Highlander Center Celebrates 94 Years of Movement with ‘Harmonies on the Hill’

Editor’s preface: We usually keep things “urban” here at IOK, but the 94th anniversary of the Highlander Research and Education Center (originally Highlander Folk School) feels like a more-than-worthy rural detour. Located just a half-hour east of downtown in New Market, Highlander was founded during the Depression-era Labor Movement and played a substantial role in the Civil Rights Movement, with trainees including Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. Its work remains deeply relevant today; the Center leads youth programming, trains thousands of grassroots organizers each year, and moves millions of dollars into Southern organizations through fiscal sponsorships.

Highlander has also been the target of violence and suppression many times since its founding. After it was raided and padlocked during an interracial voter-education workshop in 1959, the state of Tennessee revoked its charter and seized the original property in Monteagle. The school rechartered as the Highlander Research and Education Center and moved to a large house just east of downtown at 1625 Riverside Drive, where it hosted workshops with prominent civil rights leaders (including former trainees King and Parks). When that building was demolished in the wake of urban renewal, which displaced large swaths of Black neighborhoods and businesses, the center relocated to its current campus in New Market in 1972.

That hostility isn’t ancient history, unfortunately. In 2019, an arson fire destroyed Highlander’s executive offices and decades of historic materials, causing $1.2 million in damage; white supremacist graffiti was found at the scene, and in April 2026 Regan Prater, who had been linked to white supremacist groups, pleaded guilty to setting the fire.

Anyway … this isn’t my story, it’s Ripley’s, but I wanted to set the scene a little bit. Highlander is hosting a music festival, Harmonies on the Hill, this Saturday, Sept. 12, so come on out to connect, learn and support this historic nonprofit working for movement building in Appalachia and the South. More details below. —Leslie

From Ripley:

I’m five-foot-two, but I feel tall at Highlander.

I drove up the hill just before sunset on Wednesday evening to photograph the place where people will gather Saturday for Harmonies on the Hill, Highlander’s 94th anniversary celebration.

I could see folks below setting up a tent in preparation for the music festival, and their voices carried through the open space. Otherwise, the campus was quiet.

Everything looked a little smaller from up there. Not insignificant, but attainable. Having enough room to see farther felt good.

For almost a century, Highlander Research and Education Center has been creating that kind of room for other people, too. The New Market, Tennessee-based movement school brings people together to learn from one another, develop organizing skills and imagine what might be possible beyond the circumstances they’re facing now.

Garrett Stark, Highlander’s executive director, described it simply when we talked about the organization’s history and future plans. 

“Where we’re going is where we’ve been.” i.e. The issues change. The work doesn’t.

In the 1930s and ’40s, Highlander worked with labor organizers. In the following decades, its campus became a gathering place for people involved in the civil right movement. Later came environmental justice, immigrant rights and other movements across the South and Appalachia. 

This video is a little dated but offers a fascinating history, and you can learn more at the website here:

Today, people still come to Highlander to strategize, learn from one another and build the skills to create change in their own communities.

Stark told me that while researching Highlander’s history before taking the job, he kept finding the organization appearing as a footnote in major social movements. He considers that a beautiful place to be.

Highlander has often worked behind the scenes, helping cultivate movements rather than claiming the spotlight for itself. The same philosophy is built into the rooms where that work happens.

The first time I visited the campus, I sat with Brandi Augustus, Highlander’s director of radical hospitality, in one of the workshop spaces. The room is circular, surrounded by windows and filled with chairs arranged in a ring. They are rocking chairs.

There is no front of the room and no podium for one person to stand above everyone else. 

At Highlander, learning isn’t supposed to be a one-way transaction between an expert and a room full of people waiting to be filled with knowledge. The organization’s popular education model treats people’s lived experience as something valuable to bring into the room. Everyone has something to contribute.

Tufara Waller Muhammad, Highlander’s Director of Programs, put it another way.

