I used to stay with a preacher over at CAUSE for Tennessee, if I'm not in Gail, he's a, he's a, nearer seniors, I ran into, he, he, instead of just preaching on sun, he'd go out and, and help people, and go to hospital and empty bedpans, you know, he was a, he was a worker, he identified with people, and I liked him, and he, I used to stay with him when I was, numbing around the mountains, I worked, I was state student my MCA secretary for a while, and then I worked for the Pesbury-Jane Church in the

mountains. I used to know him quite well. So a year after I finished college, I was kind of flipping around, trying to figure out what I was going to do, and, and, and by that time I had discovered that, that my dream to be at a job teach in a, in a, in a, in a college or a high school in the mountains, it wouldn't be realized because I found that those schools were not to, what I thought they were, but I'd imagine them to be. I found they were all indoctrinating people, all building people into the status quo, they were all, you know, doing kind of molding people instead of liberating people, nothing creative about them. So I decided I couldn't do that. So I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I wanted to work educationally, it turns my values, but I didn't know how. And this preacher says, you ought to go to, you know, he said, you don't know enough that you're too ignorant. And he said, you ought to go to Union Theological Seminary, a place like that, some place where you, you know, you'd like to intellect your atmosphere and so on. And I said, never heard of it. But he wrote and got an application. And one day he said, well, you know, you don't have to go, you can fill it out, so they

won't accept you, so they, you know, they're pretty hard to get into, it's an intellectual place. You don't have enough good education to do it, but you don't have to fill it out, and in the exception, you don't have to go. And to get him off of my neck, I signed that application and sent in, well, the reason I was accepted, not because I was academically, you know, you know, trained for it. They did have, they picked the best of the country. But because they wanted somebody from the south and from the mountains and somebody had played football and somebody was a hillbilly, and that's how I got into Union. I know that. I know that. I know I was a token. Otherwise, I could have never gotten in because everybody there, you know, they were all smart, academically smart people. But Niebuhr was there for the first year and he was a flaming socialist, a pacifist with a lot of qualifications and exploring. But most of all, he'd run a worker's church in Detroit. He was just... He just come from there.

Just come from there. Well, he had seen with the workers and the Ford and the industry. He was exploring these other things. So he was just made for me. And he took me under his wing, not as a token person, but somebody. And we became very good friends at the, you know, and I spent a lot of time with him. And he, in fact, he moved me way ahead of myself. He put me in a seminar with graduate students and professors and priests and people like that. And I couldn't understand the word he was saying. Did you think about dropping it? Hell, I told him. And I was at a break and I went through one whole two-hour session as a seminar, two two-hour periods. And I kept thinking, well, you know, I just over my head, I don't have this conceptual battle. I don't understand these things. But, you know, I'm trying to learn. It was nice. Then I went to the first of the other, and to the first, but I said, I can't cut it. You know, I knew it wasn't for me.

So I walked out. I said, I'm not going back in right now. I said, I appreciate you inviting me. But I can't. I don't understand what's going on. I can go to the library. In one book, I can read another. I said, I know how to read. I know how to learn. But I can't understand what you're talking about. I don't have enough background. And we were out in the quadrangle. He's a smoker. And we were outside the smoke and we're standing there. And he said, now, don't do that, Miles. He said, don't do that. He turned around to these people. And he says, now, this fellow, he said, he can't understand what I'm saying. He should be able to understand. I want to talk to people like him because he's got a good mind, he says. And I mean, but he says, what about the rest of it? And you know, they admitted to the man. But didn't they understand it? They didn't have an earth attack. I mean, they're all said, no, no, no. We don't understand it. We don't understand it. Everyone else said it. There's a judge there. And he said, yup, he says, he's right. He says, we were too embarrassed to do it. Ryan says, Miles, you got to stay in here because you know I'm going to tell him the truth. And he says, you need time in the middle of something, just hold up your hand and tell me

what's wrong. And I'll listen to you. That's kind of relationship I had with Ryan. There was a story about you attending a parade there. Yeah, yeah. What happened was that I had a, I played football in college and I had a big, a big maroon sweater. I'd taken the letter C off. I was coming to university. I just wore it to keep warm. I mean, it's my, I don't have any money. So I hitchhiked to New York to go to school and I weighed on tables. You know, I didn't have, I just, poor guy, trying to go to school. I started out doing it when I was 15, so I was pretty good at it by then. And I was, there's a Mayday parade. It was a, Mayday was big then. And I'd never seen a Mayday parade. Mayday was when you, in my background, when you went around and decorated graves in the cemeteries, you know. So a big Mayday parade up there and I said, well, I go to the parade, you know. So I went down and there's people that, you know, there's tremendous lot of people and they had all these banners and people marching and unions and radical organizations and some, some religious organizations and I was standing, I just, you know, watching

