Bill Moyers Journal; 726; The Adventures of a Radical Hillbilly Part 2

Bill Moyers Journal; 726; The Adventures of a Radical Hillbilly Part 2, 1981-06-05

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MYLES HORTON:Appalachia has been the guinea pig of the country. If anybody wants to try out an idea, they try it out in this region. And we've been missionaried to death, starting back with the religious missionaries. You know, we're going to bring down the New England culture, to us mountain folks, and teach us how to use some manners. Along with a lot of good started education, they should have been credited with that. Then with the political missionaries come in to explore, then economic people come in to save the South by buying up the land and developing industry. Now the War on Poverty missionaries that came in, and now we're getting the multinational people coming in. So we've always been, somebody's always been coming and going to save the region. And they always take the war out and they bring in.

BILL MOYERS: Tonight, we continue with the adventures of the Radical Hillbilly Myles Horton. I'm Bill Moyers.

BILL MOYERS: Few people I know have seen as much change in the American South or helped to bring it about as Myles Horton. He's been beaten up, locked up, put upon and railed 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.

Myles 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, Myles 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 forbade 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 workshops from union organizing to Civil Rights. The 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, Stokley Carmichael, and scores of unsung foot soldiers in the long march of southern Blacks toward equality. The state tried to close it down, the Klan harassed it. State troopers raided it, but Highlander seemed indestructible, and so did Myles 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. Recently, I called up for Myles Horton at Highlander, now located on the farm in Knoxville. I began the second part of our conversation by asking him about the importance of music in his work over the years.

HORTON: One of the ideas that we had at the beginning of Highlander was he had to use cultural activities as part of the program, because people need not just intellectual discussion or politics.

MOYERS: Politics.

HORTON: Action, learning from action and doing things, but they also need something to cultivate the spirit, so, and obviously the drama and dance and music and things like that would contribute in art, different kinds, and we were rather fortunate when Zilphia, my wife, came to Highlander, she was a trained musician from Arkansas, and she'd only had a background of miner's background, her father's a coal miner, but she also had no musical training, but the musical training was a classical kind of you get in a, you know, going to college and so on.

She, but she soon started singing labor songs and folk songs and learned to play the guitar and accordion, and she played a piano, and to use her music to help fit into the program. The same time she was doing it, she was a good teacher, she was a very good teacher like training shop stewards in the Highlander way of doing it and how to take up grievances, not just technically, but in rallying the people behind you. And she'd used drama as part of her way of teaching, so she developed a drama program along with the music program, so she had two kinds of programs going.

MOYERS: Do you remember that song that John Handcock of the tenant farmers taught Zilphia, called No More Mourning?

HORTON: Yeah, that's a beautiful song. I was teaching in a school for sharecropper, tenant farmers out in Little Rock Arkansas, in a school that Claude Williams ran, and the police were harassing us because we had some Whites and Blacks together there. And every time the police had come, why, I would sit down in the audience like a White person being entertained and the Blacks had started leading singing, and John Handcock was the, became the, the star because he could always, he'd make up songs, if we'd run out of songs, and that's probably great. I brought that back to Zilphia. I collected that.

BILL MOYERS: Do you remember that song?

HORTON: Yeah. I can't remember the words now, but I, I remember.

MOYERS: No more mourning. No more mourning. No more morning.

HORTON and SONG: And before I'll be a slave, I'll be buried in my grave and go home to my Lord, and be free.

SONG:

MOYERS: Lead Belly was here too, wasn't he? He wrote a song that was going to be used to raise money for Highlander that became a classic. Yeah. You remember that one?

HORTON: Lead Belly was never at Highlander. He always wanted to come to Highlander, but he did three or four concert concerts for Highlander.

MOYERS: But he did write that song.

HORTON: Oh yeah, he did a lot of, he, Zilphia used to play with him. They played together. He said she's only White woman could play, you know, Black music here or so, and he'd get her to play with him. Anytime she was around, she'd get on a piano and play with him. And he sang the book, and we were at a party, fundraising party in New York, and that's back when we had respectable sort of sponsor like Mrs. Roosevelt and all the big people in the...

MOYERS: Eleanor Roosevelt?

HORTON: Eleanor Roosevelt. She's just honored twice. She's a great supporter of Highlander, but at that time she, she helped us use our influence to get a name, a bunch of name people together there. And Lead Belly was a performer at that place, and when we were getting ready to put on the program, Zilphia and Lead Belly were back playing, backstage playing, just having fun, and he said he wanted to try this song out on her. He just was working on, but he'd try to get it done for that occasion. He wanted to use it for that occasion, but he hadn't finished it. And so she liked it. So she said, go ahead and use it anyway, but she persuaded him to sing it, even though he wasn't quite satisfied with it. And so that was the, that was the beginning of Bourgeois Blues. That was the first time it was ever sung.

SONG:

Me and my wife we were standing upstairs

I heard the White man say'n I don't want no negroes up there

Lord, he was a bourgeois man

Living in a bourgeois town

I got the bourgeois blues

Gonna spread the news all around

This is the Home of the brave, the land of the free

I don't wanna be mistreated by no bourgeoisie

Lord, in a bourgeois town

A bourgeois town

I got the bourgeois blues,

Gonna spread the news all around

MOYERS: There's a story that a couple of striking tobacco workers from Charleston, South Carolina brought your wife, Zilphia, a song which she and Pete Seeger then turned into what has become one of the most famous hymns of the civil rights movement. We Shall Overcome. Is that a true story?

