Black Mountain and Highlander
Is it good for the Jews? This is a question that gets asked about all sorts of things. You could ask it about the weather if you wanted to, but mostly the question beneath the question is this: “Is this thing that this person or group did, or wants to do, going to benefit the Jews as a whole.” If we look at those who ask the question, we can usually see behind the question two different concerns: either material benefit or spiritual benefit.
This question is an old question in the Jewish mind. We find it in Pirkei Avot, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And being for myself, what am 'I'? And if not now, when?” (Mishnah PA 1:14) What we see in the question “Is it good for the Jews?” is to move away from the clear sense of personal responsibility that the questions asked in Pirkei Avot insists on. “Is it good for the Jews?” allows the questioner to disentangle the material and spiritual tension of a fully Jewish sense of what defines Jewish self-interest.
I hesitate to give examples of what I am speaking about because every example seems mired in politically divisive rhetoric and irrational rationalizations of the gratification of selfish desires as morality. Rather than letting a hundred bitter political arguments bloom, I am going to approach this with an historical example that we should have some distance from, enough at least to not lose our minds.
A week ago I presented a number of poems from poets who were associated with Black Mountain College. I found my way back to the subject of Black Mountain by a circuitous path. I was trying to make a claim that turned out to have a poor basis in fact, that Martin Luther King had early connections with Jews through his attendance at the Highlander Folk School in rural Tennessee. Here was how I was wrong: 1) King did not attend Highlander as a teen. 2) There were very few Jewish attendees at the Highlander Folk School, and for that matter relatively few teachers or staff at Highlander. The only thing that I had right was that King was famously associated with the school. On the road to the revelation of my foolishness I received an undeserved benefit. I found an article entitled, “Just Miles Away But Worlds Apart: Examining Jewish Participation in Integration Programs at Black Mountain College and Highlander Folk School, 1933-1964,” by Wendy F. Soltz (AJS Review, Vol. 41, No. 1, April 2017.)
Black Mountain and Highlander were about seventy miles away from each other. Both were innovative and significant educational institutions. Black Mountain College was founded on the principles of John Dewey. In practical detail, it was an American continuation of the Bauhaus school. The year of its foundation, 1933, points to a rapid transfer of the idea from Germany to the US. The Bauhaus was the first modern school of design. It represented the most progressive strain of artistic education and production in Germany until it was closed by the Nazi takeover. Black Mountain's faculty was initially led by Josef Albers and the school was a magnet for emigre Jewish scholars and for Jewish students.
Highlander was based on the Danish Folk School model. The Folk School was derived from the philosophy of Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, but put into practice first by Christen Kold starting in 1850. Both Grundtvig and Kold were reacting against conservatism in Danish society. They wanted the common people to benefit from education and be able to take a greater role in how their own lives were determined. Kold’s general principles were:
Education must consider the nature of children and youth and their needs.
Students must be given time to develop the capacity for feeling before learning facts, and appreciation before learning skills.
The living word (oral culture) is central.
The wholeness of the individual was experienced only in the context of community.
The purpose of education was to respond to the needs and struggles of common people.
Education should embrace heart, mind, and body. The main purpose of education was not to teach factual knowledge, but “life’s awakening”. “The school should be for life, for the spiritual, and for that which is of the heart” (Grundtvig in Borish, p. 196).
The school should be free of government control, and there should be no tests, grades, or certificates of competence given. [“A Brief History of Folks Schools,” Vicky Eiben]
Highlander applied this formula to the people of rural Pennsylvania, an area of the country that remains poor to this day. The school taught Tennesseans their own traditional crafts, songs, folklore and traditions while also teaching a progressive version of American political values. Among the skills that were taught were Union organizing. This was seen as a skill that would offer the attendees the ability to advocate for their own economic survival. Some students came from outside of the area, but most were Tennesseans, as were those on the faculty and staff. There was a very small number of Jewish students who came in groups from the New York Area a few times and almost no Jewish presence among the faculty and staff. However, Jewish investment in the success of Highlander was very real.
