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Exhibition Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words

Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words

Highlander Folk School

Ida Berman, photographer. Mrs. Septima Clark and Rosa Parks at Highlander Folk School, Monteagle, Tennessee, 1955. Photograph. Visual Materials from the Rosa Parks Papers, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (023.00.00)
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Highlander Folk School

White civil rights advocate Virginia Durr arranged a scholarship for Rosa to attend the August 1955 desegregation workshop at the Highlander Folk School, an interracial training center for labor and civil rights activists in Appalachian Tennessee. She procured Rosa’s round-trip bus ticket from liberal southern publisher Aubrey Williams. Septima Clark, a South Carolina activist-educator, led the two-week workshop and mentored Rosa. Clark founded Highlander’s Citizenship Schools program, which taught thousands of southern blacks literacy and voting rights.