HORTON: Well, it's almost, there was a strike of tobacco workers, which is in the tobacco plant in Charleston, South Carolina. We always encourage students to bring songs that they had written or used on a picket line. I just like Guy does today. We still do the same thing here now. That song was a kind of a roughhewn song that had gotten from a Black hymnal, the White people picked up, they tried to make a strike song out of it. And it's a song that Zilphia said wasn't singable, it's too hard to sing. So she sat down on the piano like she always did with people like that and they worked out the music, so it would be simpler. She used to say this singable song, and then there was songs like a Star-spangled Banner which nobody should sing.

She thought songs should be easier to sing. So that was revised, and that became a very popular song that week. People liked it after they've simplified it a little bit.

SONG:

We shall overcome

We shall overcome

We shall overcome, someday

Oh, deep in my heart

I know that I do believe

We shall overcome, someday

HORTON: For ten years it was just a Highlander song. And then the laymen would start using it a little bit more, and then it died down, and it just stayed in the Highlander domain. And then Guy Carewan, who's a charge of music here now, taught that song, which is a Black people's song, to a lot of the people in SNCC, and later on did it for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. And the kind of song came back to the people that it originated from, and then it became a popular song again, and they said, we're right, it's a song around the world, it's everywhere.

MOYERS: How do you assess its impact on our time?

HORTON: Oh Lord, there's no one's song, and I know all, but still, you see the Irish scrapping, you see people in Chile, they use it in Chile, it was used in Cuba, it's used in China, all the schools sing it in China, it's used everywhere. I don't know of any song of that kind that is so to widespread.

MOYERS: But it symbolized, didn't it, your own transformation from the union movement to the civil rights?

HORTON: Yeah, some people are trying to describe how they said Highlander is just a series of different schools, you know, we were community school, we were poverty, you know, depression school, we were industrial union school, south school, we were a farmer labor school, we were civil rights school, we were Appalachians, you know, that's one way to describe it because you have to, you know, break things up to describe them.

But to me, it's very inaccurate. Highlander's been one school all the way through, we're just doing the same thing with different groups of people, we try to empower people, we're using these different periods of interest in the South to, as a means of educating people to take more control of their own lives, and all of the subject matter differs, the approach differs, the purpose is the same, we use the same methods that I described earlier, and the same purpose, the purpose is to help people become so empowered they can have something to do with their lives. And you can't do it, but Laurie's numbers of people.

MOYERS: Is that why you stayed small?

HORTON: I knew that intellectually, and I said, well, Highlander, I'd never want to be big, because you always want to deal with 20 or 30 people at a time, because that seems to be the maximum you can deal with effectively, and don't want to have a lot of branch, you just want to be small. And whatever influence you have, developing people with a multiplication influence, where they multiply, that's where you get your, you know, your two cents worth, you multiply people. You deal with leaders who multiply themselves, then you have an outreach, you don't do mass education, so you don't need to deal with a lot of people at a time. Because that's not the way you get your brownie points built up, it's how many people are influenced, so that's done best by taking people who can multiply themselves.

MOYERS: I'll tell you something that, in looking back over your life, has helped me, and it's what you discovered about how much conflict is in the lives of poor people, and how often only conflict is the way they can resolve their problems, you know, well-educated...

HORTON: That's a very hard thing to explain to my non-violent past of his friends, they say, you know, of course you'd always rise against violence, and I say, no, I said, the people that Highlander deals with live a life of violence, and violence takes a lot of forms, not just the physical violence, but it's violence of starvation, violence of depriving people of education, violence of oppression of various kinds, all those are forms of violence, so you have to choose a lesser violence always

Our choice at Highlander was seldom between violence and non-violence it's between the lesser forms of violence. We had a discussion with some of the young people that came down from the Eastern, the big summer in Mississippi, you know,

MOYERS: In 64.

HORTON: In 64, and we were down at Greenwood, Mississippi, maybe they were talking that we'd better talk to the police, maybe after all they're not all bad, and we almost could talk to the police. And I remember these kids, so just a bunch of them from Yale, this had come down, and they were going to talk to the police. So there were these Black guys that just like, "no, no, no, no." And finally this Yale fellow said "why is it that you don't want to talk to the police? He says, "when they see this Black head, they hit it."

Now see, that's what Blacks have known all the time, and people don't know, they just hit them because they're Black, just kill them because they're Black.

MOYERS: Well, the point I want to get at, because I think it's essential to you, is that when middle class, upper class, well-intentioned liberal people, rule out conflict as a way of poor people solving their problems, they leave those poor people powerless, don't they?

HORTON: No, they support the status quo, what they're doing is reinforcing the situation, firming up the situation as it is, and not allowing for any change, and the condition those people get worse, continue to worsen because if you don't struggle against oppression, oppression moves in on you. So what they're doing, they're accelerating the rate of repression on people by not understanding it has to be a struggle. A struggle is not only my point of view, the moral thing to do, but it's a great learning experience. The greatest education comes from action, and the greatest action is struggle for justice. So either the deny people are opportunity to become empowered, educated, the deny people the right to be free, to be people, and they do it all the name of law and order.

MOYERS: Have you ever taught violence?

