WPA in Grundy County and Highlander Folk School - Part 2

WPA in Grundy County and Highlander Folk School - Part 2. . In 1939 and prior thereto the Warren Memorial Cumberland Presbyterian Church of Tracy City building on this site was used by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) for its relief programs in Grundy County. On February 10 a small group of unemployed men reported for work at the relief office. They left when the county relief administrator refused to issue work cards to them. A few minutes later they returned with their wives and announced that they intended to remain until they received jobs. By the end of the day around 150 men and women had moved into the building. The following day Dolph Vaughn, business agent for all Grundy County WPA unions, led an estimated 500 WPA workers into Tracy City and held a protest rally in front of the relief office. On February 16 WPA labor relations director, Nels Anderson, arrived on the scene from Washington, D.C. He instructed Grundy County WPA foremen to stop discriminating against union members to make more Jobs available. He further warned the union members he would take WPA out of Grundy County unless the demonstrators left the relief office. They left that afternoon., The background for the February 10, 1939 takeover of the WPA relief office by union members was the August 1938 general election in Grundy County wherein there were a series of narrow victories of candidates endorsed by Labor's Political Conference of Grundy County. Union forces, supported by Highlander Folk School, elected a sheriff, a school superintendent, and three road commissioners. Concerned with the prospect of losing control of the county, opponents of Labor's Political Conference launched a drive in the fall of 1938 to undermine the power of the sheriff and the road commissioners and discredit Highlander. According to Myles Horton, co-founder and Education Director of Highlander Folk School, the salary of Roy Thomas, the sheriff, was cut in half, his mileage allowance eliminated, electricity in the county building cut off, and warned to resign or be "starved out". For two months the road commissioners received no salary and it took two months to secure a contract with WPA giving the road commissioners authority over appointments of foremen and timekeepers., By the summer of 1939 union forces had lost the battle for economic and political control of Grundy County. Highlander Folk School doubted that its community program could reach enough local residents to improve economic conditions in the area. It continued to serve as a social and recreational center with square dances and cooperative projects and from 1938 to 1943 conducted a nursery school initiated by Claudia Lewis who joined the Highlander Folk School staff in 1938. She taught the same age children at the Bank Street Cooperative Schools in New York and wrote Children of the Cumberland, a comparative study of the differences in character, intelligence and emotional security of children from each environment., In 1935 the Committee for Industrial Organization was formed and in 1937 asked Highlander Folk School to participate in the organization's effort to organize the southern region. The committee was renamed Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and entered into agreement with Highlander to train union organizers in the textile industry in the southeast. After about 10 years the agreement was terminated and Highlander redirected its programs to social justice issues and became a school in the modern civil rights movement for training activists in non-violent civil disobedience., Photo caption:Union protesters at entrance to WPA relief office on Depot Street (Warren Memorial Cumberland Presbyterian Church of Tracy City building)., Source: Glen, John M... Highlander No Ordinary School, The University of Tennessee/Knoxville Press, Second Edition, 1996