Closed for Selling Beer | Highlander Folk School, 1961

Twenty-four years after this was filmed, the State of Tennessee sold this school at auction. The charge was selling beer.

What follows is how a state closes a school it cannot legally close for the reason it wants to — and the sentence on page two hundred forty-two where it says so out loud.

The film is called People of the Cumberland. Frontier Films made it in nineteen thirty-seven.

The photography is Ralph Steiner's. The music is Alex North's, his first for a film. The commentary was written by Erskine Caldwell.

And listed on the title card, under Assistants, is a twenty-seven-year-old named Elia Kazan.

It opens on the plateau. Ridge, then ridge, then ridge.

Then it goes underground, because that is what the Cumberland ran on.

A man in a carbide lamp looks at the camera and does not smile.

The film is not subtle about what it wants you to see. Children framed in a cabin window, looking out at the camera.

A woman on a porch, holding a baby. Grundy County, Tennessee — one of the poorest counties in the state, on a mountain, above a coalfield.

Then a title card appears, and it is the reason the film exists.

In nineteen thirty-two, a group of teachers aware of conditions in the Cumberland organized the Highlander Folk School.

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Highlander Folk School v. State ex rel. Sloan, 208 Tenn. 234, 236 (1961).

Two years later the State of Tennessee granted it a charter. October the twentieth, nineteen thirty-four.

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Highlander Folk School v. State ex rel. Sloan, 208 Tenn. 234, 236 (1961).

The charter said what the school was for. Adult workers education. The training of rural leaders. General academic education.

It was a labor school. In nineteen thirty-seven that is all it was.

The film shows students in the library. Students in the garden. Students at a table with books open.

And a chart on a classroom wall, hand-lettered: the need for labor unions.

Down off the mountain, the film shows what the school was training people to walk into.

A hand holds a sign up to the lens. It is written in pencil, in capitals, by somebody in a hurry.

Warning. We're giving you twenty-four hours to get out of town.

A window with the glass shot out.

A revolver, held at arm's length toward the lens. This was the ordinary weather of union organizing in east Tennessee, and the film puts it on screen without comment.

It ends where these films end. A rally. A poster gives the date: the fourth of July labor rally, Monday, July the fifth, nineteen thirty-seven, LaFollette, Tennessee.

Bands, banners, a tug of war, a boxing match. Thousands of people on a fairground.

The last shot is a boy with his fist in the air.

That is the film. Hold on to it — because everything that happens next, it cannot show you. It was already twenty years old.

The school stayed where it was. What changed was who came up the mountain to it.

In nineteen thirty-seven the people at that table were miners and mill hands. By the nineteen fifties Highlander was running residential workshops on desegregation — integrated, in Tennessee, at a time when a Tennessee public school could not be.

In a meeting room like this one, in the summer of nineteen fifty-five, a seamstress from Montgomery, Alabama sat through a workshop. Her name was Rosa Parks. She was arrested that December.

Labor Day weekend, nineteen fifty-seven. The school held its twenty-fifth anniversary — the thirtieth of August to the second of September.

A man moved through that weekend photographing everything. The people there took him for a guest.

He was working for the Georgia Commission on Education — a state agency, paid for by the State of Georgia, whose purpose was to resist school integration.

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"Labor Day Weekend at Communist Training School," Georgia Commission on Education, 1957 · Russell Library, Univ. of Georgia.

What he brought back was printed in Atlanta, under this headline.

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"Labor Day Weekend at Communist Training School," Georgia Commission on Education, 1957 · Russell Library, Univ. of Georgia.

Four pages. Fifteen photographs of people eating, swimming, sitting in a classroom — each one captioned with a name and an affiliation.

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"Labor Day Weekend at Communist Training School," Georgia Commission on Education, 1957 · Russell Library, Univ. of Georgia.

Rosa Parks is in it, named, two years after Montgomery. So is Martin Luther King — and that photograph went onto billboards across the South.

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"Labor Day Weekend at Communist Training School," Georgia Commission on Education, 1957 · Russell Library, Univ. of Georgia.

A million copies went out. None of it is what closed the school. It is what made closing it popular.

On the thirty-first of July, nineteen fifty-nine, officers came up the mountain.

Grundy County sheriff's deputies, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the state highway patrol. They walked into a gathering of Black and white people and searched the building.

Grundy County was dry. They found whiskey and gin.

Septima Clark, who ran the school's citizenship classes, was arrested and charged with selling liquor. The charges against her were later dropped.

But the State of Tennessee now had a file.

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Highlander Folk School v. State ex rel. Sloan, 208 Tenn. 234, 234 (1961).

The suit that followed was not a criminal case. It was brought by the district attorney general, A. F. Sloan, and it asked for one thing.

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Highlander Folk School v. State ex rel. Sloan, 208 Tenn. 234, 235 (1961).

That the charter of the defendant be revoked and the corporation dissolved.

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Highlander Folk School v. State ex rel. Sloan, 208 Tenn. 234, 234 (1961).

There were two hearings. One in September of nineteen fifty-nine, on the question of whether the school was a nuisance.

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Highlander Folk School v. State ex rel. Sloan, 208 Tenn. 234, 234 (1961).

And one on the third of November, and it is the second one that tells you what the case was actually about. That was the day the court took up the constitutional question of operating an integrated school.

