“You can forget about liberalism now at the College!” a furious student spouted at music professor and European Jewish refugee Edward Lowinsky in 1944.Footnote 1 The student was about to leave Black Mountain College (BMC) in North Carolina in protest against the watered-down integration program Lowinsky endorsed. The student's outrage at Lowinsky was part of passionate debates raging at BMC over when and how to admit black students to the college. These debates came to be known as the “Civil War of 1944,” in which European Jewish refugees played a crucial role.
The integration program at BMC was marked by problems and controversy, but at another Appalachian avant-garde school, Highlander Folk School (HFS), founded in 1932 and located 250 miles away from BMC, in Monteagle, Tennessee, the integration program was successful. Jews were involved in this integration program as well but they acted behind the scenes, with donations or short visits to campus. The comparison of these two schools and their 1944 integration processes demonstrates that a dense Jewish population at one school hindered the integration program, while such a program was successful with Jewish involvement, but without a Jewish presence, at the other school.
Founded in 1933, Black Mountain College was based on the Bauhaus, a German art and design school with a relentlessly modernist style and sensibility, and grounded in John Dewey's interdisciplinary educational model, which centered on the overall well-being of the student. This marriage of ideologies afforded students, mostly from the North, and faculty, mostly from Europe and the North, an opportunity to engage in manual labor, while simultaneously writing poetry and plays, painting, weaving, making pottery, and conducting scientific research.Footnote 2 The college, which never had more than one hundred residents during any given year, continuously teetered on bankruptcy and eventually closed in 1957.
Founding European refugee faculty members and their devoted students firmly backed this model and believed that boldly integrating the campus would “embroil [BMC] in social causes,”Footnote 3 thus making the school even more of a pariah in the South. But a group of new faculty members and students, among them the furious student who erupted in front of Edward Lowinsky, believed that a speedy integration program was part of a larger set of educational reforms needed on campus. To them, an interdisciplinary approach wasted time; manual labor distracted them from focusing on their studies and contributing to larger social changes, such as dismantling Jim Crow in the South.Footnote 4
An examination of the immigration patterns, transnational networks, and discriminatory experiences of refugee scholars at BMC reveals that these individuals successfully transplanted themselves in North Carolina due to the close-knit academic communities that their networks engendered. Owing to the European curriculum BMC fostered, faculty and staff there were highly successful in recruiting European Jewish refugees. In fact, BMC employed more refugee scholars than any other institute of higher education in the South.
African Americans, on the other hand, found themselves ostracized at BMC. During the 1930s, BMC allowed African Americans on campus only as visitors or as workers; the school employed only two full-time black employees as cooks, Jack and Rubye Lipsey. Faculty felt this was socially acceptable because they were hired to work in the cafeteria and were not attending classes.Footnote 5 By the 1940s, after a group of faculty and students lobbied for active integration efforts, and the college made tentative steps to include black students, BMC's European, avant-garde sensibilities and atmosphere, which were foreign to southern locals, made it necessary for the faculty to employ aggressive efforts to recruit African Americans. As Jewish refugees created their own unique place at BMC, they simultaneously isolated black students. Historian Martin Duberman has argued that “black students [at BMC] were in a sense double aliens—by skin color and by the nature of their rural, southern background; they were thrown into a community whose culture was defined not only by white standards but also by ‘sophisticated’ urban ones.”Footnote 6
Highlander Folk School had much in common with BMC, and faculty and students often shared ideas and sent appeals to one another to garner support.Footnote 7 Both schools were based on participatory European education models, had no endowment, did not offer degrees, and employed a labor program where students and teachers worked side by side. When students from BMC visited HFS they found a familiar atmosphere and had a favorable impression of the school. Emil Joseph Willimetz was one of these students. A Jew from New York, Willimetz attended BMC from 1937 to 1940 and often visited HFS during this time. He went on to work at HFS sporadically throughout the 1940s and 1950s and credited its work camps, and those at BMC, for helping him progress from a boy to a man.Footnote 8 In 1941, the New York Times published an article describing the work camps at the two schools alongside other experimental schools.Footnote 9
Yet despite these similarities and connections, the two schools' relationships to their surrounding communities were starkly different. Black Mountain College focused on aesthetics and prided itself on promoting a refined arts education in Appalachia, where such an education typically revolved around mountain arts and crafts. The school catered to white students mostly from the Northeast, many of them Jewish, and only a handful of southern students enrolled.Footnote 10 The unique composition of BMC's student body fascinated Willimetz, “At BMC,” he recalled later in life, “students came from all [economic classes]…. There were, of course, Jews, but I would be hard put to remember them as such.”Footnote 11 To fellow Jews, Jewishness at BMC was not overt and certainly not religious, but to locals it was foreign.
Historians have compared the two schools before and blamed the failure of BMC, in contrast to the success of HFS, on Black Mountain College's “alien ideology and social program which ultimately could not be successfully integrated with local ideas, customs, mores, and institutions.”Footnote 12 Such historians further argued that BMC was isolated from the surrounding area because “the local people were, for the most part, religious fundamentalists and political conservatives. They were traditionally wary of strangers, and even outsiders who settled in the area remained always, to a certain extent, outsiders. Several other experimental communities and schools, including the Highlander Folk School and Work Camp in Monteagle, Tennessee … were created to educate the mountain people and to preserve and strengthen the indigenous crafts, music, and culture of the area.”Footnote 13
Yet these comparisons do not consider the roles Jews played at the two schools. Through interpersonal and transnational networks, not just refugee-aid placements, BMC was one of the few places in the South that not only accepted, but also recruited Jewish intellectual refugees in the 1930s and 1940s. The college, its artists, and artwork and poetry are all well known today, having recently been the inspiration for a new travelling exhibition that received rave reviews.Footnote 14 Although the college would probably never have existed without them, the history of Jews at BMC has largely been ignored.Footnote 15
Unlike BMC, HFS never had more than a handful of Jews on campus as residents. American-born, seminary-trained Christian ministers founded HFS, and the school maintained a relationship with the surrounding mostly white, working-class community through outreach programs and vocational training. Highlander's students, from Tennessee and the South, were expected to go back out and be a part of the nearby labor force. One can say with confidence that there is nothing written on the Jews at HFS because there were virtually no Jews there. Yet despite their lack of a visible presence, Jews made a significant contribution to Highlander's successful integration program.Footnote 16 They did so as “invisible” committee members, donors, and visitors.