HORTON: I haven't used violence since I was 14 years old. I don't see, I don't need to practice or advocate violence, but I know that in a class structured society violence exists and the victims are the poor. And I'm not going to stand back and when they try to devise ways of doing things and not try to help them work out their own ways of doing it. And I'm also sure in my own mind that their times comes when you've exhausted ever avenue of change, and in a revolutionary situation, if the people won't get off your back and won't give you a leeway to grow, you've got to push them off. And that's violence.

MOYERS: Well, I think it's important to point out, as I understand your teachings, that conflict is a form of violence without necessarily being ultimately violent against person. That you believed that organizers, workers should bring conflict in the lives of the workplace in order to force the companies to change their ways. You thought that Blacks should confront White society in the power structure and bring conflict. My point earlier was that most people want to look the other way.

HORTON: See, that conflict is already there, you don't bring it conflict. That conflict is there, but it's hushed up from both sides. Black don't want to do it because they are afraid they're going to get killed. Whites don't want to do it because they want to change the structure because they want to do it by having meetings that take another hundred years, or praying another hundred years. So nobody wants to do it. So you take a situation like that, and the people you're working with, you say, look, this conflict is there. You live with long time, the violence is operating various ways. So let's look at it, and maybe by expanding that area of violence, or interpreting that area of violence, we can confront the situation in such a way that we can begin to resolve it.

Now, we don't try to resolve situation at the lower level of accommodation, you know, to law and order. We try to resolve situations at a higher level of justice. So when we talk about using conflict, we don't use it to settle something. We use it to cause a real banging of the forces. So you come out, resolve it at a higher level, like in the Civil Rights Movement. We weren't interested in settling for having some kind of peaceful relations with Blacks and Whites until Blacks got their rights. And I knew as a White Southerner that the quickest way to educate White Southerners was not to talk to them, not to deal with them but for the Blacks to stand up and demand to be treated as equals. Then you would educate White Southerners to respect them as equals. That's the fastest way. So that was our philosophy.

MOYERS: Rosa Parks was at a workshop at Highlander, a couple of months before she went back to Montgomery and sat down on that bus and refused to get up and give her a seat to a White man. Now she introduced conflict in a situation that heretofore had conflict repressed for her, but not present for the White.

HORTON: Now the conflict was there all along. She just refused to accept the situation and that brought the conflict which was there to the surface. And then when they brought the police officer, she still, you know, accelerated the conflict by making them take her to jail. So she set the thing up, set the conflict where it could be seen and it made it possible for E.D. Nixon, the Black organizer down there for the Pullman Porter's Union, to organize the boycott and to get King involved and he's the one that got King into that situation. King didn't want to get in it. He first went to Abernathy, he had the biggest church, Abernathy didn't want to do it. So he went to King because he had the smallest church.

If he had the big church, are you going to take one that didn't have any competition? Martin was picked because he has a new minister there and lower on a totem pole. Martin said we'll think it over and we'll let you know tomorrow. And Coretta and I, we weren't going to get involved in anything and he's really building up to go and take over his father's church, you know, there's Black people own these churches, you know, like a farm.

MOYERS:That was his destiny.

HORTON: And that was all planned for him. And he knew that, I met Martin when he was a junior in college and when I met him his father told me Martin's going to take his church one day.

MOYERS: So he didn't want to get off into this?

HORTON: He didn't want get off into this. And he said, well, let you know tomorrow. Nixon went back, sit out the announcements that he's going to be in Martin's church. So he called Martin next day and said, Dr, King, what do you decide to do? And Martin says, well, we've thought about it. We're going to do it. He says, it's a good thing because announcements have been out for about four hours.

MOYERS: Was it a coincidence that the trigger of all this Rosa Parks on the bus happened two months after she was at Highlander? Was it just a coincidence?

HORTON: No, no, not according to Rosa. Now, I never tried to tell what happened to the Highlander. I just let the people that happened to tell, you know. Rosa said that the connection between those two things was at Highlander, the first time in her life. She had met White people she could trust. Fully trust. And what Rosa had known some wonderful White people who were full of social equality. But what she was saying was she'd never been in a place where you could demonstrate by everything that happened that you believed in full social equality. You know, that Highlander anywhere you went, you know, everybody was equal. There's no way, I always said we were too small and too poor to discriminate. We didn't have any facilities for discriminating. There's no way we could have done if we wanted to, you know. So Rosa just saw a total way of living she'd never seen before. And she just couldn't believe that that would, you know, happen. She didn't go back with any plans or anything. She went back with a different spirit.

MOYERS: How did that come about that you were able to integrate Highlander because the laws of Tennessee were against it. The churches were against it. The political, local political leaders were against it. Everyone was against it. What was the technique for integrating this?

HORTON: Well, you know, it was a little expansion of your home is your castle idea. It's one place we were going to do what we pleased in terms of way we're going to work. And there's certain principles that you don't question. I grew up in the South knowing all these interracial people who were, who would talk about social equality, but they never eat together. They keep talking themselves into more distance. Yeah. They get in further apart, the more they talk, and the fewer people do it, they had a few Blacks that would meet with the Whites and talk, and a few Whites would meet with the Blacks and talk. The rest of you got burned out. They weren't getting anywhere. But that was the interracial thing in the South. And I learned, you know, when I was in college, the dislike that and I said, you do it. You act, and then the planning and thinking comes first. If I ever get a chance, I'm going to act and let the talk come later. I'm not going to talk first because you talk yourself out of it, you don't talk yourself into it. But if you can set up a situation where people act, then the action will change their heart.

MOYERS: But that was tough to do because many of those union organizers you had here were often members of the Klan.

