Highlander Research and Education Center

The Highlander Research and Education Center, formerly known as the Highlander Folk School, is a social justice leadership training school and cultural center in New Market, Tennessee. Founded in 1932 by activist Myles Horton, educator Don West, and Methodist minister James A. Dombrowski, it was originally located in the community of Summerfield in Grundy County, Tennessee, between Monteagle and Tracy City.

Highlander has provided education for labor and political leaders throughout the South, Appalachia, and the world. Highlander's earliest contributions were to the Depression era labor movement. During the mid-to-late 1950s, it played a critical role in the American Civil Rights Movement, for example, training Rosa Parks prior to her historic role in the Montgomery bus boycott. The school taught many other movement activists including Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) founders Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy, and future Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) members Septima Clark, Anne Braden, James Bevel, Hollis Watkins, Bernard Lafayette, John Lewis, and Julian Bond. Soon after attending Highlander, Bevel, Lafeyette, and Lewis, along with Diane Nash, founded the Nashville Student Movement.

Backlash against Highlander's civil rights work led to the school's closure by the state of Tennessee in 1959. The staff reorganized and moved to Knoxville, where they rechartered the school under the name "Highlander Research and Education Center." Since 1971 it has been located in New Market. The school was featured in the 1937 short film, People of the Cumberland, and the 1985 documentary, You Got to Move. Much of its history was recorded in the book Or We'll All Hang Separately: The Highlander Idea by Thomas Bledsoe. Highlander's archives reside in the Wisconsin Historical Society and in the Louis Round Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.