One Door Closed, Another Opened
The year 1933 witnessed the closing of the Bauhaus in Germany and the founding of BMC in North Carolina. That year classics professor John Andrew Rice lost his job at Rollins College in Florida for attempting to change the style of instruction at the school. Rice and two other faculty members decided to develop a college where their ideas for a democratic teaching and learning environment could be realized. Bob Wunsch, Rollins College drama coach and North Carolina native, knew that the buildings of the Blue Ridge Assembly just east of Asheville stood empty during the winter months and suggested it as the site of the future college. The college leased the buildings and land from the Assembly for $4,500 from September until May.Footnote 17 During the summer months the site returned to the Assembly. News of Black Mountain College's opening reverberated around the country, with newspaper articles bearing such baffling titles as “College Without Classes or Grades Opens This Fall in North Carolina,” and “No Degrees in This College.”Footnote 18 By June 1937, BMC had purchased 667 acres of land surrounding nearby man-made Lake Eden, and in 1940 began construction on its own buildings to remain open year-round.Footnote 19
Faculty at BMC believed that Gemeinschaft (communal social relations based on close personal and family ties with a focus on the collective whole) could be realized.Footnote 20 Black Mountain College was designed to be an experimental liberal arts college based on close student and faculty relationships. Living in adjacent quarters, students and faculty enjoyed a simple environment where everyone participated in a work program. Courses, especially those in the arts, relied heavily on the natural environment, where students were required to conduct material studies on dirt, wood, leaves, and rocks before attempting to paint or sculpt.
Jewish Refugees Flock to Black Mountain
By the end of the 1930s, as more and more scholars were forced to leave Europe, increasing numbers of Jewish refugees applied to teach at BMC. With this influx of scholars, many feared that the academic bubble would soon burst, leaving native-born faculty without jobs. The American Association of University Professors issued a report stating that more than two thousand teachers had lost their jobs since 1930.Footnote 21 Fear of competition between refugees and American-born faculty, as well as antisemitic backlash throughout the country, caused some aid organizations to limit grants to refugee scholars.
This fear was felt at BMC as well, and eventually a quota was set for Jewish professors that proved to be somewhat flexible.Footnote 22 For the college to accept more Jewish refugees as professors, applicants had to justify the increased risk their presence would create in the Appalachian Mountains.Footnote 23 On July 4, 1938 Ted Dreier, a founding member of BMC and professor of physics and mathematics, wrote to Anna Moellenhoff, a professor of biology and German at the college, and the wife of Fritz Moellenhoff, professor of psychology, both refugees from Hitler's Europe, about his hesitation to accept an applicant who was Jewish: “It would be a great mistake to have [Maure Leonard] Goldschmidt…. The way it strikes me is that it is just the same as not admitting more than a certain percentage of girls [as students]. If we do we won't get anything but girls. And if we have too many Jews [on faculty] we won't get anything but Jews, which would be a mistake, I think.”Footnote 24 By accepting one Jewish faculty member, administrators would have to let other, potentially equally qualified and not Jewish, candidates go by.
Applications began to require candidates to list increasingly personal information. The American Guild for German Cultural Freedom described the physical attributes of the Jewish candidates by stating, for example, as “physically they are small—short and slight and dark.”Footnote 25 If candidates were considered overtly Jewish, BMC faculty discussed this fact, as in the case of Lewis Hermann Kleinholz, one of two candidates for a biology position left open at BMC by Anna Moellenhoff in the summer of 1939. “I've seen two of the Harvard biology candidates: Kleinholz and Osborne,” Dreier wrote to Frederick Mangold, an instructor of modern languages who also served as secretary and registrar of BMC.Footnote 26 “They seem to be both very good men, and Osborne so good that I think we may have a very hard time finding anyone else as good. Kleinholz is Jewish and his looks are rather against him.” But Jewishness did not seem to influence the hiring committee's decision one way or the other, as neither Kleinholz nor Osborne received appointments and, a year later, J. Richard Carpenter accepted the biology position.Footnote 27
Despite these quotas, historians have argued that “inhospitable attitudes” toward refugee scholars decreased during the 1940s as American educators cared more about how refugees would help their institution gain prestige by pushing the boundaries of originality in research.Footnote 28 Seventy-seven percent of German and Austrian refugee scholars were placed in American colleges and universities by 1947.Footnote 29 In a fundraising campaign letter on March 12, 1943, Josef Albers boasted, “BMC since 1933 has appointed twenty-five refugees to its staff, 10 alone at the beginning of the current college year.”Footnote 30 Albers himself, an art professor and German refugee, was included in this total. Edward Lowinsky, the music professor who was subjected to the fury of the student in 1944, was one of the ten refugees hired in 1943. Through his international connections, Lowinsky attracted a distinguished music faculty of refugees to BMC, among them Hugo Kauder, Michael Kuttner, Kras Malno, Gabor Retjo, Erwin Bodky, and Alfred Einstein.Footnote 31
While it is unclear whether or not other American colleges and universities employed formal quotas limiting the hiring of Jewish professors, the South as a region was slower than the North to offer assistance to the refugee scholars.Footnote 32 Some historians argue that this resistance had less to do with antisemitism in the region and more to do with antiforeigner attitudes.Footnote 33 In any case, the number of Jewish refugees who found placements in the South is small, though the exact figure remains unknown.Footnote 34
But even with this limited data, North Carolina appears to stand out in the South in terms of welcoming refugee scholars.Footnote 35 For example, by 1945 the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars had placed four refugee scholars each in Tennessee and Virginia, one in Louisiana, and seven in North Carolina. That number may seem miniscule compared to the 111 refugee scholars the Emergency Committee placed in New York. However, it belies the total amount of refugee scholars who came to North Carolina.
The Emergency Committee placed seven scholars in North Carolina, but independently Duke accepted at least five, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at least six, and at least one refugee scholar joined North Carolina Central in Durham, one of many historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the South.Footnote 36 Nonetheless, no other school in North Carolina accepted as many as BMC, which opened its doors to an impressive thirty-four refugee scholars through various formal and informal networks.Footnote 37
The “Civil War” of 1944
The BMC Board of Fellows had always agreed in theory that they should admit African Americans in accordance with their ideals to have “no social barriers of any kind” but thought it would be safer not to. Citizens of the town of Black Mountain already distrusted BMC as an escape for foreign refugees and Communists, and, because of the faculty's recent protest against the mistreatment of African Americans in the South, the college had developed a reputation as a “haven for nigger-lovers.”Footnote 38 Admitting black students, it was argued, could possibly cause the insular academic community to commit social suicide.Footnote 39
Talk of an official integration program, which included actually hiring black professors and admitting black students, did not begin until the 1940s, when a new group of five faculty members and several students arrived on campus. This group came to be regarded by the older, well-established faculty members, as a “collective” and later as “plotters,” because they were first thought to have Communist sympathies, and then thought to be infiltrating and planning to take over the school.Footnote 40 The “plotters” included Frances de Graff (born in Holland and taught Russian language and literature), Eric Bentley (born in England and taught history and dramatics), and Clark Foreman (a native of the South, educated in New England, and taught political science), and their student followers. Foreman came to BMC “solely because he saw the school—a Yankee island in the Southern sea—as a promising locale for inaugurating an experiment in integrated education.”Footnote 41 The “plotters” wanted to open admissions to black students as the best way for the college to be in the vanguard of social change. This group opposed the educational system on which the college was founded: a model of educating the entire individual with a work program and personality refinement. This seemed to them impractical and distracting, a belief shared by many students.