HORTON: Well, the head of the educational director, which was the head of the Ruether campaign, when Ruether ran against RJ Thomas for the presidency, was a former Klan official, according to him. He told me himself that he was selected for that job because he was a Klan official, and Reuther figured there were more Klan people in the union in the South, there were non-Klan people.

We worked with Joe, we worked with him, you know, we worked with people, you know, knowing all the time. It was that kind of thing, and they objected to Blacks at Highlander. In fact, they tried to have a workshop at Highlander without any Blacks. And I wouldn't let him, I told him, I had to leave. And they said, well, you know, we paid you, we reserved this place for a week, and got all we got, all this discussion, I don't care what you've done.

And this Black guy came up, he heard about it, and he came up, and I said, he's going to stay, or nobody stays. And a lot of these people, you didn't know me from outside the South, you know, they said, well, you know, nobody can tell us what to do, he's a powerful sort of thing. But the people in the South, they worked with, they told him, you know, I've meant what I said, and that they'd be, they'd leave, what I told them they'd leave. And they said, who is this guy that can tell us, we have to leave. This guy who is, he used to be the Klansman, you know, who was instrumental in helping set that up. And he just knew me, he says, Myles has ways for you to move. And he said, if you don't want something, he's mountaineer, he's coming and shooting your ass off. You better get gone when he tells you, he knows what he's talking about, he's got the power. So instead of leaving, they let that Black guy stay. So that's the way you get him used to it.

And then they come, then those same people started bringing Blacks to Highlander. And once you make them do it some way, then they'll find out it's not so bad. They'll keep on doing it. It was a UAW after that, that set the pattern of unions always bringing Blacks to Highlander. But I had to be a little rough on them, start with, you know.

MOYERS: What's that story about the time of the White farmers were here?

HORTON: Oh, that's the farmers union. We organized the National Farmers Union, a very good organization, a liberal organization of farmers. You organized families into cooperatives and so on. And we ran a workshop, people in Alabama and up here in East Tennessee, and all around down in West Tennessee, which is a, you know, a real racist part of the country. And we had some Black people in that workshop, Black farmers. So we were milling around outside and these farmers said, you know, these Black people -- what are they doing here? And I said, I don't know, I said, you know, we have a lot of different sessions here. Different kinds of people come, union people come, church people come, all kinds of people come. These are farmers. This is for farmers union people. And we don't have anybody here but farmers union, but I said, some people get mixed up and I said, probably they just thought this was a workshop on NAACP or something else. Maybe I don't know, I said, I said, I'd like to know myself, and I said, "you go out there, you two guys go and find out if they're farmers, go ask them they're farmers."

MOYERS: The two White guys?

HORTON: Sso Black guys say they're farmers union. We don't want them to tell me, you know, you come back and tell me and we'll run them off, you know, they're not farmers, aren't farmers union members. They can't think of anything else to say so they go and ask them if I remember you from a farmer union, so and so and I can see this fellow scratching their head and the mountain guy looking at the farmers and looking back at me, taking them up here in just two county, in Green County, a couple of counties from here. Came back and I said, what did they say? They belong here, they're farmers? You know what I'm saying? I said, by God, I'm relieved. I said, I thought, you know, we're going to have to send them away and I turned and walked off. And then they had the discussion among themselves, they had to deal with all that problem. I wouldn't argue with them, wouldn't do it and they just left it with them and then they had to internalize that, you see, and deal with it.

Then they said, well, farmers, farmer union members, we don't want to run them off, then we have to be nice to them and so on, so. They came and ate with them and then it was all over, you know.

MOYERS: What did it say to you?

HORTON: I have to do things like it all the time.

MOYERS: What did that say to you about identity, about how we shape our perceptions of other people? They did want then to come as Blacks, but they were welcome as farmers.

HORTON: Well, they couldn't deal with it. They couldn't deal with the problem I posed for them of people not being welcome if they were farmers, not having a right if they were farmers. Put them in a different kind. There weren't Blacks, they were farmers. You know, you do that all the time, you help people perceive things differently. You enable them to break out of their encrustation of thinking and perceive things a different way.

MOYERS: Did you find that your efforts in organizing workers and in trying to solve some of the other problems were running into racism everywhere?

HORTON: You see, racism is a barrier, you could go so far, you could get people to organize, and you could get integrated unions, but then when you tried to relate to the larger community or go beyond just the more practical unionism, you get the politics, for example, we found that racism always was a barrier, then we said, we're going to have to remove that barrier. It was a negative way of approaching, but the barrier was in the way of democracy, so they had to get rid of it.

So we were trying to devise programs, work out ways for people to learn to work together at that time. Before the '54 Decision, we had to anticipate that decision by setting up a workshop four months in advance to discuss this Supreme Court decision on schools and they hadn't been a decision. It was a gamble, and they passed the law a month before the workshop, and the recruiting had already been done, everything had been done in advance. We took chances, we kind of pushed as far as we could, we gambled to try to promote the interest in that kind of thing,

But we were sure that there's a groundswell. We had been working in South Carolina in what we call the citizenship schools, the schools for training, teaching Blacks to learn enough reading that they could pass to qualify to vote -- in South Carolina you had to read part of the Constitution. And we developed a very successful program there that eventually spread all over the South, and that was underway at that time. And we had students, college students, Black and White, come into Highlander for three or four days, Easter weekends, and out of that group, about 80% of the people who were in the formation of SNCC came.