Both Black Mountain and Highlander were initially not integrated. At the time of their foundings, this was not yet something that was possible in most of the US. However, as Soltz points out, by the 1940s the administrators of the two schools realized that this was an issue that they were going to need to deal with. The question was not whether or not to integrate. The question was how. Soltz traces the difference in the success of the integration efforts at the two schools to the way that they dealt with internal opposition to integration. Part of this came from the the way that the two schools related to the community around them:
Black Mountain 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… to locals it was foreign.
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 a nearby labor force.
At both institutions there was apprehension about the reaction that would come from the surrounding community to efforts to integrate. These were legitimate fears. As Soltz points out, they risked being either burned out or starved out.
Soltz describes the conflict at Black Mountain in 1944 between a group of new (and non-Jewish) faculty who were strong advocates for integration, and “the ‘old-timers,’ [who] mainly included refugee faculty members and others who had been at BMC from its early stages.” The “old-timers” were not opposed to integration in principle. Albers caution can be seen in a fundraising letter that he wrote and is cited by Soltz:
"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 students of 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…"
Black Mountain would ultimately fail to attract almost any black students or faculty. Soltz credits this to the fact that the school, being unaccredited, was less useful to the type of Black students who might have been interested in the academic level of the school. But she also points to a serious failure of the culture. The student who is integrating a school bears the burden of otherness. “African Americans who were persuaded to enroll at BMC felt like ‘double aliens’ or possibly even triple aliens: they were African Americans among caucasians, locals among foreigners, and were gentiles among Jews.” The school closed in 1957, not long after Brown v. Board of Education.
Highlander pursued the goal of integration less directly and was ultimately about to achieve the larger goal. Soltz details how a black presence at Highlander was fostered through a guided, but organic, development. “After a talk by Howard Kester of the Conference on Economic and Racial Justice, on the close economic links 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.” Curiosity about Black life from within the initially all-white community generated opportunities for Black people to come to the School as guests. Those encounters, framed within the school culture, developed towards integration. Communal eating was the norm at Highlander. As a result there was no segregated facility and black guests ate together with the rest of the Highlanders. This was not always without resistance, but the culture was such that those who had a problem with blacks and whites mixing were allowed to separate themselves out and conflict was avoided. The school was integrated without much fuss in 1944, the same year, as Soltz points out, as the conflict between the radical integrationist faction and the “Old-timers” at Black Mountain.
What Soltz does very well in her article is to outline the actual role of Jews in the success of Highlander. That role, simply put, was to put up money. Jews, despite their small on campus role at Highlander, supplied about a third of the funding that the school received. Fundraising letters were written with messages that were clearly aimed at Jewish donors, even evolving over time to focus on the evolving concerns of Jews outside the campus. Highlander was not supported by any Jewish organizations. All of the Jewish support came from individual donors. Soltz breaks down the geographical distribution of those Jewish donors. They came primarily from two areas, the New York and broader New England area and from the Jews of Tennessee who gave disproportionally to their actual numbers.
Where then, does MLK come into this story? In 1957 King visited Highlander and gave a speech, “A Look to the Future.”
A photo from his visit was used in a campaign against King that also led to the closure, for a time, of Highlander. By the time of King’s visit, Highlander had come to play a significant role in the struggle for integration throughout the South. “We Shall Overcome,” the anthem of the movement was adapted from an old gospel song at the late 1940s by Guy Carawan at Highlander. Rosa Parks came to Highlander as a student.
And what of our question from long ago, “Is it good for the Jews?” Black Mountain did manage to protect the Jews at Black Mountain, but at the cost of a failure to achieve a successful integration of the program. Soltz does not address the ultimate failure of Black Mountain which was caused by declining enrollment and the knock-on financial difficulties. Black Mountain’s failure to integrate ultimately led to the failure of the college to broaden its appeal to reach sustainability. Highlander served only a small number of Jewish students and employed only a few Jews on the faculty and staff. Nevertheless, its value was recognized by a large number of individual Jews who perceived what was going on at Highlander as good for the Jews. They gave their support because they believed that having more of the people who lived near them in Tennessee, or were just their fellow American citizens who had the values that Highlander inculcated, was good for them as Jews. They struggled with the Mishnah from Pirkei Avot and answered the question, “If Not Now, When,” confidently, “Now. But let’s not make it all about me.”
