Weathering Backlash with Care Infrastructure
The Highlander Nursery School’s free socialist early childhood education helped sustain the Southern labor movement. Here’s what we can learn.
Briana M. Bivens
In 1938, parents in the white, working-class Appalachian community of Summerfield, Tenn., staged a sit-in against an anti-communist school board trying to close a new cooperative nursery school. The chair of the Grundy County Board of Education initially agreed the nursery school could share space in the public school building. Once he discovered it was run by the Highlander Folk School — a leftist social movement school that aimed to grow a multiracial labor movement — the board demanded it vacate, having decided in 1932 to prohibit Highlander from using county school buildings on the grounds that, according to historian John Glen, “they taught ‘political matters’ that were ‘Red or communist in appearance.’” Parents protested in response, writing petitions to the board and mobilizing at the nursery school to await board members who threatened to padlock the building. Despite the flurry of fear and anti-communist anxiety surrounding Highlander as a whole, the Highlander Nursery School thrived as a community fixture until 1953.
Since its founding, in 1932, the Highlander Folk School (today, the Highlander Research and Education Center) has drawn the ire of segregationists, anti-communists and anti-labor antagonists for its commitments to racially integrated, democratic labor education and movement-building. By the time the nursery school opened, in 1938, Highlander was firmly established as a Southern labor school, building the capacity of workers across the South to win workplace demands. Like many progressive educators in the 1930s, drawn to the Left during the Popular Front period, most Highlander staff identified as socialists. Highlander’s commitment to building a multiracial labor movement led them to defy Jim Crow laws, hosting racially integrated worker education sessions for workers and union members.
Highlander co-founders Myles Horton and Don West were aware that families in the community might be wary of college-educated outsiders. Building trust with Summerfield residents was especially crucial as staff aimed to organize area workers into unions and support demonstrations among Works Progress Administration workers, woodcutters, textile workers, coal miners and more. Nursery school teachers went door to door to learn which of the families in the small, rural community had young children and to alert them about the no-cost school. By providing free early care, the nursery school served as an approachable gateway to the Highlander Folk School for residents who might otherwise have joined the chorus of white Southerners suspicious of the organization.
Early Highlander staff understood the role of community care in advancing its socialist, pro-labor goals amid political antagonism. To facilitate relationships with community members, staff hosted events like square dances and music nights to revive the folk traditions of the region. Community members stayed informed about Highlander and community happenings via the Highlander-distributed Summerfield News, and residents were invited to attend education sessions Highlander hosted for Southern union members. In a fundraising letter, nursery teacher Joie Willimetz observed how “families work with the school to help their children and thus become more familiar with the Folk School’s other activities and this provides greater knowledge and acceptance of the Folk School’s activities and its inter-racial program.” Nursery school teachers consistently described the school as a “community” or “cooperative” school, with dozens of parents and community members helping run it. Parents who worked alongside Highlander staff to run the nursery school glimpsed Highlander’s civil rights and pro-union education in real time, enabling them to draw conclusions counter to the defamatory messages spewed by the Southern press.
With educational approaches rooted in democratization and anti-capitalism, the school furthered Highlander’s project to live out a socialist experiment. Teachers transported kids to and from school and even shuttled parents on errands to the doctor. Parents cooked hot meals for the children, repaired toys, maintained buildings and crafted quilts to be raffled off at fundraisers. Some parents even launched a parent volunteer initiative, comprising a rotation of more than 40 mothers and older siblings who took turns volunteering at the school between 1948 and 1953. Nursery teachers routinely visited children’s homes to update parents on school happenings and mobilize them to attend events, such as community meetings. They would sometimes stay for a meal or depart with a gift of canned peaches or an invitation to connect again for church or lunch, a modest testament to the nursery school’s role in nurturing relationships and connections between Highlander and local parents.