MOYERS: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

HORTON: John Lewis and Julian Bond and the Bevels, all those people had been at Highlander before. John Lewis says he's been to all kinds of church gatherings and things like that, and first at Highlander, the first time they were eight with White people. Now they had that background, so we'd been laying some groundwork in the hope that something would happen.

MOYERS: But when they were here, when they were gathering the whole workshops on direct action, voter education, didn't you start coming under sustained attack from Alabama, Tennessee,

HORTON: People in Tennessee, even though they opposed Highlander, didn't initiate those things. The first step taken against Highlander was initiated, was a state investigation of Highlander initiated by the Attorney General in Arkansas, who came over and asked that they investigate Highlander, because Highlander was training a lot of people, we're a lot of people from Arkansas, we're coming to Highlander, we're coming back into Arkansas and raising cane. That was the first outside pressure, and later on, the Governor of Georgia, sent an agent to a workshop where Martin Luther King spoke. They used that meeting, they took pictures of that meeting, and had as big billboards all over the South, Martin Luther King at the Communist Training School,

MOYERS: Who took pictures?

HORTON: The agent from the Governor of Georgia, and they claimed that they circulated over two million copies of that propaganda against Highlander. Showing Martin Luther King at a Communist meeting. Communist Training School, they said, and it was Martin speaking at that meeting, and that was for Martin, it was known very well, you know, he was a, it was the Montgomery Improvement Association then, and, but we thought something was going to come of that, but most people didn't think much was going to come out of it.

MOYERS: Wasn't there a trial?

HORTON: Well, as a result of this expose, so-called expose, they told the people of Tennessee, you got to find a way to put those people out of business, it's not just Tennessee matter, and that led to the trial. That was the impetus that led to the trial, so they finally had a raid on the school.

MOYERS: Literally? I mean, the police came in?

HORTON: Well, they were vigilantes, and police, and we didn't know who was who. There's about 20 people came in, armed people, having a group of choir from one of the Montgomery churches there, kind of a weekend sort of a program, and they were high school aged kids, and they were there, they were looking at a movie that George Mitchell made called A Face of the South, and they raided them while the lights were off, looking at this movie.

And they came in with their guns flashing around, and they demanded to turn on the lights, and nobody would turn on the lights. And it was rather darkness, but it was still dark. Those kids started saying, We Shall Overcome, and that night 'we are not afraid,' which became one of the permanent verses. That was the night that was invented by those high school aged kids from Montgomery. They said, right, back at the vigilantes, we're not afraid, we're not afraid. That became one of the lines of the song.

But they hauled TKSeth McCart, Guy Cara One, and some other people off to jail, I wasn't there at the time. I was away. They hauled them into jail, kept them overnight, and just to set up a trial.

MOYERS: What did they charge them with?

HORTON: They charged them with having liquor, and serving liquor, and Seth McCart was running it. She's an anti-liquor, religious leader, you know, and Guy doesn't drink, and they were serving Kool-Aid to those kids. That was a drink, you were saying.

MOYERS: Wasn't there some beer, too?

HORTON: No, but what we had done in previous years, and labor people were there, since we lived two miles out in the country, and Black and White people couldn't go up town and drink. Beer was illegal, you know, to be served beer in town. We would get a case of beer, and put in a cooler, and put a cigar box there, and everybody put in a quarter that time. And when it was, when you ran out, somebody would take the box and go get another case of beer, and put it in the cooler. So later on, the judge ruled that was selling beer without a license. And his example is, if three people in a room, and one of them goes out and buys three cans of beer, and two people give him a quarter, legally that's selling beer, so that's the illustration he himself used, the judge used.

So he said to the court in my testimony, which nobody could ever question, he said, I was the most reliable witness in the trial, that we did that. I explained the process, I explained just what we did, and he said there's on the basis of my explanation that he found selling beer, but there wasn't any beer at that time.

MOYERS: Anything to, anything to try to bring a charge against you -- case against you -- close you down?

HORTON: They had 18 charges against us. One charge we were running in a grade school, to which we pled guilty, proudly, and said, we always had, we always got to keep on doing it, so we were guilty of that. But they also got, they charged us with selling beer without a license, and they charged me with operating the school for personal gain, not personally, I was never in the court you know, as Myles Horton, but I was, as highly, I was operating the school for personal gain. They testified that I had never taken personal gain, but there's no limit to what people could take. We had a system then, is it pretty much as it is now, people get paid on the basis of the size of their families, and it's still true today, and if there's a problem, somebody gets sick or child gets sick or something, and it needs more money, you know, we, that's all the money that people have, so the school provides it.

So they said, "is there a top on how much you can provide?" And I said, no, we never discussed that, the top of it, because we didn't have it, and the top of it, because people would only take what they needed, and because nobody wanted to spend time raising money, everybody wanted to run programs, so I said, it's not a problem, and he said, is there no legal requirement that says you can't limit, that I said, no, there's no legal requirement about any of it, it's all just understood. So he says, on the basis of that, then you could take some money, and he says, Horton is growing a melon, he hadn't cut it yet, but he's getting ready to cut it, and I was convict it on anticipation, on his part of me cutting the melon, later on, that's it, that was it, that was it.

MOYERS: What does it make you feel like, when the whole apparatus of the state, as well as the whole weight of public opinion, are turned against you, and you're hounded and intimidated and harassed?

