Learning to Act:
Bridging the Legacy and Promise of Labor
and Popular Education
Institute for Labor Studies and Research
Providence, Rhode Island
May 18, 2006
by Pam McMichael, Director
Highlander Research and Education Center
New Market, TN
Greetings. It is my pleasure and honor to be with you this evening. My deep appreciation to the Institute for Labor Studies and Research for inviting me here, particularly to Margo Guernsey for your gracious hospitality. This is my first here in the ocean state and I am happy to be here. I've met some great folks and it's clear from the graduates and students up here that you are doing tremendous work.
I first want to congratulate all the honorees for your awards and add my public appreciation for the work you do to make this a more just and fair world. Whether in Tennessee or Rhode Island, we share in common that people in our communities are suffering from injustice, exploitation, and unjust public policies that have tramped on folks pretty steady since 1980, and there are also people, like the award winners, and many of you here in this room, who are working hard trying to do something about all that injustice through education and organizing, and I say the two of them together, education and organizing, as intrinsically linked.
I would like to share good news as well from poultry workers in Morristown, Tennessee, who voted in a union last year in a campaign with UFCW, and who just a few weeks ago finished negotiating their contract. It was an exciting worker/organized labor/community effort and Highlander's bilingual staff provided interpretation and translation support during the drive, vote and negotiations.
It is good to be here also in these exciting times when we are seeing so many people in the streets for fair and just immigration. For too long we've been writing the word movement with a small m, and now we find ourselves in this exciting time of capital M movement, with all its challenges and tensions, and hopes and opportunities. I, with you, watched coverage of some of the immigrant rights rallies and actions in the country's larger cities, but want you also to know, in case you haven't heard, of Dalton, Georgia where hundreds marched on May 1st, and of Jonesboro, Tennessee (how many people have heard of Jonesboro, Tennessee?) where 1,500 people marched on April 10th. Whatever happens from here, and a lot will, we are in a new moment in this country in a much-needed and expanded conversation on race and a chance to push our society toward humanity.
I bring you greetings from the board and staff of Highlander Research and Education Center where our main educational 'classroom' is a round room and our 'desks' are rocking chairs arranged in a circle, where people come together and spend time listening and learning from each other, sharing their stories, and leave with more information than they had when they came, as well as hope, inspiration and courage to take action in their local communities.
Perhaps the most famous of these is Ms. Rosa Parks, whom we honor in her passing this past October. Mrs. Parks first came to Highlander just four months before refusing to give up her seat on the bus that fateful day in 1955. She was already an activist and secretary of the NAACP, and yet she herself also acknowledged the role of Highlander in her life and on that day. She told Studs Terkel in an interview that Highlander had "everything" to do with her actions. She said, "I found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society, that there was such a thing as people of differing races and backgrounds meeting together in workshops and living together in peace and harmony. I gained there strength to persevere in my work for freedom, not just for blacks but for all oppressed people."
And she told the story of waking up at Highlander on her first morning to the smell of bacon frying and what a wonderful feeling to realize that white people were cooking that bacon that for her. Highlander was one of the few places in the South where Black and white people could come together as equals.
I want to frame my comments tonight in that legacy of Highlander's history, not to glorify the past but as a vehicle for understanding tonight's theme around labor and popular education and connected to what I call this keynote - "Learning to Act: Bridging the Legacy and Promise of Labor and Popular Education."
Highlander started as the Highlander Folk School in 1932, during the Depression, in Grundy County, Tennessee on the Cumberland Plateau near Monteagle. I want to acknowledge just a few of the many shoulders I stand on as today's director of Highlander - Myles Horton as the founder of Highlander and certainly Don West and Jim Drombowski are names that should be mentioned as co-founders with Myles Horton in a shared dream to start an adult community learning school. But if founding is also a process over time, in that way, Myles Horton was the founder of Highlander, having an over sixty year relationship with the center.
