Highlander Folk School, training ground for civil rights leaders, fights to regain land

The library on the former grounds of the Highlander Folk Center, in which Rev. Martin Luther King once lectured, is one of few buildings remaining on the Grundy County site closed by the state in 1961. (Photo: John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout)

This much is not in dispute:​​ In 1961, the state of Tennessee took 200 acres of land from Highlander Folk School on Monteagle Mountain in Grundy County. Took, as in confiscated on bogus charges of alcohol sales without a license. 

But the real reason for the confiscation stemmed from fears of civil rights and union activism after two decades of training now-icons such as Rosa Parks and Diane Nash at Highlander.

This much is also not in dispute: Five plots of that now subdivided land are owned by a nonprofit called the Tennessee Preservation Trust (TPT). The sale of those plots to Todd Mayo, the for-profit owner of The Caverns, a rural concert venue, is pending. And the current Highlander administration, which had its offer to buy the land rejected, is furious.

Everything else — what happened to TPT, whether they ever had plans to sell the land back to Highlander, what might happen to those plots now and the land next to them that TPT doesn’t own — well, the answers vary depending on whom you ask. 

On the one hand, TPT preserved some historic buildings that might very well have been lost. On the other hand, the original (and some would say, still rightful) owner of those buildings has been shut out from determining what happens to them.

Still others question whether a group of white men are the right ones to tell the story of the storied civil rights training ground.

“It’s hard to understand what the motive would be for the Trust not to turn the land over to Highlander,” says Denis Marlowe, a longtime neighbor whose mother worked at Highlander before the state raid. “I can see it only one or two ways. Either you’re getting a chance to make some money in this situation, or you don’t agree with what Highlander might do with it.”

Denis Marlowe, whose mother worked for Highlander founder Myles Horton, spent the first few years of his life at Highlander. (Photo: John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout)

Backed by Eleanor Roosevelt, training civil rights leaders

Over three decades, the tiny Highlander Folk School had a huge, outsized impact on both Tennessee and American history. In 1932, Myles Horton, Don West and James Dombrowski launched the Highlander Folk School on land donated by Lillian Wyckoff Johnson, a progressive educator. Johnson had built and run a model rural school and community center named Kindred Company (KinCo) since 1915 and wanted others to continue her work after retirement. 

Attempts to organize local workers quickly drew the ire of businessmen, both in Grundy County and across Tennessee. Although then-First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had endorsed the school, by 1941 the FBI had launched its first investigation into Highlander for alleged communist activities, surveillance that would continue for over two decades.

By the 1950s, Highlander had pivoted from labor to civil rights and became an instrumental part of the movement to fight segregation. Workshops led by activists Septima Clark, Esau Jenkins and Bernice Robinson taught Black citizens their rights, while other workshops taught white and Black adults together strategies to desegregate schools and businesses. (Parks famously attended a Highlander workshop four months before refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus.) 

Martin Luther King Jr. visited in 1957, speaking in the library. Horton’s wife Zliphia taught “We Shall Overcome” to Pete Seeger during a visit, who made it part of his repertoire, leading to its adoption as the unofficial civil rights anthem.

“A story that hasn’t been told”

In 2013, in a splashy story in The Tennessean, historian David Currey announced big plans: The Tennessee Preservation Trust (TPT), of which he was then board chair, planned to buy 13.5 acres of the original 200-acre Highlander site with a $1 million national campaign.

“Trying to get our hands on this piece of property allows us to tell that story again in the context of this rural setting,” Currey told the paper at the time. “This place has the potential to tell a story that hasn’t been told.”

A national campaign never really happened, but local donors stepped up and helped TPT buy three parcels on Old Highlander Road in May 2014. One parcel included what was left of the historic one-room library. In 2015, TPT purchased another parcel, followed by a fifth parcel in 2019 — ultimately around 8.5 acres of land with three houses in addition to the library. 

Two of the houses have been rentals for the past 10 years. The third house, a historic home used by Highlander, has been left empty. It has visible mold and other exterior damage — rotting floorboards on the porch, a gutter dangling, overgrown shrubbery trying to force its way inside.