The opposing camp, referred to as the “old-timers,” mainly included refugee faculty members and others who had been at BMC from its early stages, including Josef and Anni Albers (both of German origin, he taught art and she weaving), Erwin Straus (born in Germany, and taught psychology and philosophy), and Fritz Hansgirg (born in Germany, and taught chemistry and physics). The “old-timers” and their students steadfastly supported the education for the whole individual based on the Bauhaus. They believed that to devote time and energy to an integration program in the South at that point would be unnecessarily risky, since the local community might starve out the college by refusing to do business with it.Footnote 42 Peter Wallenstein, in his edited volume on higher education and desegregation, argues that there were no exceptions to Jim Crow segregation in public higher education in the South between 1890 and 1935.Footnote 43 But before the 1954 Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, BMC—as a private institute of higher education—was not bound by segregation laws as public schools were.Footnote 44 Nonetheless, the “old-timers” felt that admitting black students would be detrimental to the future of the college and worried about “repercussions” such as “violence against college personnel; arson against the college property; boycott by Asheville and Black Mountain merchants; fewer applications from southern students; and less likelihood of being accredited or approved by North Carolina agencies.”Footnote 45 This group, dominated primarily by European refugees, feared that the careers they had fought so desperately to salvage after fleeing Europe would again be threatened should BMC be forced to close.Footnote 46
The “old-timers” were not necessarily against integration, but rather were wary about complete and rapid integration. Josef Albers, Herbert Miller, and Edward Lowinsky saw integration as possible, but in its proposed method too fast and sudden for the Jim Crow South to accept. Albers wrote fundraising and solicitation letters to “make the attendance of several races possible” and avoid a confrontation with their Black Mountain neighbors who were accustomed to segregation:
Black Mountain College is trying to do an important step forward in behalf of the negro problem. Though we are not accredited yet and existing in the South, we plan to accept negro students as visitors…. In order to eliminate possible friction and percussion, in my opinion, it would be good if not necessary to have at the same time also students of the red and yellow races—some Indians, Chinese, American Japanese students. In case that would be achieved, our action would appear not as much as an opposition against race prejudice. Our action would also lose the character of aggression…Footnote 47
“This was neither the time nor the place,” Herbert Miller—an “old-timer” and a retired historian who continued to teach at BMC—“to take regular negro students this summer.” He agreed that BMC might take a few graduate students but was against the move because of the tense situation over this issue both within and outside the college.Footnote 48 Instead of working with the surrounding community, Miller blamed them: “we are located in the South where there are both laws and public opinion that are strongly discriminatory.”Footnote 49 In addition, Rubye Lipsey, one of the college's black cooks, heightened these fears by reminding Bob Wunsch (dramatics instructor and later rector of the college) that BMC was part of a southern community. She scared him by telling the story of a seminary in Alabama that decided to admit black students and was subsequently burned to the ground.Footnote 50
These sentiments, however, proved to be symptoms of faculty anxiety rather than accurate reflections of life in western North Carolina. Before the admission of a black student (albeit as a guest) to the 1944 BMC Summer Institute, several interracial events took place on campus without any known local racist backlash. The first was the college's celebration of Negro History Week in February 1943. A black lecturer gave a presentation and black teachers from a local high school attended. The second was a visit by George Redd, a professor of education at Fisk University (a historically black university) and two of his students, in the spring of 1944. Both of these events took place with no negative local reactions.Footnote 51 But instead of surveying the local community for advice, Wunsch consulted administration at other universities in North Carolina asking for opinions about the issue. They too were worried about local reactions. “I do not think it wise to admit Negroes as students next autumn,” James E. Shepard, president of the University of North Carolina replied, “Right now more harm would be done.”Footnote 52
As Black Mountain College's civil war continued, one student and the college's assistant treasurer resigned in February 1944 because of their fears of how integration might affect the college.Footnote 53 Weeks of heated discussions quickly turned into months of fighting. Ultimately, the college reached a compromise in April 1944 and allowed three black students to attend the college's Summer Institute but not as “official,” full-time students. This number slowly dwindled to one “qualified” older black woman admitted not as a student but a “member of the Institute.” Bentley called this compromise the Hofjude, or “court Jew,” a label illustrating his animosity toward the college's Jewish refugee professors who had not long ago escaped racism in Europe, but who now hesitated to act to overturn Jim Crow in the South. Out of frustration, Bentley left to teach at Fisk University for the summer and Jewish anthropologist Paul Radin, who taught courses on race theory and history at Fisk in 1927–30 and at BMC in 1941–42 and 1944 (partial year), declared he would not be returning to campus that fall.Footnote 54 De Graff, forced into resigning, stated there was no use staying where she was not wanted. This led the rest of the faculty group in favor of immediate integration to resign along with their student supporters in August 1944.Footnote 55
After the War: The Failure of the Integration Program
The departure of this group of faculty and students drastically reduced the population on campus. However, most of the refugees remained at the college, and other refugees and veterans returning from war filled the vacancies. For example, Jewish refugees Charlotte Schlesinger and Erwin Bodky filled vacancies to teach music at BMC.
