Highlander Folk School films, 1957
- Extent:
- 2 moving_image(s)
- Scope and content:
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This silent film documents integrated social activities during the Highlander Folk School twenty-fifth anniversary celebration weekend, including dining, swimming, and dancing, and features shots of prominent civil rights and labor activists such as Ralph Abernathy, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, Jr. The film is in two parts; the first part, shot in color, shows civil rights leaders and others entering and exiting the library and an interracial group swimming in a pond. The second part consists of about twenty black-and-white still photos taken by Friend during the weekend celebration; many of the pictures in the film correspond to pictures in the broadside published by the Georgia Commission on Education.
- Biographical / historical:
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The Highlander Folk School footage was shot by Ed Friend in 1957 at the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of the Highlander Folk School, an adult education center in Monteagle, TN, that promoted social and economic justice. Friend was dispatched to Monteagle by Roy V. Harris, a powerful Georgia politician who was deeply invested in Jim Crow and segregation, who viewed the event as an unexpected opportunity for his Georgia Commission on Education, a publicly funded anti-integration agency. Learning of the event, and its participants, he dispatched photographer Ed Friend to gather evidence that Communists directed the Civil Rights movement. Friend, posing as a vacationing freelance photographer, was given free rein by Highland founder Myles Horton to take all the pictures he liked.
Contents
Access and use restrictions
- Parent restrictions:
- Audiovisual recordings are available at: https://bmac.libs.uga.edu/Detail/collections/3809
- Parent terms of access:
- Before material from collections at the Richard B. Russell Library may be quoted in print, or otherwise reproduced, in whole or in part, in any publication, permission must be obtained from (1) the owner of the physical property, and (2) the holder of the copyright. It is the particular responsibility of the researcher to obtain both sets of permissions. Persons wishing to quote from materials in the Russell Library collection should consult the Director. Reproduction of any item must contain a complete citation to the original.