1959 Highlander Way · New Market, TN 37820 · phone: (865) 933-3443 · fax: (865) 933-3424
e-mail: hrec@highlandercenter.org

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The 1970s: Appalachian People's Struggles

Save Our Kentucky anti-stripmining poster.

In 1971, Highlander opened a new center on a ridge-top farm near New Market, Tennessee, and turned once again to organizing in the Appalachian communities where it began. These communities faced a wide array of problems, including deeply rooted poverty, growing environmental devastation from stripmining, and outside corporate control of land and resources. There were also growing organizing efforts around these and other environmental and economic justice issues.

Highlander's primary focus was encouraging local leadership to build community organizations that could break the hold of undemocratic governments and companies in the region. Through fieldwork and workshops, Highlander reached out to groups organizing around issues such as banning stripmining, improving healthcare in the coalfields, and eliminating toxic pollution in their communities.

Highlander also helped to develop the Southern Appalachian Leadership Training program (SALT), which provided training and support to emerging local leaders. Additionally, the staff organized cultural workshops throughout the region to highlight the strength of Appalachian cultures and the need for cultural workers to engage in social-change efforts.

Coal mining music workshop; October 1978. Hazel Dickens is seated, center.

In the late 1970s, Highlander joined with the Appalachian Alliance in a participatory research study of land ownership in Appalachia. Over one hundred activists and academics pored over tax rolls and deed books, documenting the vast corporate control of land and the resulting environmental devastation and lack of resources available to local communities. Highlander provided research assistance to this effort and helped train local activists to do their own research to strengthen their voices on issues affecting their communities.

The 1980s: Supporting Local Communities in a Global Context

Following Highlander's 50th Anniversary in 1982, the staff and Board decided to keep working in Appalachia but also to rebuild the Center's connections with local organizers and activists in the Deep South. And recognizing that many local problems are the result of global economic forces, they decided to forge new connections with activists and organizers beyond the borders of the United States as well.

In Appalachia and the South, Highlander's field work and workshops served to link groups involved in democratic economic development, helping them figure out how to do development that really aids the community. At the same time, Highlander once again began to host summer youth gatherings to support youth leadership and organizing in the region.

Participants in a Highlander youth program, 1984.

The number of communities organizing around toxics began to grow, both in the United States and in other countries, and Highlander's Community Environmental Health Program grew as well, providing workshops, research, and field support to groups fighting industrial pollution and toxic waste and helping to forge connections among these groups. Following the 1984 gas leak at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, which killed and injured thousands of local residents, for example, Highlander connected community people from Bhopal with people affected by Union Carbide facilities in this country.

Cover of No Place to Run: Local Realities and Global Issues of the Bhopal Disaster; published by Highlander and the Society for Participatory Research in Asia, 1985.

Highlander also played an active role in international adult education efforts, helping to host exchanges and education programs with community-based educators and researchers in Nicaragua and other countries.

...to 1990s-Today: The 21st-Century Highlander...

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