just a bystander. Oh, yeah, I was on the sidewalk. I didn't even know what I was going to, what parade, what parade was all about. And so a police, they had, they had the, what they call the call sacks and it was a good name for them. They rode horses and they rode along and they rode between the bystanders on the sidewalk and the paradeers to keep, you know, keeping, I guess, to keep them separate. And this cop with it on a, on a horse lane over and says, there's a red son of a bitch and he just wham, I on top of my head, he said, you've got a red sweater on him. But the musing part about that was that, that I used to try to tell, to explain my, my, my confusion about the, the missiles they used for the comments part of the early days, a CP. And, and I grew up in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church and I, that was CP. And all my, all my life, CP meant Cumberland Presbyterian. That sweater came from a Cumberland Presbyterian College that marked me as a, as a, as a, as a

ray, as you see. Is it a radicalizing moment? Oh, man, it, it moved me, you know, like, like, like Kestko says, the Bay of Pigs made a communist country out of, out of Cuba. This moved me to thinking very fast, you know, about the, what's all about? What's the police power? That's my first running with police. You know, I lived in small towns, I'd never lived in the city in a country. I'd had trouble, but, you know, with the, but I'd never had been beaten up or never had. So I saw the police as part of the establishment, part of the oppressive, something, it, it, and that explosive power. At that time, I was, I was beginning to try to understand Karl Marx just theoretically. My, my, most of my background was a religious background, mountain background, kind of working, but not, not, you know, and had no radical influence. What did you see in the south in those days that made you believe there was a need for a school like college? Well, the need for what was the poverty that I grew up knowing about and being a part of.

So I started making my own living when I was 15, so I could go to school, so I knew, you know, I didn't read about, I knew it, lived it. And I knew all my people and all my, you know, people I grew up with and my relatives know. And I knew the poverty. And I knew that people were shut down, you know, they couldn't, the life was too narrow. And they ought to be some way, you know, to get something more creative going. And I also knew that industry was going to come in. You know, you know, you could make an analysis of that kind very simply. And, and that the industry had come in to explore the people and I didn't want to be explored. I wanted to learn how to organize so they could, you know, take care of the innards. So the one of the chief purposes we had in mind was to try to, we said we'd try to change society by understanding it, so we'd have a decent society, but one of the immediate things was to help people understand, you know, union, labor, and political strategy for working people. You really wanted to try to organize. Oh, but we weren't going to organize, how there's not an organization school. In fact, yes, we've had hundreds and hundreds of people at Holland who have been organizers. But we don't, we, we, we, we say to do a good educational job, teach people how to

think, how to analyze, they can become organizers, you don't train them to be organizers. Well, I don't, I don't agree with this training people to do things, you liberate them and they train themself. So what was the German degree idea? What we did, we did want to help develop leadership for unions and leadership for tremendous leadership in the South came out of Holland or through Holland. Why unions? Why did that appear? Basic economic democracy, I don't believe he can have democracy, it was just political democracy. I used to talk to Martin Luther King a lot about that and he agreed theoretically, but it was only later on that he started putting into practice the idea that you had to mudden to nothing as he says to be able to eat a hamburger with a white bread, you had to have the money to buy it. And he, and he got killed when he did that, you see, trying to organize the garbage workers. So I thought on you from the beginning, economic democracy had to go hand in hand with political democracy. I was always keyed into there. And he described for me what conditions were like for the workers in this part of the country in those days. Well, they tried to organize a list bet on up here where my ancestors came from, we'll talk a settlement.

And I was in the late 20s and they brought troops down to break a strike and run the people back in the hills until they'd behave themselves. And all they were doing was trying to have cut down on the 12-hour work day and get more than $8 a week for working. They beat him in the submission, they, I mean the company, it was the first multinational. It came here in the 20s. What was it? It was a Bimberg rayon plant. It was a multinational plant, of course we didn't know that then. But that's what it was that I'm talking about it, the workers tried to organize. They tried to organize. And that plant was built on the land, it was one of my ancestors got the first land grain in Tennessee and that's where that plant was built, right on that spot. And but those people were just being pushed around, now those people had a background like my background. They were people who came out of a good tradition and so on, and the amount of people are supposed to be pretty tough, pretty independent. Well, but they care themselves.