“We’re interdependent on this planet,” she told me. “We’re interdependent, regardless of what people tell you. We all need each other.”

That idea is at the heart of Harmonies on the Hill. You can’t have a harmony with one voice.

The one-day movement music festival takes place Saturday, Sept. 12, bringing musicians, cultural workers, organizers and neighbors together on Highlander’s hill. The lineup includes Jontavious Willis, Carolina Mendoza, Yella P, the Fruit of Labor Singing Ensemble, Mose Stovall, Rebecca Bryant & Friends, the Pinky Ring Quintet, Skipp Coon, DJ Drew Drake, Cattywampus Puppet Council and more. There will also be line dancing, square dancing, a children’s storytime, a drumming circle and programming from Highlander’s education team.

Tufara, who recently returned to Highlander as Director of Programs, curated the festival. She wanted the lineup to feature primarily Tennessee-based artists, but the reasoning went deeper than geography.

“Music is medicine,” she said. “Music can reach people in ways a traditional workshop sometimes can’t. You don’t have to speak the same language or even understand a word to feel it.”

Highlander played a vital role in shaping and spreading “We Shall Overcome” into the ultimate anthem of the Civil Rights Movement and beyond.

For Tufara, the festival is about more than sound. It’s about community, movement and the experience of being together. “We’re living in trying times,” she said. “People need medicine. Our people need joy.”

That’s a word I heard repeatedly in conversations with the Highlander team: Joy. It isn’t separate from the work; it’s part of it.

Stark told me Highlander is a place for serious work. People go there to talk about hard problems and the enormous effort required to change them. Sometimes, he said, people forget to stop and celebrate, and Harmonies on the Hill is an attempt to make room for that.

There is a practical reason for the festival, as well. Highlander has spent the years since the pandemic and the 2019 fire rebuilding its relationships with the communities immediately around it. The campus has not always been easily accessible to members of the public who weren’t already connected to Highlander’s work.

So this is an invitation to come up the hill. Bring a lawn chair or blanket or lunch. Listen to music and dance. Meet your neighbors and the people who have been doing this work here for years.

Brandi described the goal as creating a space where people can experience joy, solidarity and connection while learning from one another. Many of the performing artists are cultural workers and organizers using music and art in their own communities.

And there is another voice that will be present on the hill Saturday, even though she won’t be there herself.

Vonda McDaniel, who became Highlander’s co-director alongside Stark earlier this year, suddenly passed away earlier this summer. Stark had known her for 18 years and worked closely with her for 15. In a statement he sent me, he described her as a visionary who could see what was possible long before others could, a leader who encouraged people to think bigger and believed in them sometimes before they believed in themselves.

Her absence is enormous, but Stark was clear that Highlander has never been about one person. “Highlander remains a leaderful organization full of many talented staff, board members, volunteers, friends and family,” he wrote.

That matters here, because the circle has no head and the work doesn’t belong to one person. It belongs to the people who keep showing up.

Maybe that’s what I was feeling on the hill Wednesday evening, standing above the festival grounds. The place was quiet, but it wasn’t empty. There were already people there, getting things ready for other people to arrive.

The hill gave me a different perspective and the circle offered another, but the word harmonies might offer the simplest one of all: A harmony needs more than one voice.

📅 When: Saturday, Sept. 12, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
📍 Where: Highlander Research and Education Center, 1959 Highlander Way, New Market
🎶 What: A one-day movement music festival celebrating Highlander’s 94th anniversary through music, joy and community
🎟️ Tickets: $40 adults; $20 youth 18 and under
🥁 Performers: Obayana Ajanaku, Cattywampus Puppet Council, Rebecca Bryant & Friends, Skipp Coon, Pinky Ring Quintet, Carolina Mendoza, DJ Drew Drake, Yella P, Fruit of Labor Singing Ensemble, Jontavious Willis and more
🪑 Bring: Lawn chairs, blankets, lunch and snacks
🍴 Also: Food, T-shirts and other merchandise will be available for purchase

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