Myles Falls Horton (July 9, 1905 - January 19, 1990) was an American educator and civil rights activist from Tennessee, best known for co-founding the Highlander Folk School in 1932, a center for adult education that became a key training ground for the Civil Rights Movement. Inspired by Danish folk high schools and Christian socialist theology, Horton built Highlander around free discussion among ordinary people rather than top-down instruction, believing that oppressed communities already held the solutions to their own liberation. Prominent Civil Rights leaders including Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and John Lewis passed through the school; Parks attended a workshop there shortly before her 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. Despite sustained opposition from segregationist authorities to its interracial gatherings, the school survived and continues today as the Highlander Research and Education Center.
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