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Highlander Folk School v. State ex rel. Sloan, 208 Tenn. 234, 234 (1961).

The trial judge disposed of it quickly. Brown against Board of Education did not apply, he held, because Highlander was private.

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Highlander Folk School v. State ex rel. Sloan, 208 Tenn. 234, 239 (1961).

So the State needed other grounds. It found two.

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Highlander Folk School v. State ex rel. Sloan, 208 Tenn. 234, 239 (1961).

The first was that Myles Horton, who founded the school and ran it, was running it for himself.

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Highlander Folk School v. State ex rel. Sloan, 208 Tenn. 234, 239 (1961).

The court found that the school had conveyed him some seventy acres with valuable improvements. That he wrote all the checks. That he had reared a family on the school's property for twenty-five years at the school's expense.

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Highlander Folk School v. State ex rel. Sloan, 208 Tenn. 234, 239 (1961).

And that he drew a salary of some nine thousand dollars a year, without any record of the directors ever having fixed it. The inference, the court wrote, is that he fixes his own salary.

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Highlander Folk School v. State ex rel. Sloan, 208 Tenn. 234, 236 (1961).

The second ground was beer.

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Highlander Folk School v. State ex rel. Sloan, 208 Tenn. 234, 236 (1961).

Large quantities of beer, the court wrote, possessed and sold promiscuously to the students as well as the teachers, many of the students being minors, and all of it sold without a license.

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Highlander Folk School v. State ex rel. Sloan, 208 Tenn. 234, 236 (1961).

Large stacks of beer cans, whiskey jugs and bottles found about the school. Many exhibits appearing in the record, it said, show revolting and inexcusable conduct carried on at this school.

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Highlander Folk School v. State ex rel. Sloan, 208 Tenn. 234, 241 (1961).

Read the testimony the court quotes to support that, and what it describes is a canteen.

A witness is asked where she saw whiskey. In gallon jugs and quart bottles, she says.

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Highlander Folk School v. State ex rel. Sloan, 208 Tenn. 234, 242 (1961).

Another witness is asked what else they sold there. Her answer is printed in the Tennessee Reports.

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Highlander Folk School v. State ex rel. Sloan, 208 Tenn. 234, 242 (1961).

Well, I have saw them sell chewing gum and candy, razor blades they would have there in the P. X.

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Highlander Folk School v. State ex rel. Sloan, 208 Tenn. 234, 242 (1961).

That is the evidence of revolting and inexcusable conduct. Chewing gum, candy, razor blades, and beer without a license, in a dry county, at a school on a mountain.

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Highlander Folk School v. State ex rel. Sloan, 208 Tenn. 234, 242 (1961).

The court had one more thing to say about what Highlander was.

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Highlander Folk School v. State ex rel. Sloan, 208 Tenn. 234, 242 (1961).

The record fails to show, it wrote, that the school had any plan, or standard for teaching and studies. It seems that it was operated more as a vocation work shop then as an ordinary school.

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Highlander Folk School v. State ex rel. Sloan, 208 Tenn. 234, 242 (1961).

Twenty-seven years of adult education, and four years after Rosa Parks sat in one of its workshops, disposed of in a sentence.

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Highlander Folk School v. State ex rel. Sloan, 208 Tenn. 234, 242 (1961).

On the fifth of April, nineteen sixty-one, the Supreme Court of Tennessee affirmed.

The case will be remanded to the Circuit Court of Grundy County for the appointment of a Receiver.

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Highlander Folk School v. State ex rel. Sloan, 208 Tenn. 234, 242 (1961).

And then Chief Justice Prewitt wrote one more paragraph. It is the last thing in the opinion, and it is the reason this episode exists.

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Highlander Folk School v. State ex rel. Sloan, 208 Tenn. 234, 242 (1961).

It might be observed here that we base our decision on the two propositions before the Court — that is, the operation of this School for the personal benefit of Myles Horton, and that in such operation he repeatedly violated the criminal laws of this State in the sale of whiskey and beer.

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Highlander Folk School v. State ex rel. Sloan, 208 Tenn. 234, 242 (1961).

And that this being so, it is unnecessary for us to pass upon the constitutional question as to the mixing of white and colored, male and female, in the same school.

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Highlander Folk School v. State ex rel. Sloan, 208 Tenn. 234, 242 (1961).

The court names the reason in the sentence where it declines to reach it. Four justices concurred.

On the ninth of October, nineteen sixty-one, the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear the appeal. Three hundred sixty-eight U.S. eight hundred forty. One line.

That winter a court-appointed receiver sold the school at public auction. The buildings, the land, the library.

Deputies padlocked the doors on the mountain the film had climbed.

The State of Tennessee took the property.

It did not take the school. Highlander had already taken out a new charter, in Knoxville, and it is still operating today under a different name.

What is still buried is the record underneath the opinion — the trial transcript, volumes one and two, the exhibits the court called revolting. Those were Grundy County circuit court papers, and they are not online anywhere.

Everything in this video came from one book you can download: volume two hundred and eight of the Tennessee Reports, free, from the Caselaw Access Project. The opinion starts on page two hundred thirty-four. The sentence is on page two hundred forty-two.

If your people were in Grundy County then — or if you were ever on that mountain when the buildings were still standing — I would like to know what was said about it locally at the time.