Nursery school children also witnessed essential labor in action and were exposed to movement leaders in the surrounding community, taking field trips to see workers laboring on a railroad, tarring the roof at the Highlander Library and manufacturing concrete blocks at a nearby plant. In a fundraising letter template to union locals, Willimetz wrote:
At the Highlander Nursery School, we don’t have courses in Labor History or how to organize a union, but the children do get to know the officials and members of CIO unions who come to Highlander as real people. They never hear their teacher say, “That blankety blank CIO is ruining this country.” These children attending the nursery school now will one day be part of the south’s labor movement.
It’s clear that Highlander staff not only saw nursery children as movement workers-in-the-making, but also perceived the nursery school as a connective node to Highlander’s other labor movement activities.
The parents’ staunch defense of the Highlander Nursery School is provocative, especially in a Southern context steeped in white supremacy and anti-leftism. Highlander launched the nursery school the same year that Congress created the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). HUAC and its state-level counterparts cast a wide net in the name of anti-communism, notoriously investigating and undermining labor activists, civil rights organizations, leftists and other perceived political subversives into the 1970s. Highlander’s position as a gathering place for Black and white labor and civil rights organizers made it a target for Red Scare paranoia, inciting attacks and probes from not only HUAC but also the Southern press, the capitalist class and the FBI.
Of course, not all local families approved of Highlander, and some parents refused to send their children to the nursery school. Willimetz recorded some of the reasons parents shared, including husbands’ objections, fear of what Highlander “teach[es] the kids,” and explicitly racist
aversions to having their white children affiliate with a racially integrated organization. Others didn’t hesitate to affiliate with and support Highlander and defended the school against the Board of Education’s obstructionism. Across the nursery school’s lifespan, parents, siblings and
community members participated meaningfully in its cooperative structure. Despite the pervasive and well-resourced opposition, many local residents saw real value in the nursery school, at least enough to position themselves in resistance to anti-worker, anti-communist forces and in alliance with a union-building organization.
For our current moment, the Highlander Nursery School is instructive in two ways. First, it reminds us that others have— and we can — build micro-spaces of collaboration and democracy amid state and non-state hostility.
Second, it’s a testament to how care infrastructure can facilitate relationship-building and sustainability within social movements.
Through the no-cost nursery school, movement workers at Highlander expressed a socialist spirit of cooperative care, meeting the material and care needs of poor and working-class people while demystifying Highlander’s labor and civil rights efforts. The nursery school was an enriching experience for children at the same time that it was a low-stakes, concretely beneficial access point for residents who might otherwise have dismissed or opposed the organization over its perceived radicalism.
If the Trump administration’s policy strategy is to, as Eve Ewing argued, “exhaust us as efficiently as possible,” then we should look with even more clarity and vigor toward developing cooperative care infrastructure in our communities and movement organizations. Mutual aid networks and other formations motivated by prefigurative politics already do this, pooling material and intellectual resources to meet communities’ basic needs without relying on the conditional care of the state. Movement workers organizing and strategizing for a liberatory future beyond Trump are centering care and capacity-building in their practice, and they’re focused less on facilitating one-time actions than on building broad-based, sustainable movements. When neoliberal capitalism pushes individualism and market-driven self-care, meeting care needs collectively is a rebellious act that can make political action more possible and sustainable. As the Trump administration reshapes the federal government into an increasingly fragile, fascist and inept structure, cooperative care and education emerges as one possible sustainability strategy.
We need solidarity movements poised to weather backlash, nurture relationships across differences, and build an infrastructure for non-capitalist ways of relating. The Highlander Nursery School offers hope and inspiration, demonstrating how one of the longest-standing social movement schools in the United States facilitated community care and early childhood education to advance and sustain its liberatory political aims.
Much of the original archival research cited in this essay first appeared in the History of Education Quarterly.
Briana M. Bivens is a is a clinical assistant professor in the Teachers, Schools and Society Program at the University of Florida. She is also a member of the Highlander Research and Education Center’s Timeline Committee.
