Thursday
Yesterday I attended a Grundy County event looking back at Tennessee’s raid 60 years ago on Highlander Educational and Research Center, an instrumental player in the civil rights movement. While we relived those days—although I was only eight, my father took me to meet director Myles Horton—current co-director Ash-Lee Henderson reminded us that Highlander is not living history. While it takes inspiration from such past successes as Rosa Parks, it’s very much focused on current problems.
The charges that led the state to close down Highlander and seize its assets were egregious: the purported reason was beer consumption on the premises but the actual reason was blacks and whites congregating and strategizing about ending segregation. During the commemoration, a poem written at the time by Appalachian children’s author May Justus was read. Miss Justus (as we always called her) was a Highlander supporter as well as a personal friend, and her poem was inspired by something Horton wrote in the Chicago Defender: “You can’t padlock an idea.”
A longer version of the passage predicted Highlander’s future: “You can padlock a building, but you can’t padlock an idea. Highlander is an idea. You can’t kill it and you can’t close it in. It will grow wherever people take it.” Highlander opened up again in Knoxville and, after it was run out of Knoxville, in New Market, Tennessee. When arson destroyed its library and archives this past April (a white supremacist symbol was also found), workshops continued without a hitch.
At a time when we have a president who lies constantly and uses cruelty as a weapon—and when sycophantic Republicans fear opposing him—the poem is as timely as ever. The Biblical imagery in the poem reflects Miss Justus’s own convictions, and the concluding line alludes, of course, to the hymn that rallied the union troops during the Civil War.
Hymn for Highlander
An idea cannot be padlocked.
Falsehood is a drabbled cloak
Sewed with crooked seams.
Truth’s a fair and fadeless robe
Washed in many streams.
Courage is an arrow true
Flying to its mark.
Cowardice a broken lance
Swaying in the dark.
Cruelty’s a skeleton
In a donjon keep.
Kindness is a shepherd gone
After one lost sheep.
Fear’s the whimper of the lost
In an alley dim.
Hope’s the shout of those who march
To a battle hymn.
Highlander is still training grassroots activists to march to that hymn.