As with Josef Albers, according to Edward Lowinsky, the problem was not integration itself, but rather how the college went about the process.Footnote 56 During the fall of 1944, he reached out to Redd at Fisk University and other HBCU leaders for advice. By May 1945, Lowinsky had persuaded the college to admit two black students for the Summer Music and Art Institutes, one of whom was Sylvestra Martin. Martin was a strategic choice made by Lowinsky: as a single black woman, Martin was considered unthreatening and less controversial than a single black man. Cases against black men who purportedly raped white women in the South were regularly in the news.Footnote 57 Although the majority of these cases were built on falsehoods, they often provoked dangerous lynch mobs. Admitting a black woman to BMC would avoid any possible accusations from Black Mountain citizens and potential pushback from parents of some of BMC's students. Lowinsky also persuaded black musicians Carol Brice and Roland Hayes to join the BMC Summer Institute as guest faculty members. The Julius Rosenwald Fund paid the students' tuitions and faculty expenses.Footnote 58
Lowinsky organized a concert for Hayes to perform that summer, and approximately thirty to forty African Americans attended, out of a total 400 people in the audience. Seating was mixed and local residents did not complain. Hayes had an enormous impact on Lowinsky and, “in meeting him,” Lowinsky wrote, “one realizes sharply how much human substance this country is still wasting by its discriminating policies.”Footnote 59
Lowinsky truly believed in the benefits of a step-by-step integration program. By the fall of 1945, he convinced the Board of Fellows to admit Martin from the Summer Institute as the first full-time black student for the 1945–46 academic year. As an individual whom the BMC community already knew, Martin would help the college ease into integration. Furthermore, the college hired Percy Baker, a black professor of biology at Virginia State College, as a visiting lecturer for the fall.Footnote 60 At this point it had become evident to R. R. Williams, Black Mountain College's lawyer located in Asheville, that BMC was not adhering to his legal advice against integration, and he resigned.Footnote 61
In the winter of 1946, BMC hired Mark Fax, a black composer, and he and Martin appeared in concert together, again with no negative local reactions.Footnote 62 After this, the BMC Board of Fellows approved admission of female black students for the 1946–47 academic year. Lowinsky notified the Deep South News Service and Black Dispatch that BMC was accepting applicants regardless of skin color and that black students were encouraged to apply.Footnote 63 News of this reached the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Friends Service Committee.Footnote 64 Soon after, Lowinsky painstakingly wrote to an extensive list of black high schools as well as HBCUs trying to secure black students, transfer students, and a professor at BMC.Footnote 65
In the end, the Board of Fellows made a decision to hire one black teacher and admit four black students. However, only one student from Fisk University could be persuaded to enroll. Percy Baker tried to explain to a discouraged Lowinsky why African Americans failed to flock to BMC.Footnote 66 “You must appreciate,” Baker wrote in November 1946, “the fact that the Black Mountain philosophy is so rare and different … that it is difficult for [African Americans] to follow.” Baker also explained to Lowinsky that it was difficult for African Americans to justify the risks and hardships of attending an interracial school in the South where no degrees were awarded.
By winter 1947, BMC students, growing weary of easing into integration, campaigned for a faster-paced integration program, and five black students arrived, two of whom were male veterans. “Our interracial program is flourishing,” Lowinsky exaggerated in May 1947, “the five Negro students here are a completely integrated part of the community and feel very happy.”Footnote 67 Yet only one female black student could be persuaded to enroll for the following academic year. As discussed above, Baker suggested to Lowinsky that this was due in part to the Black Mountain College's lack of accreditation and official degrees.
These solicitations always highlighted the diversity on campus. For example, Herbert Miller replied to potential black student Anita Calloway: “a large proportion of the faculty has always been Jewish, as have many students. We also have had several Japanese students and shall have another after Christmas.”Footnote 68 Yet the very marketing campaign Lowinsky and Albers before him thought would help the integration program succeed, one which promoted diversity and uniqueness, only ended up highlighting the foreign nature of BMC in the South and thus further alienating African Americans.Footnote 69 While BMC had successfully recruited European Jewish refugees to campus in the early 1930s and the 1940s because of the various formal and informal networks operating at the time, without similar black networks at their disposal, the college failed to bring black faculty to campus in the mid-1940s and early 1950s.
When Lowinsky left in 1947 to take a Guggenheim Fellowship, the integration initiative ended. No one else was willing to accept the challenge of recruiting black students. A year later Lowinsky accepted a faculty position at Queens College and was saddened to hear that the integration program at BMC had failed. “If BMC wants to have Negro students,” Lowinsky wrote in 1948, “it will have them; if it does not find them, it is because it does not really want them.”Footnote 70 Lowinsky believed that BMC just needed to try harder–—maybe solicit more applications—and then perhaps they might find African Americans who would be sufficiently comfortable to remain on campus. But even after bachelor of arts degrees were awarded in 1951, and the college sent out inquiries to attract black students, none enrolled.
From Queens College, Lowinsky moved to the University of California, Berkeley, and then to the University of Chicago. While at the University of Chicago in the 1960s, Lowinsky became increasingly involved in activism for equal rights for African Americans. He donated funds to a number of organizations, including the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), hoping that the day would come when “white and black people in this country [will] live together with mutual respect and equal rights and opportunities.”Footnote 71
Was Black Mountain College Unique?
While BMC's integration program was early, compared to desegregation events at other colleges and universities in the South, desegregation in the twentieth century occurred even earlier and more easily at experimental liberal arts schools in the North. For example, Sarah Lawrence College in Westchester County, New York, and the New School for Social Research in New York City desegregated early in the 1940s, and the latter even offered classes in black history and culture as early as 1946.Footnote 72 At first glance, the efforts of BMC's refugee faculty in the early 1940s appear courageous for the Jim Crow South. But there are questions that beg to be answered: were other experimental liberal arts and folk schools also attempting such a program in the South? If so, were Jews involved?
Liberal arts and folk schools in the South, typically situated on several if not hundreds of acres of property in the Appalachian region, ran into different hurdles. From its beginning in 1932 in Monteagle, Tennessee, Highlander Folk School (HFS) had invited black visitors and speakers to campus, participated in interracial conferences, and helped the few biracial labor unions gain their footing. In 1941 a few Jewish staff members arrived on campus. In 1942, HFS leaders announced that from then on resident terms would be interracial, but the school was not officially integrated until 1944.Footnote 73
Highlander, located within the Appalachian region 250 miles away from BMC, was also based on a European model of education—but one that was malleable and grew out of the needs of the local people. These needs typically centered on an education that brought together individual economic improvement with progressive political ideals—mainly labor rights. While the integration program succeeded at HFS, Jews participated in the school in vastly different ways than they did at BMC.
