"Just bring out the food" Horton remembers an integrated meal in 1928 Knoxville Myles Horton is one of the unsung heroes of the Civil Rights Movement. The founder of Grundy County's legendary Highlander Folk School, Horton helped train labor organizers in the 1930s and 1940s and civil rights leaders in the 1950s and 1960s (among those who attended workshops there were Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King). In his autobiography, The Long Haul, Horton remembered organizing a statewide student YMCA event -- his first experience at integrating a segregated world. Horton "The conference was to begin with a banquet at a whites-only hotel in downtown Knoxville. I made reservations for the banquet but didn't tell anyone that we were an integrated group. I didn't say we weren't one, either -- I just didn't say. I leveled with no one, but I did tell the truth, which is that we were going to have a banquet. "The first time people realized what was happening was when we all gathered at the hotel for the banquet. I arranged for us all to come in the street door that led directly into the banquet room. That way, we avoided going through the lobby and creating a stir before we even sat down to eat. "The situation became a reality when we sat down at the tables. Now, if you confront people with a reality that is different from the one they are used to and they don't know how not to do what they're supposed to in a given situation, they won't know how to act. When we entered the dining room the black kids started looking around and the white kids started looking around. They were all the same age, they were all Y members. They did what they were used to doing in a dining room -- they sat down to eat. They did the familiar in an unfamiliar situation. I'm not sure they even gave it much thought at that moment. "Then the waiters came in. They were all black. And they said, 'We can't serve you because we can't serve black and white people together.' "'These are just a bunch of high school kids, what do you mean you can't serve them, they're fine. Just bring out the food.' "The waiters insisted again that they couldn't serve us, so I told them I didn't understand. 'We're paying you to serve us. We hired you to wait on us. If we get up and leave, you'll go home without any pay, and if we don't get any food, we'll all get up and leave.' Now there were about 120 of us, and I asked the waiters what they were going to do with all that food for 120 that was already cooked. They answered that they couldn't make the decision to feed us. I told them to inform whomever could make that decision what the problem was. "They fed us. "That was 1928, long before any civil rights movement activity in Knoxville . . . I took the gamble of doing something about a moral problem instead of simply talking about it. I just reversed the process that was going on in the universities and churches, and over 120 people learned that they could change things if they wanted to." Myles Horton died in 1990. A successor to the Highlander Folk School still exists in Jefferson County; click here to be taken to its web page.