Despite some renovations, the one-room library sits empty, too, paint already peeling off the cement blocks. That’s why the organization needs to sell now, says Phil Thomason, TPT board chair, who says the organization never intended to keep the property.

“Our intent when we purchased it in 2014 was to restore the building back to its original design listed in the National Register of Historic Places and then sell it to a person, a benefactor, or an entity that we felt would be a really good steward of the property,” says Thomason.

One of a handful of structures still standing on the grounds of the old Highlander Folk School, a house stand empty and unkempt. (Photo: John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout)

That steward, however, won’t just be Todd Mayo. It will also be Currey, via a separate nonprofit called Kindred Cooperative in a nod to the original land owner. Last summer, months before Mayo put an offer on the land, Currey’s TPT entered into a 99-year lease of the Highlander property with Kindred for a nominal annual rent. (Thomason says it’s “something like” $1 per year.)

Mayo says he was intrigued by the project when Currey approached him.

“David communicated to me that he borrowed money to save this [property] and put it in a trust through TPT, but that … it needed to be sold and put into his nonprofit to carry on doing things there,” Mayo says. “I said, ‘Man, I’d love to help’.”

The TPT board voted to approve the sale for $600,000 in December 2023. Highlander put forth a competing offer of $800,000 cash in June, but the board voted against it. 

“The relationship that we had with Highlander was severed a couple of years ago by them … and they disparaged and had unkind words for my organization,” Thomason says. “[Before 2024] we always had the door open to them for an offer, but we never received anything in writing …. [This summer] as we looked at the offer that Highlander presented, the timeline and other considerations just made it imperative that we move forward with Todd’s offer.”

Per state law, the Tennessee Attorney General’s office must approve any sale by a nonprofit of substantially all its assets to another entity. That review is currently underway, and if the AG’s office approves the sale, which Thomason seems confident will happen, Mayo will own the land by the end of the year.

The role of race in historic preservation

Ted Debro, a Black Birmingham businessman, worked with Currey to create an experience room in the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church, examining the aftermath of the 1963 bombings that killed four Black girls. 

“We were very pleased with the work that he did, and I found him to be a very open and caring individual and one who really understood the story and how to pull that together,” Debro says. “I didn’t find him to have a prejudice or a racist thought in his body.”

But several people, including Highlander’s current co-executive director, Rev. Allyn Maxfield-Steele, raised questions about whether an older white man is the right person to tell Highlander’s story, given its storied history in the Civil Rights Movement.

“As another white person, I’ve grown to understand that we’re all in recovery from the deepest, entrenched pools of white supremacy that we grew up in,” said Maxfield-Steele. “But the deals that he’s been willing to seemingly make without our consent and without our blessing and without transparency — that’s the issue. And some people do call that white supremacist business practice.”

This attitude is what enrages Currey.

“That’s what [Highlander staff] use when they don’t get what they want — if you don’t agree with them, then everybody’s a racist,” Currey says. “That’s not the case. I do a lot of work with a lot of African American communities around the South. Do you think if I was a racist they would want to do business with me?”

A simmering fight for years 

This anger — of Currey and Thomason toward Highlander, of Highlander toward the TPT — first came to a head in 2022, but it had been simmering for years.

Highlander didn’t stop training activists when the center was forced off Monteagle. Now called the Highlander Research and Education Center, it’s been located in New Market, Tennessee, since 1971, after 10 years in Knoxville. The organization has continued to train grassroots organizers and work for social and economic justice, and if it ever ended up with the original land, they say that goal wouldn’t change. But Highlander now has resources they didn’t have in the 1950s — over 50 employees and an annual operating budget of around $9 million.

According to Maxfield-Steele, Highlander has been interested in reacquiring the site and has talked to Currey and TPT members multiple times over the past decade about making it happen. 

“In 2014, what we said was that we can’t afford this now, but we believe this project is valuable, and our story is one that should be told by us,” says Maxfield-Steele, explaining that Highlander was in the middle of a capital campaign at the time and couldn’t afford any additional cost outlays. “That was not something that it seemed that they were interested in pursuing.”

