Guy Carawan - Career at Highlander Center

Career At Highlander Center

Carawan first visited the Highlander Folk School in 1953, with singers Ramblin' Jack Elliot and Frank Hamilton. At the recommendation of Pete Seeger, he returned in 1959 as a volunteer, taking charge of the music program pioneered by Zilphia Horton, who had died in an accident in 1956. When college students in Greensboro, NC, began the lunch-counter sit-in movement on Feb. 1, 1960, Highlander's youth program took on a new urgency. Highlander's seventh annual college workshop took place on the first weekend in April, with 83 students from twenty colleges attending. As part of a talent show and dance, Carawan taught the students the song "We Shall Overcome." Two weeks later, on April 15, two hundred students assembled in Raleigh, NC, for a three-day conference at Shaw University. Called by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to develop a youth wing, the students instead organized the independent Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). They invited Carawan to lead the singing, and he closed the first evening with "We Shall Overcome." The audience stood, linked hands and sang—and went away inspired, carrying the song to meetings and demonstrations across the South. Movement leader Rev. C. T. Vivian, a lieutenant of Martin Luther King reminisced:

I don’t think we had ever thought of spirituals as movement material. When the movement came up, we couldn’t apply them. The concept has to be there. It wasn’t just to have the music but to take the music out of our past and apply it to the new situation, to change it so it really fit.... The first time I remember any change in our songs was when Guy came down from Highlander. Here he was with this guitar and tall thin frame, leaning forward and patting that foot. I remember James Bevel and I looked across at each other and smiled. Guy had taken this song, “Follow the Drinking Gourd” — I didn’t know the song, but he gave some background on it and boom — that began to make sense. And, little by little, spiritual after spiritual began to appear with new words and changes: “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize, Hold On” or “I’m Going to Sit at the Welcome Table.” Once we had seen it done, we could begin to do it.

At Highlander's April workshop, Carawan had met Candie Anderson, an exchange student at Fisk University in Nashville, from Pomona College in California, who was one of the first white students involved in the sit-in movement. They were married in March 1961.