Highlander is also known for its integration of music and other forms cultural work into organizing, education and movement building, and another person who must be mentioned is Zilphia Horton, Myles' wife, who brought that understanding of the power and necessity of music and culture to Highlander. Zilphia worked at the school over 20 years until her untimely death.
The people of Grundy County were among the poorest in the country. Coal mining and timber cutting had provided most of the jobs but by 1932, the area was reeling from the effects of the Compromise of 1876, which was a deal between defeated Confederate generals, opportunistic southern industrialists and northern money (now there's a recipe for bad things to come), to help elect Rutherford B. Hayes president in exchange for railroads and industry in the South to take advantage of wide spread unemployment. They knew that following the abolition of slavery they could ensure low wages by pitting the races against each other. Additionally, in Tennessee and the South at the time there was wide spread practice of leasing convicts to private industry, a key strategy used against striking miners.
Soon after Highlander opened, situations with striking miners put Horton in local communities, the first being Wilder, Tennessee, in an all too familiar situation, where miners were paid in script at the company store which over-charged for goods, made weekly deductions for rent on shacks, charged for facilities that didn't exist and for medical services which were often unavailable. As the miners' debts piled up, and food dwindled, they went on strike. It was bitter cold that winter, and the company shut off the electricity and removed the doors to the miners' homes. The Red Cross distributed food and blankets to strike-breakers but not the strikers.
The Wilder strike was broken in brutal ways including the murder of local leader Barney Graham, shot in the back while going to get a doctor for his wife. Highlander staff were still processing the Wilder events and lessons when bugwood tree cutters there in Grundy County went on strike. The company told the strikers they would be arrested because it was against the law to strike, to which they replied that Section 7-A of the National Industrial Recovery Act guaranteed workers the right to collective bargaining - a fact they had learned at Highlander labor education classes.
Songs were important to people as they organized during these brutal and violent times. Frank Adams in Unearthing Seeds of Fire: the Idea of Highlander quotes Zilphia Horton:
Down in Chattanooga some clothing workers had organized and asked for recognition. The company refused and they went out on strike. They asked us to come down from Monteagle to help them with handbills and to keep the strike going. It was decided to have a Washington birthday parade since the workers felt they were striking for freedom - economic freedom.
There was a minister in the parade. A band. Children and strikers. We were marching two by two behind the band and when we marched by the mill, they opened up on us with a machinegun. Several people were hit. Highlander's librarian, Hilda Hubert, was hit in the ankle.
I looked around and the police had disappeared. There had been quite a few of them around, too.
In about five minutes after the firing stopped, a few of us stood up at the mill and started singing. And in about ten minutes, people began to come out from behind the barns and little stores around there, and we stood and sang, "We Shall Not Be Moved." That's what won them recognition. That's what a song means in many places.
The experience of working with people in local communities was crucial to Myles Horton and the rest of the staff re-evaluating their approach to education and letting go of more academic methods of teaching. They had to totally invert the process, moving away from a more traditional kind of teaching, and they came to the critical understanding that in order for this to work they had to get even more out of the way, start with people's needs and get people talking to each other.
The work during this time positioned Highlander to become the principal union labor education center of the South during the 1930's, '40s and '50s. Highlander had contracts with many unions including the Sleeping Car Porters. In 1939 the CIO regional director asked Highlander to help start a program to develop leadership among new members and by 1942 about 90% of Highlander's alumni were connected to unions, and on Thanksgiving weekend, 1945, an alumni gathering at Highlander represented more than twenty international unions from 7 southern states.
Later though, red baiting and race issues within labor took their toll and frayed the relationship between the CIO and Highlander. Highlander's board of directors in 1952 agreed with Horton that race should constitute the school's new direction, both for what was happening in the South and because you could not build a unified labor movement without dealing with race.
It was not immediately clear what those steps should be, but in the Highlander way of listening and bringing people together, the idea took hold to support an effort to help southern Blacks learn to read and write so they could pass the literacy test and register to vote.
