JF Ptak Science Books  

I’ve uncovered today a small packet of mimneographed publications from a famous labor/civil rights school in the mountains of Tennessee. The Highlander School in Monteagle, Tennessee, was a training/leadership/educational center founded in 1932 for Southern labor activists and, later in the 1950’s, a training center for civil rights activists. One of the categories that this post has been filed in is “A History of Blank, Empty, and Missing Things” but really only for the document displayed below, which is an unfilled-in form for attending one of the sessions at the school–there’s a curious collection of such things here, from naval sea logs to Nazi diaries for Warsaw and other such things. It is an interesting experience to look at such a blank-filled document, a document that doesn’t bear someone else’s marks and expectations, and imagine your own answers to it, unencumbered. 

The letterhead on one of the publications including the governing body of Highlander, including the well-known names of Dombrowski, Myles Horton, and Zilphia Mae Horton–that last name is probably familiar because of her work in folk/civil rights music like her reworked  versions of “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize,” “We Shall Not Be Moved,” and “This Little Light of Mine”, and then most famously (with Pete Seeger, Frank Hamilton, and Guy Carawan) on “We Shall Overcome”.

Also from the group I’ve included scans (on the left, below) of a summary of what the Highlander School was (in 1942), and then (at right) the covering title and art for the May 1942 “Southern Workers School).