Rooting Highlander in Tennessee
Born in Tennessee in 1905, Myles Falls Horton grew up in the Presbyterian Church, presided over the Cumberland YMCA in 1927, attended the Union Theological Seminary in New York, and sought to merge his interest in religion with his passion for organized labor.Footnote 74 In 1930, he began attending classes in sociology at the University of Chicago. Shortly thereafter he began to imagine a school in his home state of Tennessee that would improve the economic situation for the local people, most of whom were impoverished. He discussed his nascent ideas with anyone who would listen, including Jane Adams and Danish-born minister Aage Møller. Møller suggested that Horton travel to Denmark to observe Danish folk schools in action. In 1932, Horton travelled throughout Denmark for a year looking for answers to his questions about how to engage the local population, seeking advice from those who had blazed the trail before him, and hoping for inspiration for his school. Horton observed that the strengths of the folk schools were their informality, close student-teacher interaction, highly motivating learning process, and clear objectives. “Education,” Horton wrote, should “help people appreciate and intelligently face life” and “calls for solidarity of all workers and sees beyond the existing economic, political and social systems.”Footnote 75 To Horton, his new school would not merely be a training school, but a school that educated individuals to work together toward a common goal. In late 1932 he decided he would return to the “backward mountain sections at least one hundred years behind the most advanced parts of the country” and create a school for the people: Highlander Folk School.Footnote 76
The original concept of the Danish folk school was to “awaken and develop patriotism and civic responsibility among the nation's long-oppressed rural peasantry.”Footnote 77 The Danes restored their economic stability after the 1864–65 war with Prussia and Austria by utilizing the folk school concept to stimulate intellectual activity and political participation among the rural population. With HFS, Horton aimed to do just that while deeply embedding Protestant Christian theology into the curriculum. Horton utilized the close friendships he had maintained throughout his life with Protestant ministers including James Dombrowski, with whom he graduated from Union Theological Seminary, whose dissertation was titled “Early Days of Christian Socialism in America.” After fundraising for HFS for a year, Dombrowski arrived on campus in 1933. One of the other founding members of HFS, Don West, also had a strong Protestant background.Footnote 78 West received a bachelor of divinity degree in 1931 from Vanderbilt University and assumed the pastorate of a small Congregationalist church near Crossville, Tennessee, before meeting Horton at the Blue Ridge Assembly in North Carolina, coincidentally the first location of BMC.
When seeking a location for HFS, Horton realized that his new folk school should be on a farm so students could work together and grow their own food. This experience, as well as working with union locals, provided the hands-on learning that students needed to succeed at the first of Highlander's two main goals: “to educate rural and industrial leaders for a new social order.”Footnote 79 In the early years HFS fought for a new social order alongside industrial and union leaders. By the 1950s the school had begun helping farmers unite for workers' rights.
Highlander sought students from the immediate vicinity and throughout the South and was devoted to serving the local community in a variety of ways.Footnote 80 While in Denmark, Horton wrote that as a radical he must “champion a cause” and make it “real” to the people of the Appalachian Mountains. This was the second of Highlander's two main goals: “to conserve and enrich the indigenous cultural values of the mountains.” To Horton, respecting local cultures and norms, as well as participating in, assisting, and welcoming the local community, were essential to prevent HFS from becoming “a detached colony or utopian venture.” And detached it was not. Of the four hundred white students who enrolled at HFS between 1932 and 1939, 87 percent were from the South.Footnote 81
Early Integration Efforts and Jewish Involvement at HFS
A few years after the founding of HFS, students and staff at the school discussed the importance of cooperation between white and black laborers. After a 1934 talk by Howard Kester of the Conference on Economic and Racial Justice, on the close economic link between southern white and black workers, HFS students inquired about what it was like for black workers. According to the students, the black situation was indicative of the working-class situation as a whole. Yet staff members were reluctant to invite black students to participate in classes on campus, fearing that “the harm [the visit] would do in the community would more than offset any sort of value.”Footnote 82 They believed that HFS had already gained enough support from the community to invite a black speaker as a guest of the school. Earlier, HFS and the local community launched a recreation program reviving mountain square dancing and folk songs. The program hosted a “Negro boys' quartet from Chattanooga.” The issue of where the black singers should eat was never discussed, so “when lunch time came, there was one dining room and the people did the natural thing [at HFS] which was to eat together.”Footnote 83 Based on this success, HFS assumed they had the community's support, and, in the summer of 1934, invited J. Herman Daves, a black professor at Knoxville College, to discuss the need to unionize workers regardless of race. Somewhat surprising to the administration, local “reaction came swiftly and the guards had to be posted around HFS at night when local opponents threatened to dynamite the school.”Footnote 84
This threat did not deter HFS from continuing to encourage black visitors and speakers and participating in interracial conferences. For example, in 1937 HFS helped the Textile Workers Organizing Committee create an interracial local, and later HFS staff conducted extension programs for African Americans in Tennessee, Louisiana, and elsewhere in the South.Footnote 85 As early as 1939, Horton bragged about Highlander's efforts to promote racial tolerance: “Last night we had Dr. Arthur Raper, Secretary of the Interracial Commission as our visiting speaker…. We have been rather successful in the past in breaking down racial prejudice and we hope to get the present student body straight on this problem before the term ends.”Footnote 86 Horton called his successful integration method “natural exposure.” “An effort is made,” he wrote, “to take the presence of Negroes as visitors for granted. With the exception of a discussion of Negroes in labor unions, nothing is said to the students before the visitors arrive. When they come to the school as speakers or as casual visitors, the same consideration and courtesy are shown them as are shown other [white] visitors, but no fuss is made about their presence. Eating and sleeping arrangements follow the routine of all guests.”
Horton provided two examples of the success of this method. The first involved visiting professor Charles Johnson of Fisk University, who brought a young black assistant with him to HFS. When the assistant participated in a dance and games at the school “his presence was simply taken for granted by the group.”Footnote 87 The second event was another visit by J. Herman Daves and three black students from Knoxville College.Footnote 88 Horton described inviting the guests and all HFS students for coffee. When presented with the invitation, two white women in their fifties decided not to attend. One stated “In Kentucky white people don't associate with niggers. They know their place and we know ours. It's all right for the young people to do what they please but I'm too old to change.” However these women had no objection to the visitors returning for dinner that evening with the rest of the group.
In 1934, shortly after the school's founding, only about ten Jews visited: three from Tennessee, two from New York, and one each from Arkansas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, and London, England.Footnote 89 But Highlander's financial records reveal the depth and breadth of the Jewish support during the 1930s. Supporters of HFS made 683 total donations, amounting to $8,498.90 between 1925 and 1936. Jewish supporters provided over one-third, or 267, of these donations, totaling $2,225.05, over 25 percent of the total amount raised. The bulk of Jewish donations came from the North and Midwest. There were only nine Jewish donations from Tennessee but, not surprisingly, this state had the most Jewish donations throughout the South.Footnote 90
At first glance it appears that Jewish donations were directly correlated to the size of the Jewish populations in those states at the time. After all, New York's Jewish community has always been much larger than Tennessee's.Footnote 91 But while there were not many Jews from Tennessee who donated to the school, they were eight times more likely to donate than Jews from New York, despite Highlander's targeted solicitation of Jewish donors in the North and Midwest, as will be discussed below. This information helps us understand that even though HFS did not boast a large resident Jewish population on campus, local Jews did support the school through monetary donations.