Esau Jenkins and Septima Clark from South Carolina were at a UN workshop at Highlander, and Jenkins, a hotel and restaurant owner on John's Island, also drove a bus back and forth to the mainland providing transportation for domestic workers and farm laborers. He told about trying to teach reading and writing to people on that bus ride to and from work so they could register to vote.
When they got ready to hire a teacher for this first citizenship school, Septima Clark suggested her niece, Bernice Robinson, a beautician. Black beauticians had status and played key leadership roles in the community because they owned their own businesses and did not depend on whites for their income. Robinson said she couldn't do it because she wasn't a trained teacher and they said 'that's exactly why we want you. You know the people and will know how to reach them.'
Robinson started the first class in the backroom of a cooperative store on Johns Island with 14 students meeting twice a week. Her materials included the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the state constitution. The objective of this experimental school was to help them understand that in addition to learning to read, they could play a role in their communities and they could help change the world. They were learning in order to act. Long before knowing the term popular education, Robinson had the students talk about the vegetables they were growing in their gardens and what tools they were using, had them make up stories or tell about something they wanted to order from a catalogue, and she would write the stories down in their own words, then use their own stories to teach reading.
This example is current for us today as a model that can connect literacy and popular education, grounded in people's real lives and focused on issues in people's real lives. In addition to the methods, one of the reasons for the success of the Citizenships Schools, and any successful adult literacy program, is to remove any barrier that made adults feel uncomfortable as learners.
In the Citizenship Schools, one of these barriers was the pencils. These first students were mostly over 60 who had used a plow or hoe most of their lives, and they were constantly breaking the pencils by writing too hard. The staff just bought a lot of pencils and said don't worry about it, there's plenty more.
In three months time, that first citizenship school tripled in size, and 80% of the participants passed the literacy test and registered to vote. Word spread, and people on a neighboring island contacted Highlander for help in starting another Citizenship School.
Septima Clark went on to become the Education Director at Highlander responsible for spreading the Citizenship Schools across the South. Within two years time, she had totally stopped using trained teachers for the citizenship schools because their methods did not work.
It is critical to remember that these Citizenship Schools were about learning to read and write in order to vote in order to act. The schools set people on a path of action. You needed to pass the test to vote but you also knew or learned that you couldn't read and write yourself into freedom. So the Citizenship Schools were always connecting education to changing the conditions around you. In 4 years, voters on Johns Island grew from 30 to nearly 700 and were involved in getting roads built, schools improved, and health care facilities.
Education for Changing Unions, a wonderful resource by five Canadian labor educators, demonstrates a spiral model of popular education where you start with the experience and knowledge of participants, find the patterns, add new knowledge and analysis, practice skills and strategize for action, apply the action, and then do it all again. Paulo Freire was the Brazilian educator whose name must be credited with pioneering the theory and practice of popular education. We also realize that people in oppressed communities across the globe were exploring these methods based on life experiences similar to what Freire was encountering in northeastern Brazil, and Myles in Appalachia, and Robinson and Clark in the US South - injustice, poverty, unemployment, illiteracy and hunger.
What makes popular education so powerful is that those who have been written off, whose labor is supposed to serve the elite, who are told 'you don't have a voice and don't matter,' are now - through popular education - heard for the value of their own voices and experience, and while they learn from someone else, their experience also teaches. And that is incredibly empowering.
In the 1990's I was involved with a group called Southerners on New Ground who developed popular education workshops on the economy conducted mostly with lesbigaytrans groups in the South to help people make the connections between a conservative social agenda and economics. Few people consider themselves experts on the economy, but when you get people talking about what their grandparents did for a living, what their parents do, what's happening to them and their friends, what's happening in their communities, people know about the economy, they know about downsizing, deregulation, automation, privatization, and outsourcing. They might not know the term 'social structure of accumulation' but they know who's got wealth and how they keep it. They know that corporations have more power than governments.
By starting with the experience of oppressed people, and making education real to people's lives, we create not only a result but a process-oriented result that reinforces democracy. A bottom up approach creates democratic participation along the way that makes the end learning stronger.
