Education in Black and White: Myles Horton and the Highlander Center’s Vision of Social Justice by Stephen Preskill

This is one of the most important books of this decade. I remember the Tennessee billboards that proclaimed, “Martin Luther King at Communist Training School” with a picture showing King at Highlander’s 25th Anniversary celebration in 1957. Neither were Communists, of course, but those who opposed Kind and Highlander could not attack them with truths. Highlander was founded by Myles Horton and Don West in 1932, but West left within a year, and Myles Horton stayed with Highlander until his death in 1990. Myles Horton was first and foremost a listener and facilitator who brought together ordinary people working to improve their lives, so he became a fixture first of the CIO work to organize labor in the South, and then the civil rights movement, and then Appalachian social movements. This is the first book-length study of Myles Horton in twenty-five years, although several previous books are extant, including a dialogue between Horton and Paulo Freire, the author of Pedagogy of the Oppre