Tough, but it's tough until you bring those troops in, it's tough when you can't stand up against the hard gun thugs and police and troops. Well, given that reality, why did you think that a bunch of... Teachers. At a seclusive place like this could identify with men in circumstances as painful as those. Okay, now I believe that they had to be done. And I was determined to try to do it. And I was determined to identify to have these people to perceive that I had solidarity with them. I knew that had to be. Yeah, but here you were, Union. So I had, you know, in the... In the seminary, Chicago. Yeah, but... A year ago, up in West Virginia, they got to argue about people who had come down and these experts had come in from these universities and somebody said, well, you know, your friend Miles Horton is one of... The hell he is, he said, he'd never been to school. We know him. You know? But why did you think so? So I knew as a handicap, but I thought I could overcome it somehow. Well, I tell you, it's very interesting that we did make a terrible lot of mistakes

the first year because of that, you know, what we had learned that we thought you could apply pretty much like the authority to apply. So we felt flat on the face, we weren't getting through to the people. So we had a little... We had a little self-criticism visit and we said, what we know, the solutions we have are for problems that people don't have, and we're trying to solve their problems by saying that they have the problems that we have the solutions for, that's academia. So it won't work. So what we got to do is to unlearn much of what we've learned, and then try to learn how to learn from the people. In other words, instead of learning from what we learned academically, we've got to learn how to relate to their experiences. So how did you do that? Well, we did that by a very strict censorship on ourselves to try to talk in the jargon and quit trying to use educational terminology and grout and listen to the people. Now you listen to the people, not just words, but by their emotions, by what you see

around, by the children, by the surroundings, there's a lot of way of communications. We had to learn a whole new way of communicating. Did you have to ask them what they wanted to learn? No, you don't ask them. You just go around and get to know them well enough that you can figure it out. And one of the first things I figured out was all of my interest in democracy and brotherhood, all of which I think is sound, was that they didn't want to talk about democracy and brotherhood, they wanted something in their bellies, they wanted some clothes on their back, and they wanted to listen to anything we said about that. So we had to learn and we had to help them with our problems. We had to start croppers. We had to get organized in unions. We had to fight for them to get surplus food. We had to identify with them in the economic struggles. The reality. The reality is that they perceived as the important thing before they would, we could share the things that we perceived. That was the kind of learning we had to go through. But tell me specifically, Miles, what did you do to these workers when they came here in the early days?

Okay. In the first place, you have to have their confidence because by helping them with their problems, like I said earlier, we had to learn from the people and start where they were and deal with their problems. And we say, look, who's been telling you what to do, teachers, preachers, politicians? And did it work? Was it good advice? Did it work for you? Well, I don't know. But you wouldn't be here if that worked because you've had plenty of advice. You had plenty of people telling you what to do. So we're not going to do that. We're not going to compound that. We're going to try something else. We're going to try to build on what you know and your experiences and help you understand that your neighbors have some experiences. And other people in another place, maybe in another country have some experiences that relate to this problem, all that are related tied in with your experience. I remember one fellow who came from over here in the mountains up near North Carolina line. He said, when I came here, he says, I had run a little piece of a pie that had all the answers. The pie has all the answers.

He said, I had a little slice of that pie. And Joe here, he had a little slice. Somebody else had a little slice. And Miles told us about some other people who had a little slice and he contributed to that slice. So now we've got the whole pie. Now I know everything. I've got the whole pie. I'm going to take the whole pie back home with me instead of my little slice. But he was proud of the fact that he contributed to the slice, you know. He didn't have to learn from other people. Well, that's what happens. You didn't. But in addition to get that information, you've got to get motivation. And motivation comes from within, not from outside in something. You don't motivate somebody. You help them learn to motivate themselves. So what you do is to try to get people to have more confidence on themselves in their peers and to understand it's up to them, there's nobody else can do it. Many of these people would go back and put their heads in front of a Billy Club, wouldn't they? Yes. And then they'd get in jail and so on and they'd yell for help and we'd go help them. We'd never show our face. You know, we'd work behind scenes with them. And yet you were arrested several times. Well, you know, if you were perceived by the enemy of working people or enemy of blacks

to have solidarity with them, if that's their perception to you, then they're going to treat you like they treat them. In other words, you're one of them. So they'll beat you up or jade you just like them, that's not the price you pay, that's the privilege you have. Well, when was the first time you were arrested? Oh, the first time I was arrested was in second year of honor in 30th-33. There's a strike at Wilder, can you see? Oh, that was in one of the poorest. That's where we were living. And honor was located in one of the 11 poorest counties in the United States. There's a higher percentage of people on welfare in that county. It only 11, I don't know how it rated among 11, but it was one of the 11. While there was another one of the counties in the mountains of Tennessee. So they had a strike. And they had a strike for some time. And some of the people came over and asked if we could help them somehow with that strike. And I said, I don't know enough about it. They said, well, I said, I'll go over and visit.

