The Geography of Nonviolence

Abstract

Abstract In the summer of 1954, the Highlander Folk School, a racially integrated institution located in the hills of Tennessee, hosted a series of workshops on the United Nations. Highlander’s UN workshops cultivated a grassroots globalism that aimed to connect the UN to local action on behalf of racial integration. Yet while the workshops helped raise awareness about the work of the UN, they failed to directly link such global awareness to local action and instead revealed the danger that a certain kind of global optimism would lead to local apathy. By contrast, Highlander’s radical integrationism, by challenging the borders of race, opened a space for other kinds of border crossing, particularly in regard to nonviolent civil disobedience. Audio recordings of Highlander’s workshops provide a rare perspective on the geography of nonviolence. By revealing the geographic imagination of local activists, these tapes allow us to reconceive the transnational history of the American civil rights movement as a grassroots endeavor.