Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson is co-executive director of the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee, an organization founded in the 1930s as a “folk school” to train labor organizers throughout Appalachia and the South. In the 1950s, Highlander was an incubator for the civil rights movement, with trainings led by Septima Clark and Ella Baker. By the 1990s, the center supported anti-strip-mining battles in Appalachia and linked mountain organizers with anti-globalization efforts around the world. Today, Highlander draws on the strengths of immigrants, students, and other local leaders in the rural South to build popular education programs that advance cultural organizing for justice. Former Sojourners editorial assistant Faith Zamblé interviewed Henderson in July.
Faith Zamblé: How would you describe your work at the Highlander Center?
Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson: I describe it as a grand inheritance. I was 31 or 32 when I became the first black woman to be co-executive director of the Highlander Center. And I inherited 86 years of people’s stories and experiences and movement legacy. But with that legacy comes a great responsibility to make sure that the Highlander Center isn’t just a living museum, where people come to study what was; it should also be a place where people can learn how to do things now. It’s living in the past, present, and future at the same time, every day, all day.
Why is it important to encourage the work of popular education? Popular education, to me, is useful for so many reasons, but the one that resonates with me most is that marginalized people get told every day we’re just not enough, that we don’t know enough, that we’re not smart enough, that we don’t have enough resources. One of my elders used to tell us before she passed, “We have everything we need in our bones.” I think popular education—and participatory action research, in particular—and intergenerational organizing really prove it.
Is there anything you wish people understood about Appalachia? Don’t sleep on us, because we’re actually not out here broke, busted, and disgusted. We’re winning with less resources than people have anywhere else in the United States. I would ask comrades who believe false narratives about what’s happening in the South—the stereotypes about us being backward and conservative—who that narrative serves. There’s so much beauty in being rooted in the South, and I would hate for folks that aren’t of the region to miss out on the power that’s there. It’s transformative.
What role does your faith play in all of this? If all the pieces of my identity aren’t the lenses that I’m seeing through, then everything’s blurry. Faith is integral to the clarity within which I move on a second-to-second basis. I believe in an all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect Creator who believes we deserve to live our lives in the fullest dignity, with great joy, figuring this experiment out together and treating each other right while we do it. That impacts everything. Our beliefs that we can beat the injustices of Donald Trump, the most powerful man in the world; that we can overthrow capitalism; that we can permanently uproot white supremacy? There ain’t nothing in that but faith. I’m grateful faith exists because I don’t know if we can build social justice movements that win without it. It’s the reason I’m nutty enough to think I should commit 18 hours a day to try to save the world.
What gives you hope? I don’t get into fights I don’t think I can win, and I think we can win this. What makes me believe that we can win, other than my faith, is my belief in the innate goodness of people. I believe that another world is necessary and very close because of the goodness of the people I get to work with every day. Marginalized people are some of the most brilliant, beautiful, incredible human beings I ever get to experience, and because they live, I’m going to see liberation in my lifetime.
Faith-Marie Zamblé is an artist, writer, and M.F.A. candidate in dramaturgy and dramatic criticism at the Yale School of Drama. This is her final "Curated" column (for now).
Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson is co-executive director of the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee, an organization founded in the 1930s as a “folk school” to train labor organizers throughout Appalachia and the South.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!
