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Highlander serves as a catalyst for grassroots organizing and movement building in Appalachia and the South. We work with people fighting for justice, equality and sustainability, supporting their efforts to take collective action to shape their own destiny. Through popular education, participatory research, and cultural work, we help create spaces -- at Highlander and in local communities -- where people gain knowledge, hope and courage, expanding their ideas of what is possible. Wedevelop leadership and help create and support strong, democratic organizations that work for justice, equality and sustainability in their own communities and that join with others to build broad movements for social, economic and restorative environmental change.… (more)
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Horton was clearly able to combine his notion about the "leavening" role of the intellectual in society with his democratic and egalitarian ideals in powerfully productive ways. His early anti-racism was cultivated in the YMCA, but it required the innovative setting of Highlander (inspired by the Danish folk school movement) for him to realize what modes of "education" would be effective in supporting social change. Ideas from Highlander according to author Frank Adams's descriptions include: a) programmatic avoidance of paternalism, b) placing values before tactics or associations, c) the use of music to reinforce and promote cultural solidarity, and d) preferring personal and domestic styles to institutional ones.
The evocative title of this book seems to allude to the ancient Gnosis and the Manichean idea of divine sparks imprisoned in human beings. (The original Gnostic doctrine is however anti-egalitarian, insisting that most "seeds" don't sprout, and that humans can be divided into spiritual castes on that basis.) Adams never gives his source for the phrase "seeds of fire," although he uses it once -- in quotation marks -- toward the end of the book. (214) In that instance, he is characterizing group problem-solving of the oppressed for themselves, contrasted with the uselessness of conventional educational media to empower others from above.
Adams wrote this volume while he was himself engaged with Highlander and attempting to learn its methods. It is full of startling anecdotes and information about the impressive level involvement by Highlander with some of the most consequential social changes in 20th-century America.