HORTON: It's not quite that clear cut, there was never a time when we didn't have friends. We had that time, we had the labor movement, still a tremendous lot of support from the labor movement, who opposed all of this, we had the Nashville Tennessean, editorially supporting Highland, we had the Chattanooga Times, the editor of the New York Times, supporting Highlander, though we didn't, we weren't completely alone, and you'd gradually won over other papers and Memphis other places, because it's such a raw deal. What I used to do, I would take advantage of those hearings to try to educate the people of Tennessee because it's all covered by radio, TV, and news, all of it was the big thing in Tennessee, so I'd use that as public education, and we, of course, the enemies, staid enemies, you don't win them over, but you make friends, and during a trial, during a trial, you know, to give you an idea of the kind of support we had that Chattanooga Times covering that trial, said that every witness of state had, without a single exception, had been convicted and had served time, every witness. And he says, Highlander didn't have any witnesses like that, and said, in fact, Horton refused to subpoena any witnesses, he said, no, I said if it's not enough volunteers to testify for Highlander after all these years, we don't need support, over 200 people signed up to testify, so the papers tell those stories, you know, frankly, people get educated, we were never all alone.

MOYERS: What are you doing right now?

HORTON: Right now, we're in a kind of, I guess, a transition period in a way, we've been working for the last 10 years or more on Appalachia, trying to help get a lot of spirit in Appalachia. When we first started, we decided that the Civil Rights Movement, you know, was had plenty of leadership, hundreds and hundreds of people had been to Highlander, and thousands have been to citizenship schools that came out of Highlander, and there's plenty of leadership developed out of the Civil Rights Movement, so we said, look, you don't need Highlander, you can run your own programs.

We set up a program for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, I was an advisor to SNCC on an educational program. So we said, you know, you've got all you need out of Highlander, and they didn't agree with that, but we said, you know, you know, you can do your own programs, we'll give you our blessing, but you're not going to do it. We've got to come back to where we started in the mountains and start working with our own people, because they're behind, and we try to get some consciousness of what could happen in Appalachia, built up.

We started out, in about 60, in the mid-60s, and we had a very hard time getting a few people together to play music, now you can't keep them away.

MOYERS: Mountain people?

HORTON: And we get people together to talk about the activities of different things, half a dozen peoples; organizations in Appalachia, none of them working together, the spirit was low. But since then, we've come a long way in Appalachia, there's maybe 50 organizations, which now are combined Appalachian Alliance, which is something that we've always felt it was important to get people together instead of competing, and they've worked together.

Just completed a land study, which is part of Appalachian Alliance,

It showed practically three-fourths of the land in Appalachian absentee owned. Those people pay one-third the taxes on that land, that the local people pay, which means there's no tax base for schools, health, roads, or anything.

MOYERS: Well, give me an inventory of the problems that are faced by Appalachia. I thought there'd been a War on Poverty in the Appalachian Regional Commission. I thought all of that had been...

HORTON: Well, when the War on Poverty was announced, I don't have to explain that to you. I was asked, if I thought that was a good thing, and I said, yes, but I'd like to qualify it and they said, but do you think that's going to be a good program, going to get people out of poverty? I said, no, I don't think it'll deal with poverty, although that's a subject, but I think a lot of people will get experiences out of that that will enable them to do things on their own later on, and they'll find out that something can't come down from on high, that'll solve their problems for them. So it'll be a lot of good learning to take place.

And I was asked, well, what's Highlander's role? I said, wait a little bit, people will start getting disillusioned, and then start trying to help people analyze their experiences so they can build on it to take things that their own hands and start doing things for themselves, and bring pressure on the government to do sounder jobs. That was my analysis when it was first announced, and that's what the program Highlander was, to try to salvage from the people that learned something out of that, some capabilities of doing things.

MOYERS: Is there a lot of disillusionment in Appalachia?

HORTON: Oh, yes. Appalachia has been the guinea pig of the country, if anybody wants to try out an idea, they tried out in this region, and we've been missionaried to death, starting back with the religious missionaries, we're going to bring down the New England culture, us mountain folks, and teach us how to use some manners, along with a lot of good-style education;

They should have been credited with that. Then we then, the political missionaries come in to exploit them, then economic people come in to save the South by buying up the land and developing industry, and then the War on Poverty missionaries that came in, and now we're getting the multinational people coming in.

So somebody's always been coming and going to save the region, and they always more out than they bring in. And that's why we think people have to take control of their own organizations and their own lives.

MOYERS: How are you going to do that?

HORTON: Well, we make a little headway, in the sense that Appalachian Alliance has a voice, Appalachia never had a voice before, there's a structure for a voice.

MOYERS: Who are these people in it?

HORTON: There are about 50 people's organizations in the region, practically all their organizations in the region are run by the people, and they've learned to work together, we've got a lot of Appalachian study programs going, all the universities, it was a time when they

weren't any, 10 years ago.

MOYERS: What about the economic reality?

HORTON: Let's see, the thing that we've been trying to get people to understand is that this wave of people living on the land, getting back and retreating into the past, it's not going to help Appalachia. Appalachia is tied into the multinationals with the rest of the world. We're part of the world.

So one thing Highlander is bringing people from Appalachia, it's kind of a third world, kind of getting the third world people together, you know?

MOYERS: To do what? If three-quarters the land is owned by non-Appilacians, how in the devil are you going to bring pressure? What do you want to do?

HORTON: Well, you know, they don't have to stay that way, you know, if you get enough people power build up, you can do things for those big chunks of land.