I went over there and I was trying to get someone to come to Hound because that's the way we work. And they didn't do it. You'd get pull them out and send them back in to do it. They'd go back where they came from to do it, they're based. And they were a guy around it. I was outside, I was stirring up trouble. And the National Guard, there's a lot of young National Guard people over there. The Governor had sent the National Guard to protect the property. They'd been some violence. And they arrested me. And I said, you can't arrest me. You've got to give a charge. And they had these betts. I was arrested in my belly and my back grown. So I wasn't arguing with them much. I was kind of gently suggesting, you know, they want to have a charge, you know. So they had a little huddle over the side. One guy said, you arrested for coming over here and getting information and going back and teaching it. And that was a crime. And that was what I was arrested. So I always said, there's the only time I was able to arrest it with a charge was accurate. That's exactly what I was doing.

What was it like for those made in wilder when they went on strike? It was a company town, wasn't it? It was a company town. And their company was determined to break the union and during the depression and Loppie wanton's job. So it was fairly easy. But the people wouldn't, you know, they just wouldn't give up. So they brought the troops in to protect the property. And they were, there's no welfare programs there. And the Red Cross is an existence. But the head of the Red Cross is a wife of the superintendent of the mines and she gave Red Cross flower to the scapes, not to the union, not to the strikers. No strikers could get any Red Cross, but people who were working to supplement the company, they got all the Red Cross, I exposed that. And there's an investigation that was, you know, supported my charge. They went over and they found that was absolutely true. Nobody believed it. And when I came out with an expose, they, if what had happened, you know, the Red Cross was a sacred cow, you know.

And I said, you know, that's what the Red Cross is doing there. And that's what everybody's doing. These people are starving the death, literally starving if people, you know, maybe it's getting extended bellies and people are hungry. And you know, they've eaten up everything in the countryside and had to do something about this situation. Then the editor started and said, I was a communist, staring up trouble, you know. That was staring up trouble because I was the one that was, if I hadn't gone there, it wouldn't have been this trouble, you know. So that was, that was the kind of thing you were into. Tell me about that strike in, I think it was 1937, in North Lumberton, North Carolina, when you called for the pretty girls and the American flag and someone to play the banjo. All right. You see, most people, when they, when they do an education, they work at all, and they are so heavy handed, no sense of humor, you know. And working people, you know, they have red and roses too, isn't it mine? And they, they got the, people think the self-enters of people is just economic self-enters, but they have a lot of other self-enters, you know, part of it is, you're getting a little pleasure out of the most miserable situation, haven't they have a wonderful sense of humor, they have to have to survive. So if you don't have that, you know, they, they, you don't relate to the people and you

got to go fishing with them and great beer with them and have fun with them and so on. So I, one of the things I would do over there, we had a mass picket line and around the mill and, and the sheriff and the devs couldn't keep, we had so many people, we'd have a thousand people they couldn't deal with us very well. So they'd call for the state highway patrol to come in and, and, and, and help. And the governor wouldn't station highway patrol air for political reasons and, or, or, or other reasons, but when they call for it, they would, they'd come in. Well, I'd help to organize a newspaper, Gillian Raleigh, while I was over there working. So I had my confederates there and, and, and the, and the newspaper was right across the, the, the, the street from the highway patrol. So when they'd start out to come to Lumberton, to, to come to, to, to, to, down there, then I'd get, they'd call me, one of the newspaper guys would call me, they had to say, anybody that saw him leave was supposed to call, send away from me, you see, they would come in. We took about an hour to get there for the patrol patrol to get there.