World War II and Official Integration in 1944
Early Jewish involvement with HFS stayed mostly behind the scenes. The occasional visitor, such as Emil Willimetz, mentioned above, stayed for a thirty-day work camp during summer recess from BMC.Footnote 92 In 1940, Willimetz returned to HFS for a six-week workers' rights session. But virtually no Jews were on campus as residents or staff members before 1941, when Harry Lasker and William Elkuss arrived.Footnote 93
Lasker began his work as a volunteer among textile unions while a student at the University of North Carolina. As an HFS staff member in the fall of 1941, he started several classes on basic union problems, promoted the formation of legislative and education committees, and provided other education services to local unions. However, Lasker's efforts “produced wretched results.”Footnote 94 He believed that race was such a barrier in the South that he taught separate classes for black students. Although Lasker was enthusiastic about an extension program he created in Memphis, it was poorly financed, and as a result, the local unions failed to work together and members remained unorganized. After he volunteered for the Army Air Corps in 1942, Horton tried to revive the extension program with no success. Two years later, after Lasker was killed in a plane crash, HFS constructed a dormitory and library in his honor.Footnote 95
Elkuss, an Austrian refugee who was previously a student activist at the University of Paris, completed his education at Columbia University. He came to HFS as a work-camper in 1941 and soon thereafter became a member of the staff.Footnote 96 By 1942, Elkuss had established a research department devoted to the folk school's defense program. In this program he produced interpretive pamphlets on wartime labor legislation and government agencies and sent out weekly bulletins on legislative developments. Elkuss, like Lasker, also served in World War II. In 1946, as a Jew, workers' rights advocate, HFS staff member, and now a veteran, Elkuss wrote an article titled “A Letter from the South” for an American Veterans Committee publication. “In Georgia and south-eastern Tennessee,” Elkuss wrote, “an estimated 30 to 35% of the new Klan membership are ex-GI's … The Christian Veterans of America are attempting to establish themselves in Alabama, [and] The Christian Crusader viciously attacks the Negro, the Jew, and Organized Labor.”Footnote 97
To Elkuss, workers' rights were intertwined with fighting racism and antisemitism. For example, during the spring and summer of 1946, Elkuss established an interracial American Legion post in Chattanooga and worked with the NAACP in the hope that affiliating with groups fighting racism would benefit the southern labor movement. When Elkuss left HFS in 1949, the school's work with these groups quickly declined.Footnote 98
Around 1941, the same year Lasker and Elkuss arrived on campus, HFS began to appeal to donors using wartime rhetoric. It was no longer the merciless shop floor managers whom the unions fought, but now these managers were equated to Hitler.Footnote 99 In December 1943, Horton sent out a fundraising appeal with a short song he wrote to be played on piano or guitar. “We've got the show and You've got the dough,” the lyrics read, “Let's get together and make all Hitlers go. Send your contribution to the address be-low—. Yours for Victo-ry against ev'ry foe—.”Footnote 100 Highlander may have been using this rhetoric as any other organization did at the time: as a unifying message to support the war, or they may have been using it to reach the heart and soul of the Jewish contributors in the North and Midwest who donated heavily to the school. In either case, it is in this World War II moment that HFS began to incorporate messages not only of tolerance of all races, but also tolerance of all religions in its programming. In this way, HFS linked the fight against racism and segregation on campus and in the workplace to the fight against the Nazis' antisemitic policies.
Almost simultaneously, Jewish visitation to HFS peaked. Highlander's 205-page handwritten guest book provides a complete picture of where Jewish visitors came from and when they stayed. Between 1934 and 1946, a total of 3,353 guests signed the HFS guest book.Footnote 101 Three hundred and thirty-five of these guests, or 10 percent, were Jewish. Eighty-two of the Jewish guests were from New York and 104 from Tennessee. One hundred and forty-five Jewish guests were from the North and Midwest, while 174 guests were Jews who lived in the South.Footnote 102 These numbers tell us that targeted solicitation using wartime rhetoric increased Jewish visitation at HFS, and Jewish visitors made up a significant percentage of the overall visitor population throughout the official integration period at HFS. Furthermore, the number of Jewish visitors from New York and from Tennessee were relatively the same. Unlike the rates of Jewish donations, southern Jews visited HFS just as frequently as northern and midwestern Jews did.
During World War II, the HFS integration initiative changed. First, HFS as a whole shrank into hiatus during the war.Footnote 103 Second, Horton's “natural exposure” method went by the wayside. In January 1942, Lewis Jones, a Fisk University sociologist, became the first black member of the HFS Executive Council. But the campus itself was not yet integrated. Most resident students came from union locals that lacked black members, and HFS policy was to accept only those students sent by their unions. Staff members tried to overturn the prejudices of white workers by exposing them to the problems of black workers, but HFS continued to be hesitant to enroll independent black students in the same resident terms. By August 1942 HFS staff moved away from the “natural exposure” method, and announced that students should be informed that the upcoming resident term was interracial and that discrimination would not be tolerated at the school. Max Yergen, director of the Council on African Affairs, hosted an interracial conference at HFS that following spring to usher in the new policy. The conference had a wide reach outside of Tennessee, as Yergen's visit and the conference were “expression[s] of his concern for the white peoples of Occupied Europe as well as for the millions of his own race living in Africa.”Footnote 104
Highlander integrated in 1944—the same year BMC was in the middle of its “Civil War” over integration. But while HFS experienced its fair share of ups and downs in the pursuit of integrated classes, the school was successful and did not experience the same turmoil as BMC.
Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) members from six states attended a four-week term from May 1 to May 28, 1944, sponsored by the Southern CIO Regional Directors. The students who attended were employed by their respective international organizations or were elected officers in their local unions.Footnote 105 In a summary of their work in May, the Community Relations Class at HFS compiled a listing of “Things CIO Unions can do on Racial Discrimination.” The one-page list included items such as organizing a racial discrimination committee in a local union, then demanding that committee make contact with black community leaders; obtaining black publications such as magazines, newspapers, and books; writing letters to the editors of any publication that produced racist stories, jokes, or cartoons; suggesting that individuals not use the word “nigger” but instead “negro” and use “Mr. and Mrs. or Miss as you would to any white person;” and, finally, investigating community boards and council to see if African Americans were represented.Footnote 106
The United Auto Workers' (UAW) summer school on campus from June 5 to June 11, 1944 was representative of the school's successful integration. “Although [HFS staff] couldn't be sure of the community's reaction to Negro students living at the school, [they] felt the odds were in [their] favor and the chance important enough to take.”Footnote 107 This was the first interracial union school held in the South and the largest residence session ever held at HFS, and it went off “without a hitch.”Footnote 108 During this one-week session forty white students and three black students enrolled. Then on August 13 to August 20, HFS held a one-week term for thirteen white students and two black students from various CIO unions throughout the South.Footnote 109 Throughout the 1944 calendar year, HFS enrolled 100 local labor leaders, almost 1,300 students in extension classes, and over a thousand more in conferences and institutes hosted on campus.Footnote 110 These impressive numbers demonstrate that the interracial programs did not deter white students from enrolling at HFS.