Earlier, I referred to Myles Horton talking about teachers getting out of the way. In Teaching for Change: Popular Education and the Labor Movement, Laura Chenven writes about this point of not letting your own agenda or educational biases override the educational experience and the importance of listening to what people need. She tells the story of a staff development program with adult education teachers where they are presented with a cartoon where a worker is telling a researcher where he spends his money, what percentage on food, rent, etc, and when he's done the percentage is higher than 100%. The teachers are then asked, what's going on in this cartoon and what is needed to be done. Most responded that it's a budgeting issue and classes need to teach percentages and fractions. When the same exercise was done with union workers, they said the problem was low wages and what we needed to do was organize for a pay raise or lower rent.
In the same book, Susan Washington of the AFL-CIO Education Department writes about the educational efforts to help build strong union leadership across crafts with Avondale Shipyard workers in New Orleans who organized a union in 1993 and spent the next six years fighting for a contract. Washington writes:
It became clear that future session had to be built around the workers' own experiences. Too much reading or written exercises would not be as effective. The workers attending the evening sessions were often coming off of grueling shifts at the shipyard. There were looking for relevant and practical.
Popular education in the context of a worker-centered, activist-based union campaign can dramatically contribute to victories. The more workers learned from each other, the more they recognized the value of their own experiences and expertise.
I want to close with three recent examples of these principles and methods, two of which are shared on the website of Equipped for the Future, the University of Tennessee's Center for Literacy Studies.
In an African American community, members of an adult education class were trying to overcome fears and doubts. They realized to get more education meant risking separation from family and friends and co-workers, but they wanted to read to "know more about everything" and "participate in all kinds of conversations." Using literature to explore their fears and introduce them to African American writers who spoke to their experience, the teacher used the Langston Hughes poem "Hope." First she asked students what is hope, what do you hope for, what would you do without hope. The experience of talking, reading and writing about hope led to wanting to read other poems and the class members went on to perform the poem, "The Creation," at two churches and an NAACP banquet.
In an English as Second Language class with students from Central America and Mexico, all employed in low wage jobs, the teacher asked about what they wanted to learn and be able to do. Students expressed their frustration with not being able to communicate more fully about their lives with their co-workers. They could share some basics, where they were from, how many children, but they wanted to share more about their home communities and countries they came from and what they did there. They made this their class goal and the instructor developed and adapted reading and writing exercises that met the students' needs of building English skills while breaking down isolation and building connection.
In a coal mining community in Virginia, women in a GED class were talking about getting a notice that food stamps were no longer going to be mailed, that you had to come to the county seat to pick them up. The teacher asked what they wanted to do. Students made a list of what they wanted to know, invited an attorney to their class, made telephone calls, interviewed people who were waiting in line to get their stamps and wrote letters, and were part of a community response that got the policy changed.
I can't talk about learning to act without mentioning a great resource, based here in New England, The Change Agent - Adult Education for Social Justice: News, Issues and Ideas. Started in response to federal cutbacks for adult education, it is a tool for teachers and learners that promotes social action as an important part of the adult education experience. For over ten years now, each issue explores a different social justice topic through news, opinions, classroom activities, lessons, cartoons, interviews, and pictures.
The last thing I want to make sure to say is that bridging the legacy and promise of popular education and labor is a tool and process through which workers can also unite across differences. These are not just feel good components but necessary ingredients in strengthening a labor movement in these times of such strong divide and conquer tactics.
With the war on terrorism fueling neighbor against neighbor, with immigrants blamed for taking jobs while corporate greed goes not only unchecked but rewarded, when two people of the same sex can't marry because somehow it's going to destroy our civilization, when race and racism are not memories of 1932 or 1955 but still splitting those who could and should be working together, when an economic system sets people up to be poor then blames them for being so, popular education helps us cross those difficult divides, share in our commonalities and shared values, and more deeply understand and respect our differences. And working together across those differences in our common humanity is the only thing that is going to save us in these times. It's the only thing that will help us turn this country back in more just and humane directions.
Thank you.
top of page
|