MOYERS: Now you're sounding Utopian again.

HORTON: No, no, I'm just saying I'm talking about some direct action, moving in and occupying some of them. You know, really have a showdown and force the issue so people get to understand that you can't have an Appalachia rich in resources, it's poor in people because all the richness goes out. You know, we've got to find a way to take back some of the richness that belongs to the people.

MOYERS: Have you been in jail enough?

HORTON: Well, about a dozen times maybe.

MOYERS Yeah, but isn't that enough?

HORTON: I don't want to go to jail. I never did want to go to jail.

MOYERS: But, I mean, if you start urging people to occupy Appalachian land, if you start telling them to take it back, you're going to wind up in jail.

HORTON: We did that in our American Revolution, we started taking over British-owned land right and left, remember? That's how we got this country going, you know, it's a good American tradition. Of course, you're right about the law and order people, they don't understand that, but they can be educated. I know I'm serious. I think somehow the people got to take back the sources of their wealth. And I don't think we're ready for that, I don't think people to understand that. But I think they've got to quit trying to escape, you know, hide out and start standing up and saying we demand our rights.

MOYERS: Who are the losers in Appalachian? Who are the winners?

HORTON: Well, the people who are winners in Appalachian are the agents for the absentee-owned companies, you know, and the people who work for them in terms of economic welfare. The losers, of course, are the people back in the hollow, who have no tax base to support their schools and their communities.

MOYERS: So is the issue still as it was 20 years ago, poverty?

HORTON: Sure, it's poverty. But it is a relative poverty. Poverty is a relative thing, you know. People say, you know, capitalism is a wonderful thing. Look how much better it was now than to be when you were growing up. And I say, the gap between the rich and the poor is wider. And the important thing is a lack of distribution of the wealth and use of the wealth. We don't have people starving as they were doing when Highlander started, not many anyway. But the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer relative to each other. The Blacks as well as the Civil Rights Movement -- the middle class Blacks prospered. And it's misleading to talk about how Blacks prospered because the majority of working class Blacks are worse off in relation to working class Whites than they were before the Civil Rights Movement. So those problems haven't been dealt with, problems of poverty haven't been dealt with.

MOYERS: Powerlessness.

HORTON: And they've got to have power in the hands of those people. Now one way to get at this, I guess it's two theories of how you have revolution. And that's what I'm talking about. One is that people are desperate and out desperation they act. I think leads fascism. I don't think that's, you know, I think the people who are desperate are going to follow any leader that comes along. In fact, it's kind of the desperate people who voted for Reagan, a lot of desperate people voted for Reagan. He must, he'll have a gimmick. That hat fooled them. I was just up in Canada the other day, I read a columnist that says, "Reagan was all hat and no cattle." All style and no style.

MOYERS: And you think people like that?

HORTON: And I think a lot of poor people, a lot of union people voted for him thinking he's going to, were fooled by that hat, you know, he's going to do something. People have still have to think that somebody is going to save him, that's going to come on the white horse to save them.

Now what we've been trying to do is get people to understand that's not the way of salvation, they've got to save themselves. And if you've got to do it, not out of desperation, then you've got to do it on the basis of rising expectations of people. We say to people, you deserve more than you have. You deserve part of the good things of this life. You deserve the right to, you know, the opportunity to be more creative. You deserve the opportunity to have a higher standard of living. You deserve the right to help as well as a theoretical education. We keep saying that you deserve those as human beings and the systems should deliver those to you. It doesn't change the system till it does. We still are letting people make decisions for us instead of people learning to make decisions. But when people at the bottom learn to make decisions, there's enough of us that we can begin to bring pressure.

Now, that situation hadn't developed in Appalachia because the lines aren't as clear-cut. Everybody's got relatives on both sides and know somebody on both sides, have neighbors on both sides. You know, the Black and White case was clear-cut in the South, you know, why didn't you problem about understanding, you know, who you were. It was legally enforced racism, you know, it was more clear-cut. And when the Blacks started finding out that they could go to jail and still survive, they'd been, we've been saying, if you do anything, we don't like we'll put you in jail so they backed off. They found they could go to jail, even die, you know, and people, when they, when no longer were the Whites able to say, we'll put you in jail or we'll kill you couldn't stop the movement, then the Blacks took off. But they had a clear-cut issue, clear-cut issue, and they had some White friends, you know, all along.

MOYERS: Are you saying that democracy's not working very well as you see it?

HORTON: No, democracy's not working all in Appalachia, not at all.

MOYERS: How do you define democracy?

HORTON: Democracy, to me, is where people have a way to control many facets of their lives, political, economic, social, cultural, and so far as they are minimized, democracy is denied.

MOYERS: Some would respond that if you've got a good job and you're making a good

income, you've got disposable income, then you have some control over your life.

HORTON: And most of the people in Appalachia, you know, go, hunt jobs all over the world. Most of the people, all over the United States. We have more people going out of the state to find jobs, out of the region to find jobs in another part of the country, because they're jobs in the region. People, that's an outlet, you see, so they can escape that way. In a depression they come back home. There's too many escape valves that this is hard to get people to get some consensus on what to do. I think, you know, I think we've got to learn it, if you don't have the strength, you don't have the people, you don't have the power to deal with the big United States government, which of course is subject to the multinationals. The United States government doesn't run the show, you know, they run.

MOYERS: So they're still there?