While 1944 marked a successful turning point for HFS, in the following years the school did go through trials and tribulations regarding integration. “To say that every detail went smoothly is not accurate,” HFS staff reported in 1946, two years after the UAW summer session, “when the white students arrive, the majority of them have the usual prejudices … and it is likewise a difficult adjustment to make for [African Americans]. These prejudices can be overcome only with the proper handling and time.”Footnote 111
This comment summarized the unavoidable vicissitudes of the integration process but not the failure of the program as a whole. The problems encountered at HFS were relatively mild compared to those at BMC, and they decreased in severity over time. For example, in May of 1945, the Southern CIO Regional Directors sponsored a one-month school. Twenty-seven students, including two African Americans, attended.Footnote 112 While this first appears as a success, a few white students did return to their homes in Alabama in protest of the integration program. A similar problem occurred at the 1946 CIO school, where five white students threatened to leave if black students were not segregated during meals. Highlander staff simply pointed out to these students that there was room to sit at another table if they would like, and the matter was settled. Then the HFS staff held a two-week general workers' term in September 1946 for fifteen white and three black students. Some of the white students initially resented the black students. Therefore staff led a discussion on racial discrimination without forcing mixed seating. Nonetheless, “by the end of the term the students had cultivated a group spirit absent from any previous HFS interracial session.”Footnote 113 Finally, proof that the integration program was slowly but surely working, nineteen students were sent to HFS by their union local in 1947, which had opposed the integration policy three years earlier.Footnote 114
By 1945, as World War II drew to a close, HFS boasted that by working together at their school, individuals learned “tolerance among people of different races and religions.” Indeed, “here at Highlander,” a publicity flyer boasted, “white and Negro students study together, play together and work together. The necessary maintenance work of running the school is done cooperatively by students and staff…. In this way, the students learn to know one another and understand one another's problems. Here Southern workers overcome much of their anti-semitism and race prejudice by being associated with teachers and students of other races and religions.”Footnote 115 One can extract from this passage that the different races referred to are white and black, and the different religions are Protestant Christian and Jewish. To HFS, racism was different from antisemitism, which was perceived as a religious prejudice. Highlander directly targeted Jewish donations in the North and Midwest; Jews from both the North and South visited HFS with frequency; and the school's rhetoric on race prejudice changed due to these close affiliations. Thus, even though their physical presence on campus was minimal, Jews were influential in the formation of the integration program at HFS and were central to the ways in which the school approached race and racism.
After the War: The Success of the Integration Program
Historians including Seth Forman, Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, and Stuart Svonkin have documented strong Jewish contributions to civil liberties rooted in political liberalism after World War II.Footnote 116 These studies are based in the archival collections of Jewish agencies such as the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, as well as the NAACP. On Highlander's campus, even though the Jewish presence remained minimal, Jews played a significant role in civil rights activism after the war.
Highlander's aspiration to be the place where “for the first time in their lives, most students meet people of other races and religions on an equal footing” was the impetus for the school to begin to work with Jewish organizations outside the labor movement in 1946.Footnote 117 Highlander reached out to the national Jewish community as potential allies as well as future sponsors. Unlike the Jews at BMC, who aggressively promoted their integration program and recruited African Americans, Jewish involvement at HFS took a subtler route through support committees, sponsors and donors, and visitors to campus.
In the 1940s Myles Horton, the founder of HFS, began to establish allies throughout the United States. These allies formed committees in their respective cities to provide outreach and awareness about HFS goals concerning black and white worker rights, and most importantly, to raise funds for the school. Jews were heavily involved in the committees in New York, Washington, DC, Boston, and St. Louis. In fact, these individuals often held meetings in their homes, as Mrs. Leon Keyserling did for the Washington, DC committee, or offered free office space, as Wallace Cohen did during an intensive three-month fundraising campaign.
Through Cohen's connections, Emanuel K. Berman set up the Boston committee and got the word out about HFS to the larger Boston Jewish community in an editorial in the Jewish Weekly Times.Footnote 118 “[Highlander] is a model of democracy in action,” the editorial reported, “its students stemming from all races and religions.” “Guest lecturers come from the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, the Southern Conference of Human Welfare, and other similar organizations,” Berman continued. The editorial further promoted HFS as popular in urban areas and in the forefront of the progressive political movement: “Local committees for the purpose of maintaining the Highlander School are being established in the larger cities of the country. The Boston committee which is now in the process of formation,” Berman declared, “merits the interest of every progressive and liberal in this area.” Marc Siegel and Felix Albert offered to reorganize the New York committee and sponsored an art auction as a fundraiser for HFS at the home of Ellen Green.Footnote 119 By the 1950s, William Stix had formed the St. Louis committee and led Horton on a speaking tour to a few groups across the city, including the American Jewish Committee.Footnote 120
Still, an examination of Highlander's financial records shows that unlike the results Forman, Greenberg, and Svonkin documented, HFS had more success with donations from Jewish individuals than they did with Jewish foundations and organizations. Between 1946 and 1964, HFS sent appeals to dozens of foundations requesting funds to support the school. All of the foundations rejected Highlander's plea and cited such reasons as: the mission of HFS did not fall in line with what the foundation funded; the tax status of HFS was in question; the foundation/organization was out of funds or being liquidated; or the funds from the organization were already promised to other projects.Footnote 121
Although the rejections must have been disappointing, donations to HFS from Jewish individuals were abundant. Like it did for foundations, HFS solicited far more individuals in the North than they did the South and were acutely aware of how this would be perceived by the local community.Footnote 122 Even northern supporters were aware of potential difficulties with how this may appear. When asked to serve on the advisory committee for Highlander, one supporter replied positively but stressed his anxieties about the issue. “I don't quite like the idea of adorning your stationery with so many northern names,” Roger Baldwin of New York wrote to Horton in 1942, “looks as if you are an intruder without southern support, or enough of it to count on.”Footnote 123 “You are right about the damage of using too many northern names,” Horton replied to Baldwin, “and we are trying to make this committee more representative of the country as a whole.”Footnote 124 This may have been the reason why Horton felt compelled to defend the program in a 1946 fundraising letter: “Total contributions from unions and individuals in Tennessee amount to more than those from any other state except New York. We feel that the support shown by the labor movement and by the people of our own state justifies the continuation of our program of leadership training.”Footnote 125
Southern Jews who contributed to HFS were extremely devoted to the school. The Gershon family of Atlanta, for example, was one of these devoted sponsors.Footnote 126 Harry M. and Rebecca Gershon corresponded frequently with Horton in the early 1940s and were part of Highlander's “National Sponsoring Committee List” in celebration of Highlander's tenth anniversary.Footnote 127 The Gershon family continued to sponsor HFS throughout the rest of the 1940s and 1950s, and in 1962 they were listed alongside forty other influential sponsors, including Mrs. Sophia Yarnall Jacobs, Rabbi Jacob J. Weinstein, and Mrs. Louis S. Weiss.Footnote 128 By the late 1950s and early 1960s, these sponsors and others such as Dr. and Mrs. A. Levine of Rowayton, Connecticut and Gloria K. Solomon and W. B. Silberman of Chicago contributed to Highlander's Defense Fund, which Highlander established in order to battle the “constant harassment” to which the school had become accustomed.Footnote 129
Just before Elkuss left HFS, Emil Willimetz returned as a staff member in 1948 and began setting up the Film Center at the school and assisting with union workshops.Footnote 130 Jewish visitors after the war also supported HFS and its goal of integrated higher education and workers' rights regardless of race. Jewish visitors came to HFS for one- or two-day stays, long weekend sessions, and union workshops and conferences. Willimetz remembered later in life how he helped these visitors acclimate to life at HFS:
In the late 1940s, the Southern CIO unions were making constant use of Highlander's interracial facilities. When they arrived at the school, [my wife] and I and others would take them up to the large attic dorm and assign them beds. We would have them plunk their bags on a bed in a random way, making it seem totally casual and inevitable that black student beds would be intermingled with those of whites. The same was true of eating together and helping with clearing the tables and other chores. One black woman student laughed, saying, “It's the first time I worked in a kitchen while a white man was doing the dishes.”Footnote 131
Through these visits, Jews made temporary yet influential contributions to HFS. Jews from the North and the South arrived on campus to show their support of the school and its mission, and then returned home to spread the word.
