The Beautician and the Bus Driver

Myles Horton founded Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee in 1932 — by the 1950s one of the only places in the segregated South where Black and white activists lived, ate, and planned together. Rosa Parks attended a two-week Highlander workshop in the summer of 1955, four months before her arrest in Montgomery.

Highlander's deepest invention was the citizenship school. Septima Clark — a Charleston teacher fired for her NAACP membership — built adult literacy-plus-civics classes so Black Southerners could pass the voter-registration tests designed to exclude them. Esau Jenkins, a bus driver on Johns Island, South Carolina, had been teaching neighbors to read the constitution on his bus route; the first school was built for his island. And to teach it, Clark chose her cousin Bernice Robinson — a beautician, deliberately selected because she wasn't a credentialed teacher. The point was the pedagogy: 'the answers come from the people.' Teachers who looked like school would teach like school; a neighbor taught like a neighbor.

The program spread through the South — by 1961, when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference took it over, it had helped tens of thousands register — and its teachers became the movement's local backbone.

What it teaches the shelf: leadership development is not a credential pipeline. The people best positioned to teach a neighborhood are often the ones no institution would think to hire — and a movement that trains beauticians and bus drivers as teachers is answering 'are we stronger now?' every single week. Clark said it plainly: 'I train the people to do their own talking.'

Details

• era: 1932–1961
• place: Monteagle, Tennessee & Johns Island, South Carolina
• illustrates: coaching-five-steps, beautician-teachers-pattern
• source note: Highlander history, Parks's 1955 workshop, and the citizenship schools per the King Institute at Stanford and the SNCC Digital Gateway; Highlander continues today as the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, TN.
• practice kind: story