And then call him and we'd have a picket line, wouldn't let anybody get anywhere near that mill, a real, molten picket line, and, and, and tough, you know, and, and, and the time of troops got there, we, we'd send, in fact, everybody home would have, we'd keep all the gals around, we'd get some pretty women, and we'd get some guys who played instruments, be a tar player. And the time they got there, there'd be just a few women sitting around and, tell us that they're picking a guitar, and me sitting under tree listens to the music, you know, and, and nothing, nothing going on. And then when they drive up with their, they, they drove up with their, their, their mass song, you know, getting ready for warfare and the guns and the, and the cars, and these girls would go over and say, hey, buddy, you know, you know, you know, you're, you're nice looking, what you got there, you know, they, they, they start hiding their stuff, it's so embarrassed. We'd pull stuff like it. And then they, then the troops would go back and say, oh, yeah, we couldn't, nothing's happening down there. Just a bunch of pretty girls. Just, nothing happens. And then, then they'd come and call them and try to, they got back, we'd have a thousand people back on the

thing. Now we had to pull things like that all the time. Was this the place, uh, lumber to North Carolina, when the four guys came after you with me, with the gunned, and you made your best audience. Yeah, that's, that's, I had some experiences there. That was very educational for me. What happened that time? I was trying to, to get those people to make decisions, because the big thing is to get people have confidence they can make decisions. I was doing pretty well, so they made all the plans, the committees were set, they made all the decisions. They had to sit with them and encourage them to make decisions. But it got pretty rough. And it's, it looked like we were about to lose a strike. And the strike committee got pretty desperate. They weren't so sure themselves. So they came up to my room one time and said, so we got to talk about the plans. And then they talked over and they said, boss, you got to tell us what to do. We just go as far as we can. And I said, you got to run this union, so you might as well learn, you learn, when it's easy, you learn when it's rough. If you don't learn to make tough decisions, you know, I learned, and I get the learning experience you don't. I need less than you do.

You need the learning experience, I could get along without it, you know. So you got to make a decision. They said, but there's 2,000 people involved in this decision. And I said, sure, that's why you, you know, it's kind of important to see, but you got to make it. And one guy, one guy said, you got to, you got to make his decisions. I said, no, no, he said, now you're not at home to run the school. You were running a strike and you know, these people, you know, it's a serious business. And you can't just say, we got to learn to do this. So I said, no. So he just pulled, Reese's pocket and pulled out a gun and he said, you son of a bitch, make this to see you. I came here going back on my principles of education and I ever did in my life. But did you stick for her? Yeah, I did. I said, well, I said, you know, you can win this round. But you still want to make decisions that you get through. I admit I was scared. I've used to been scared in situations like that. You do no fear? Oh, yes. I know fear.

You didn't survive. I wouldn't have been here today if I didn't know fear. If you don't know fear, it's just like having a sense of touch. So when you burn your finger, you know, it hurts. If you didn't have that, you burn your finger off. You know, you wouldn't, or you put your hand in the bus or you wouldn't know it was you'd be looking off and you cut it off. If you don't know fear, in this kind of business, if you're playing on the cutting edge of social change in conflict situations, whether, you know, whether the size aligned up in its violence all the time, you know, you better, you better learn to know it. What about the time the four guys showed up in the street below the hotel? Yeah, well, that's another time I was afraid. They had hired these people to kill me who had the company. And the company, the company was tied in with the power structure in the town. Bill, just to show you how solid they were, one Sunday, every minister in that town, pray that leave town. Every church. Every church. Didn't you get the message? Or didn't he get the message? Well, he was busy or something because he never did anything about it.

I didn't leave. And the reason I, then there's some delegation to see me and told me I had to leave town. And I, that was before they got the people to kill me. That was an afterthought. And I said, well, you know, gentlemen, I said, you know, I said, I could appreciate your problem. I said, you know, this town's been nice and quiet and you've been living off of these people out in the middle of the region. And now it's changed. They began to stand up and I can see why you would want me to leave town. But I said, and I said, you know, there's a lot of logic on your side. You know, the majority of the people here would like me to leave town. So you could put it to vote, you know, democratic decision, I'd have to leave town. But I said, none of those things are factors in this. And they were getting ready for some real posse statements, you know. So I said, well, you have to understand my problem. I said, I come from the mountains, you know.

And I said, you know, what happens in the mountains? You know, people live back in the mountains and they end breed and a lot of degeneracy takes place. And people get so they don't have any mental facilities or paired. Of course, they leave all that stuff. You see, so I knew they'd read all this stuff. And I said, you know, I said, I'm just so degenerate, I haven't got the energy to leave. They were fed to be tied. They stormed out that room. But they were really preyed. And they put out a contract. Then they put out a contract. And these people came and... How many? Four. And my hotel was across from the courthouse. And the sheriff's office was right across from there. On the side next to me where I could see the sheriff all the time, he could see my room. The sheriff left town or police left town. They closed the post office.

