Highlander serves as a catalyst for grassroots organizing and movement building in Appalachia and the South. We work with people fighting for justice, equality and sustainability, supporting their efforts to take collective action to shape their own destiny. Through popular education, participatory research, and cultural work, we help create spaces - at Highlander and in local communities - where people gain knowledge, hope and courage, expanding their ideas of what is possible. We develop leadership and help create and support strong, democratic organizations that work for justice, equality and sustainability in their own communities and that join with others to build broad movements for social, economic and restorative environmental change.

Cornel West has called Myles Horton "an indescribably courageous and visionary white brother from Tennessee." Horton (1905-1990) cofounded the Highlander Folk School (now known as the Highlander Research and Education Center), an institution controversial from its beginnings. During the early labor movement, the Highlander School sponsored programs for both union organizers and rank-and-file members; the staff of Highlander saw education as a way to approach and work through problems. Issues of race were always important to the school, which became a beacon for the civil rights movement; its summer institutes included such influential participants as Rosa parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and Andrew young. His commitment to education as an agent of social change allowed Horton to see himself as both a teacher and a student, as one who could learn from others as well as help others learn. The Myles Horton Reader presents essays, speeches, and interviews, giving the reader a grounding in the pathbreaking work of an extraordinary man.
The editor: Dale Jacobs is assistant professor of English and director of composition at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. His work has appeared in Composition Studies, Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, National Writing Project Quarterly, and other publications.

In his own direct, modest, plain-spoken style, Myles Horton tells the story of the Highlander Folk School. A major catalyst for social change in the United States for more than 70 years, this school has touched the lives of so many people, including Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Pete Seeger. Filled with disarmingly honest insight and gentle humor, The Long Haul is an inspiring hymn to the possibility of social change. It is the story of Myles Horton, in his own words: the wise and moving recollections of a man of uncommon determination and vision.