Between 2014 and 2019, Highlander had occasional discussions with Currey about the site’s direction but never received any offers in writing. In 2019, Howell E. Adams Jr., a donor who helped TPT purchase the parcels, told Highlander about the Kindred proposal. Maxfield-Steele thought parts of it were ludicrous — both “historic Highlander” and the current iteration of the nonprofit have long worked to “help rural people” — but he agreed to work on a plan.

But after emails back and forth, Maxfield-Steele says they couldn’t get a commitment from Currey about what would happen with the land. The pandemic hit, and things quieted down until 2022, when TPT submitted an application to place the library building on the National Register of Historic Places without notifying Highlander.

“There were citations that were wrong,” Maxfield-Steele says. “And we had never given any legal permission to TPT to submit anything.”

The dispute made the news, but behind the scenes, Highlander made an offer to buy the land.

“We said, we could cut you a check today,”  Maxfield-Steele says. “And we offered to compensate [Currey] for his time in 2022.”

Thomason says TPT never received an offer.

“The fact that they objected to [the Register nomination] just told my board that they were not serious and would never provide an offer,” Thomason says. “Were there some minor inaccuracies? That’s correct. And those were corrected.”

Since then, the two parties have not talked until Highlander learned this spring that Mayo had made an offer for the land. Staff drafted a counter-proposal and attached letters of support from prominent historians, activists and Grundy County neighbors, including Tennessee State Historian Carroll Van West. They also included information about partnering with MASS Design Group, the architectural firm that designed the National Memorial for Peace and Justice honoring victims of lynching in Montgomery, Alabama. 

Highlander provided financial documents demonstrating that paying $800,000 cash for the site — again, $200,000 more than Mayo and much more than TPT originally paid for the land — was feasible. The board still voted against the plan.

“On paper, it looks weird that they would turn down a significantly higher dollar amount, but it also looks bad that they would reject an 87-page document that included Septima Clark’s family, MASS Design, Brent Leggs of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Black Tennessee historians, and reputable folks from the region and outside the region,” Maxfield-Steele says.

Racism, intentional or not, is a factor in the Highlander property dispute, says Dr. Learotha Williams of Tennessee State University. (Photo: John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout)

Dr. Learotha Williams, a Tennessee State University professor and historian, was one of the supporters who submitted a letter, and he sees racism at play, whether intentional or not.

“The preservation space that we work in is largely dominated by white males who have access to all of the properties, all of the mechanisms for preserving stuff, determining what was going to be preserved, how it was going to be preserved — in other words, who could tell the stories,” Dr. Williams says. “I can see the shock and anger emerging out of [the Register dispute], but nonetheless, this act is an act to punish Highlander, the same way that the sheriff said, ‘We’re going to punish Highlander by not allowing them into this site.’

“I don’t see much difference between the two,” Williams says. “You don’t want them there, so we slap a padlock on it in the 1960s. You don’t want them back at the site now because they called you out for some nonsense, so we don’t wanna sell it to you no matter how much money you got.”

Tempers are unlikely to calm anytime soon. Currey expressed repeated outrage over being perceived as elitist and not knowing what’s best for the land. Meanwhile, Highlander did not know that TPT had entered into the 99-year lease months prior to Mayo’s offer until told by this reporter, and now feels even more betrayed.

“That TPT invited us to make an offer without disclosing a century-long lease which essentially voids ownership is deeply deceptive and only confirms what we feared all along — this was never a genuine invitation,” says Evelyn Lynn, special projects organizer at Highlander. 

Thomason, Currey and one member who spoke on background were the only TPT board members who agreed to talk. None of the other eight current members, nor several past members, returned calls or messages.

Potential problems with Kindred and the appearance of a sweetheart deal

There are multiple problems with Kindred potentially running the site, at least as the nonprofit currently exists. The first appears to be a conflict of interest: Not only has Currey been an off-and-on member of the TPT board since 2010, but he also partners with Thomason professionally via his historic preservation firm, Thomason & Associates. The firm’s website states that Currey’s company, Encore Interpretive Design, has provided “planning and interpretation services” for multiple projects.