In 1955, Willimetz left HFS and moved to Knoxville.Footnote 132 That same year the American Jewish Society for Service (AJSS) sent nine campers and two counselors, ten of whom were from New York, to the HFS work camp from July 1 to August 19.Footnote 133 With a few minor bumps in the road, as with any summer camp involving high schoolers, the AJSS was successful in helping in the “development of a camp site at Highlander which [served] as a base for an interracial summer camp for children as well as a vacation spot for families.”Footnote 134 The Jewish campers arrived fully understanding that this was no ordinary work camp. They were aware that several workshops were scheduled on public school desegregation in the South even though their work camp was not advertised as being interracial. They also knew that “Highlander [was] the only resident adult school in the South where Negroes and whites can meet together and study their common problems.”Footnote 135 And this was true. In 1955, one year after Brown v. Board of Education, the University of North Carolina, for example, had only just begun to admit black undergraduate students, and the University of Tennessee announced a “step-by-step” integration plan for black undergraduate students (who were not actually admitted until 1961).Footnote 136 That same year, the Jewish campers arrived to a flourishing interracial work program and prepared a campsite, planned buildings, built a swimming dock and float, and built and equipped several outdoor fireplaces, all for the upcoming interracial children's camp to be held at HFS.Footnote 137
Henry Shipherd predicted that the campers would benefit from their efforts: “The use of the term ‘interracial’ as you well know, means a departure from some of the accepted patterns up North, whereas in the South it means a revolutionary break with both the laws and the customs and therefore has greatly added significance. Highlander is pioneering in this field and I think the workcampers will catch some of the significance of this work during a two-month stay here.”Footnote 138
And Shipherd was right; the Jewish campers caught the significance: “I have been quite surprised and very impressed,” wrote Shipherd in 1955, “by the fact that there were two or three work campers at every session of the two-week Work Shop on Desegregation of Schools. They have shown by their questions that they were very anxious to know how the schools were run in the South and just what the Negro problems were. I doubt that some of them will ever forget the facts which they learned from hearing Negro teachers and civic leaders tell of their community life and their patient hope for a better world for their children.”Footnote 139 Highlander was eager to bring the AJSS campers back the following summer.Footnote 140 The example of the 1955 AJSS work-campers highlights the continued Jewish involvement in the integration program at HFS after the war, which was when Jewish committees were established and individual donations to HFS increased.
Even though Willimetz left HFS in 1955, he returned to campus that year to photograph the civil rights workshop on school desegregation that Rosa Parks attended. Willimetz had worked with HFS for almost two decades when he photographed his last school desegregation workshop in 1957.Footnote 141 Later in life he reflected on the school's influence on civil rights, “Highlander had worked with a good number of Southern people—not all reaching the same public prominence that Rosa Parks did, but each adding impetus to the change.… I believe that Highlander deserves a good deal of credit…. Highlander helped lay the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.”Footnote 142 Willimetz was not alone in his thinking. The 1985 documentary You Got to Move featured HFS as the foundation for social change and grass roots civil rights activism in the South and was re-released in 2011 because of its popularity.Footnote 143
Just Miles Away but Worlds Apart
The mostly foreign and/or Jewish faculty, students primarily from the North, and avant-garde arts education at Black Mountain College were neither southern nor Appalachian products. As Stephen Whitfield argues, “Black Mountain was in but not of North Carolina.”Footnote 144 In fact, when a faculty member did mention working with and engaging the local community in learning programs or workshops at BMC, colleagues offered no support. Some even labeled this ongoing struggle as “community vs. college.”Footnote 145
Black Mountain College was not unique in its 1944 integration initiative—other Appalachian schools, such as HFS, also attempted integration programs early in the 1940s. Black Mountain College was set apart, however, because it absorbed so many refugees, more than any other college or university in the South. While BMC would never have existed without these refugees, their overwhelming presence on campus created a foreign atmosphere in the South, which alienated black students and prevented many from enrolling. African Americans who were persuaded to enroll at BMC felt like “double aliens”Footnote 146 or possibly even triple aliens: they were African Americans among Caucasians, locals among foreigners, and were gentiles among Jews.
Even though Highlander Folk School was supported by donations from the North as well as the South, and visitors came from the North and Midwest as well as the South, it was said you could “feel the pulse of the South” there.Footnote 147 This was especially true because of the ways in which HFS involved the local community in its programming and provided an education based on familiar regional concerns, not external ones. Highlander's seminary-trained founders involved the local community and adapted to the changing needs of southern black students and workers. But only one Jewish refugee lived on campus while other, native-born Jews operated behind the scenes as donors and visitors. In this way, HFS did not appear to be such a foreign outlier and still remained very much a part of the South. It was therefore able to succeed and maintain its integration program, even until today.
