ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with Myles Horton’s boyhood growing up poor in western Tennessee and includes a few of the critical incidents that led to Highlander’s establishment in 1932. An important part of the Hortons’ family life was their membership in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. After Horton graduated from college, he held a position for a year as the head of the state of Tennessee’s Student YMCA. During his senior year at Cumberland University in 1927–1928, Horton encountered a wealthy textile mill owner named John Edgerton, whose dismissive, top–down attitude toward organized labor helped him to see that classism, like racism, was another form of prejudice he would need to combat. Horton understood more clearly than ever that Tennessee’s social and economic rifts were a function of a long, complex history, a history riddled with conflict and contradiction, and shaped by deeply engrained hatreds and prejudices.