They closed the stores. Everybody left town in the middle of Wednesday afternoon. So nobody had ever left those posts before the history of that town. And I kind of walked out of the street and I didn't pay much attention. But I noticed everything was so quiet. And I looked over to the courthouse and everything was quite usually a hub, hub, hub around me. So I went to my room, you know, kind of wondering about why all this quietness is around. Nobody seen by around the hotel. Pretty soon this car came up. And they stopped outside my window. And I was sitting looking because, you know, I was a little apprehensive. I know about what? And the client tried to run me out before that. So I was kind of, you know, had that on my mind. So I looked out the window and these fellows were sitting in that car. And then I knew, you know, they had guns. I knew what was happening. And the town had cleared out and he was going to get everything. So I thought, well, this is it, Horton, you know, you got to think fast and keep you calm. So I leaned out the window and I said, hey, what are you guys doing?

They looked up and, you know, they were going to come up and expect me to see them. And they didn't say anything. And I said, well, I understand you're supposed to kill me, you know. So they looked a little confused that I knew. And I said, you know, I've been trying to learn how to be an organizer, you know, get some practice organizing. And the more experience I have, the better I'll be, you know. And I said, this is probably the last chance I'll have to learn and think maybe I'll just practice a little on you, you know, and you don't want me to organize you. My last effort to organize, they last. They thought that was, I wouldn't buy, take a big swig of beer and they last and point up to me and wave to you because I said, organize, I said, yeah, you've got to be organized. They said, we're against, we don't have anything to organize, that's, you know, your trouble making your comments. I said, no, no, no. I said, I don't know. You need to be organized. And I said, you don't understand. I said, now you coming up here to kill me.

And I said, you know, you're going to kill me. And I said, each of you thinks, you know, that you won't be killed. Now some of you are going to be killed because I'm going to, and I went over and a, and a, and a, and a, and a wholeness preacher had brought me a big old gun. And I just put in the drawer and they even picked you up and he said, you got to keep this in. He gave me a blessing and told me to keep that gun. A hole in this preacher. He's a worker in the plant. Good union man. So I remembered that gun, so I went over and got that gun. And I sat there with that gun in my hand. And I said, now, when you come up here, the first person comes through the door, I'm going to kill him. And maybe the second person I'm going to kill him. Now the third person, and the fourth person is going to kill me, that's the way it's going to be. I said, now you never thought about the two of you who are going to be dead in a few minutes. You just talked about me being dead.

That's right, you know, and they started looking at you because they hadn't thought about it that way. And I said to the guy in the front, you know, you're going to be dead in a few minutes. You've got a family, you know, you're going to think when you come back home in the boxes. Now, what about you in the back seat there? I said, you look tough. I said, maybe they'll put you in front, you know, you need to be dead. You're ready for this. You know, you guys ready to die. And I said, which two are you going to be dead? Now, you've got to get organized so you can decide among yourselves who's going to be dead. So I said, that's why you need to organize. And I never will forget to feed it. I felt like I see I was really getting through to him, you know. Like, sitting there with that gun, and I had the greatest, greatest desire to try to throw it, you know, like you're doing the movies. And I knew Dan Wilt, but if I threw it out the window, I wanted so much to sit there and while they're making up the mind, twist that pistol around my finger, but I figured I'd lose it. But I'm not trying to do that. I was going too far. So I set the hold on to it, scared to death. Could you have shot the damn thing?

I never even thought about it. I figured I'd talk away out of it and I'd shoot my way out of it. I never even looked at the gun to see her into that way, because I was gambling on talking about it. And sure enough, they started looking and they took some more beer and they talked and looked at it. And I just kept holding it and going out of my sight. Okay, you guys got together. Who's going to be dead? Hey, you in the front seat. I was kept individualizing. I said, maybe I'd shoot you in the head or maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe hard. I guess I could shoot you in the heart, you know, bro, you guts out. I said, no, you know, you'd spread out. You're a fat man. I got to spread out up here in the hallway. I'd never be nice to them. I just kept just being nasty to them. They'd go away. They'd go away. They'd go away. That's what I just felt back then. The adventures of Miles Horton will continue next week. I'm Bill Moyers. For a single transcript of this two-part program, please send $3 to Bill Moyers Journal,

Box 900, New York, New York, 101, 01. Funding for this program has been provided by this station and other public television stations and by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.