HORTON: You've got to be realistic and know that you've got to be big enough to tackle this problem before you can, before you've got to get allies. That means we've got to cut across all kind of racial and religious and national grounds.

MOYERS: So there's still an agenda for an old radical?

HORTON: I think the interesting thing to me is that we're just beginning a little bit to get people to understand this. You know, as you talk, there's a paradox.

MOYERS: You were active in union organizing and in time, the unions begin to red bait you, the AFL.

HORTON: They got conservative and bureaucratic.

MOYERS: Well, in time, Northern liberals turned against you because they were afraid of the Communist associations.

HORTON: Yeah, well, they were a little afraid that some of the civil rights business would get in their towns and affect their housing.

MOYERS: And then in 1969, after all the battles that you'd helped to win, you went to Chicago, and there you were, the only White face in a sea of Black faces. And everybody joined hands to express solidarity, then you held out your hands and no Black would touch you.

HORTON: Yeah, they were saying "we should overcome" and nobody would touch my hands.

MOYERS: What does all that say to you?

HORTON: It says that these Blacks know that the racist society, most Whites, are racists to them, and they could not possibly have known that I'm any different from any other White. I understand that fully well, but it bothered me that we hadn't made enough inroads that they would think they might be exceptions to Whites, but it didn't bother me personally. I wasn't hurt personally.

MOYERS: Doesn't bother you that in time, after time, of people to whom you've given your life and your energies, wind up not appreciating it.

HORTON: No, I see. I think you have to be objective, objective, not subjective about these things. You have to understand the forces that work and understand those things, those things happen. I don't think these things, personally. I never took these attacks on Highlander, the investigations, the court trials, the confiscation of our property, even the beatings I never took personally, although it was my bones, they were cracking. But I never thought of it as I never thought of it as me, what I know me to be, which was what they were after.

I was a symbol. I represented something that they hated. I represented something that's challenging their whole way of life. That's what I represented to the Black crowd in Chicago, and nobody would take my hand and say, "we shall overcome." I represented that picture. And when the Klan over here in Merryville beat me up, I represented, you know, bringing Blacks into their homes. So I I try to keep a little objective about this thing.

MOYERS: How do you see yourself, Myles Horton?

HORTON: I'm an instrument. You know, that's why I don't take these things personally.

MOYERS: Instrument of what?

HORTON: I'm an instrument of, I try to be an instrument, I try to make Highlander an instrument of empowering people, a way to get people to understand that they can be creative and imaginative, they don't have to put up with this system the way it is. They can create a new one to be more human. And they got to, they, not be subservient to technology, which is moving in and dominating their lives. I just, I think you, you got to use yourself, a use Highlander to help, help do that. I don't have a program, Myles Horton is trying to, or Highlander's trying to, it's, we, we, here we are, we're trying to use our facilities and what little we know and how we work to help empower people.

We were talking earlier about education, how you educate, you know, and I was talking about the, the kind of the structural things that you could put your finger on. But really the way you educate is by example, you educate by your own life what you are. I can, I'm interested in people learning how to learn. The only way I can help is to share my enthusiasm and my ability to learn myself. If I quit learning, I can't share it. I try to get people to feel, you know, be humane. I think you have to love people to do these things. If I don't love people, I can't help people learn to love people. I can't do anything. I don't do myself.

MOYERS: How can you love the man who's beating you on the head?

HORTON: I can you love the man who won't take your hand when you hold it out in some very, humane to..I don't, I can feel sorry for those people.

I'm, not a good guy like Martin Luther King was loving -- all these people, you know, and thinking you could save them, I don't think you can save them. But I think I can, I can survive and understand who they are and, and they're unlovable so I can't love them. But I don't have to hate them.

I don't have to think it's personally directed at me. I mean, I just don't bother with them. You don't have to. I think you should have some good healthy enemies. I'm just always proud of my enemies that I am with my friends as those who are enemies. Well, the people that are enemies are people who, who, who are racists, the bigots who don't believe in, in people living in decent life. They're people who think poor people or to stay poor, they're law and order people who think structures come before people. I got a lot of people that believe in things that I don't believe in. I don't want their friendship.

MOYERS: You've got some healthy enemies.

HORTON: Yeah, think you should measure yourself by your enemies as well as your friends. Well, I'm not a good guy, you know, saying I love all these people personally. Yeah. They're not lovable.

MOYERS: Do you believe with your old friend Reinhold Niebuhr that it is possible to establish justice in a sinful world?

HORTON: No, I think you can work for justice in a sinful world and you can always have the hope and sometimes the proof that you can make headway in terms of justice in a sinful world. The industrial union movement before it got was making headway, the Civil Rights Movement that was making headway, I, I've had some experiences of, you know, it makes you realize things can happen in dealing with justice and injustice. I don't think it'll ever come a time when there aren't problems. I don't envision the time when everything is perfect. I'd like to envision a time when there's, there's more good than evil, which is not true today, there's more evil than good today in this society. I'd like to envision a time when more people are freer in more areas of their lives. I think all those things are possible. I think you keep pushing, but your sights keep moving too. It's this old story of climb one mountain, you see another mountain. Now, you know, I don't, that didn't bother me. I, you know, people have accused me of never being satisfied. Well, why should a human being be satisfied, right? If you're satisfied, you know, you might as well, that's the end.

MOYERS: From the Highlander Research and Education Center near Knoxville, Tennessee, this has been a conversation with Myles Horton.

I'm Bill Moyers. I'm Bill Moyers.

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