Highlander Center Celebrates 75 Years of Helping Working People

by James Parks, Sep 1, 2007

Baldemar Velasquez, left, will join performers at a benefit concert for the Highlander Center.

Since the Depression, the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tenn., has helped poor and working people in the South and Appalachia build broad-based movements for social change. This Labor Day weekend, nearly 1,000 progressive leaders from the arts, politics and social justice are gathering to celebrate the center’s 75th anniversary.   

Founded in 1932 at the height of the Depression, Highlander has been a leading force in U.S. culture and politics. The center played a key role in the 1930s and 1940s supporting workers and union organizers fighting to help Southern workers gain a voice on the job. In the 1970s and 1980s, Highlander played a leading role in fighting black lung, brown lung and strip mining. 

In the 1990s, the center backed efforts to combat plant closings and oppose the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Since the late 1990s, Highlander has helped immigrant workers join unions, negotiate contracts and learn their rights in the workplace.   

AFL-CIO Organizing Director Stewart Acuff, who speaks today at the anniversary celebration, says:

We are so proud and happy to join the Highlander Center in celebrating its 75 years of struggle and teaching and organizing for social justice. Those 75 years have been full of Highlander trying to help average folks, everyday people learn how to work together and engage in collective action to win justice on the job and in their communities. It was Highlander who helped teach Rosa Parks about nonviolent civil disobedience. It was Highlander who taught the CIO’s Operation Dixie about southern working class culture. And it was Highlander that held out the beacon of hope for every southern organizer in every dark night of struggle for 75 years.  Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) says: 

Highlander has been an anchor for almost every major social movement in this country.  From labor rights to civil rights and from environmental justice to immigrant justice, Highlander has been at the forefront of social justice work for decades.   

The three-day celebration, Aug. 31–Sept. 2, includes workshops, cultural performances, jam sessions and dialogues on racial justice, immigration and workers’ rights. Highlander also will host a Southern Strategy Session tomorrow with more than 25 organizations from across the South coming together to develop an approach for progressive social change in the region.

Included in the festivities is a sold-out benefit concert tonight in nearby Knoxville, Tenn., featuring among others, Baldemar Velasquez, president of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC). In June, Velasquez and accordionist Jesse Ponce released a CD at a fundraiser for FLOC’s efforts helping North Carolina farm workers form unions. The CD, “Justice Has No Borders,” is available from the Labor Heritage Foundation. 

The weekend will culminate with a cultural festival and 40th anniversary tribute to the We Shall Overcome Fund. The fund, founded at Highlander, uses royalties from the civil rights anthem, “We Shall Overcome,” to support African American cultural workers in the South. 

Click here to learn more about Highlander and here for more information about the celebration. 

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