And Currey is still intimately involved in TPT. Since the 2017 reporting year, he has filed every annual report with the Tennessee Secretary of State’s Office and since the 2018 reporting year, his home address has been listed as TPT’s mailing and principal office address. 

“It is [my address] because I filed their annual report for them, because I used to be on the board,” Currey says.

Currey’s home address is also listed on all of Kindred’s annual reports. 

Both federal and state law say conflicts of interest should be avoided, but they are not technically prohibited. 

“When an organization makes a decision that is clouded by conflict, there’s a reasonable concern that that decision was not made in the best interest of the general public,” says Eric Franklin Amarante, a professor and expert in nonprofit law at the University of Tennessee Knoxville who has consulted with Highlander. “If someone is still somewhat involved or maybe even intimately involved in the organization, but they don’t maintain the title, that’s still a concern.”

Then, there are questions about the nonprofit status of TPT and Kindred. Currey says he created Kindred to raise funds because TPT lost its nonprofit status during the COVID era. 

“(TPT) didn’t file some tax returns, and their board chair passed away from cancer — I was not on the board at that time — so we created Kindred so that we could finish the [library renovation], says Currey.”

But his timeline is a little off. TPT did have its 501(c)(3) status revoked by the IRS in 2020 for failure to file an annual report for three years in a row, and it has not regained it. However, Currey filed to incorporate Kindred in 2017, and in July 2019, he announced that TPT planned to turn the site over to Kindred to manage.

In 2021, the IRS granted Kindred tax exempt status, but the nonprofit appears to have not been in compliance with state or federal law since 2017. According to the IRS, Kindred has yet to file the required Form 990 annual report for any year, possibly bringing it to the verge of also possibly having that status revoked. It also has not had a board of three people in place, as required both by state law and its own charter.

In annual reports filed with the state, Currey is listed as both the president and secretary of Kindred for 2017 and 2018. From 2019 through 2023, Nashville architect Brian Tibbs is listed as the board secretary. In a phone call, Currey said Tibbs is still on the board. Tibbs, however, says, “I haven’t had any involvement with Kindred.” 

Thomason said he was unaware of Currey’s lapses and blamed it on his lack of time.

However, Amarante says none of this looks good.  

“If I were counseling the client, I would say, ‘This is a big transaction, basically all of your assets.’ And I would want to make sure that the entire transaction was clean of any self-interest,” Amarante says. “I’ve seen conflict-of-interest policies where the relationship described would not be technically considered a conflict, but if I were working at the IRS or state AG’s office and I were reviewing it, I’d be like, ‘This just looks like a sweetheart deal.’”

The form required by the AG’s office to approve the sale requires a nonprofit to “provide sufficient documents to identify any possible conflict of interest, self-interest, or self-dealing of any board member, officer, or director in connection with the Transaction.”

The future of Highlander

Whether Kindred, Mayo or Highlander end up controlling the lots, one thing seems sure: It will likely take significantly more money and additional land purchases to create a destination landmark that draws tourists from outside the state.

Mayo says his current vision isn’t to change much: Have elementary school children occasionally come by for a field trip, but otherwise keep it a quiet residential street where everyone minds their own business. The sale includes a preservation easement, which limits what can be built on the property.

The Highlander library. (Photo: John Partipilo)

“I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about that,” Mayo says when asked if additional purchases could follow in the years to come. “You’d have to look at it relative to the cost and the benefits. … I plan on keeping everything the way it is for right now.”

Mayo says that he would like to restore the dilapidated home if it’s financially feasible. He may look into buying the house just south of the library, which will likely be on the market next year. He also plans to let the tenants in the other houses stay, at least for now.

Although he hopes Highlander ultimately gets their land back, Marlowe has a pragmatic take.

“This whole thing has been almost like a fantasy, as far as having the property saved and preserved,” Marlowe says. “If we’ve learned anything in the last 70 years of fighting these fights it’s just the fact that you’re there fighting doesn’t necessarily mean that the earth’s going to be shook up and changed any time soon. What’s important is to not lose sight that they were fighting.”

Lynn puts it more succinctly.“David Currey won’t be here in 99 years,” Lynn says. “But the Highlander Center will.”