Why the Highlander Center opposes historic designation: ‘The mic is being removed from us’

For 90 years, the Highlander Research and Education Center has helped to train laborers, civil rights leaders and social justice activists in Appalachia, across the South, and abroad. Transformational figures including Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks have ties to the center.

Now, the center's leaders – who still collaborate with grassroots organizations working for justice, equality and sustainability to this day – are fighting for a voice in how its legacy is preserved.

Part of the original Highlander site in Grundy County has been nominated for the National Register of Historic Places. But Highlander Center's directors didn’t place the bid.

“What's really upsetting about this instance is that it's not even just that we're fighting to find our voice. We have it. The problem is that the mic is being removed from us by people who were not participants in the very thing that made the place historic enough for them to want to register it in the first place,” Highlander co-executive director Ash-Lee Henderson told Knox News.

The Highlander Center has filed a petition opposing the National Register of Historic Places nomination on the grounds that "approval would undermine federal and state efforts to promote diversity and equity through historic preservation" because a white-led organization with no ties to Highlander's work is behind the nomination.

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They are partnering with the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Advancement Project and the Washington, D.C., law firm Crowell Moring in the objection.

Highlander leaders only recently became aware that a private Nashville-based organization nominated the site back in late 2021.

Tennessee Preservation Trust – which aims “to promote, preserve, and protect our state’s diverse historic resources” according to its website – purchased the original site of Highlander’s library in 2014, restored it and has nominated it to be designated an historic place under its original Highlander Folks School Library name.

The library and the original Highlander Folk School was founded in 1932 and served as a training and education center for labor unions. By the 1950s, the school was training leaders in the Civil Rights Movement and supporting causes like desegregation and voting rights, but it also faced government opposition.

Tennessee revoked the school’s charter in 1961 and seized its lands. The organization relocated to Knoxville and changed its name to Highlander Research and Education Center. It moved again and the center is now located in New Market.

“I show gratitude to the Tennessee Preservation Trust for what they have done to make sure that that land got protected and not allowed to be developed by folks,” Henderson said.

“But I think that the process that they're going through is actually replicating a lot of the bad practices that they say that they're protecting Highlander from and that's really unfortunate,” she added.

Highlander leaders have been in discussions with Tennessee Preservation Trust members for nearly a decade to either buy back the land or have it returned. But Henderson says these efforts have failed so far and verbal commitments to work together have not be solidified in written agreements.

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Public support for the rejection of the Historic Places nomination and for the land to be returned to Highlander has been “overwhelming,” Henderson said. More than 2,000 letters of support have been submitted via an online campaign through the Action Network site.

“I'm excited about the day where the story will be less about (Tennessee Preservation Trust) and a whole lot more about what Highlander’s doing with folks in Grundy County and folks all across the South to rewrite the future of the South where everybody has what they need, so we don't harm each other anymore and we don't have to fight,” Henderson hopes.

Whatever happens with the Historic Places nomination or the land, the Highlander Center, which was the target of an arson attack in 2019 that remains unsolved, is committed to providing the support and education for justice work as it has done nonstop for the past 90 years.

Recent programming includes cultural organizing and training, electoral justice work, economics building for co-op groups, a children’s justice camp, and working with labor movements and the movement for Black lives.

It was featured in a recent episode of "United Shades of America" on CNN.

“The work is abundant right now, both because the issues are so severe, and converging and intensifying (and) also because the vast majority of people in the South, I truly do believe, want a better world,” Henderson added.

Knox News reached out to Tennessee Preservation Trust Director David Currey for comment but did not receive a response after leaving several messages.

Phil Thomason of Thomason & Associates, a preservation firm that helped prepare the nomination for the Tennessee Preservation Trust, confirmed the Highlander Folk School Library’s Historic Places nomination “is pending at the National Park Service as part of a review and comment period.”

Electronic comments for the Highlander Folk School Library nomination closed on July 20, according to the Federal Register. The Tennessee State Review Board, which must approve an historic places nomination before submitting it to the National Park Service, has its next meeting Sept. 14.

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This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Highlander Center opposing national historic places nomination