He became committed to both economic and racial justice. As a southern white, there was almost no precedent for someone like Horton and the man he would become. There, he became a student of Reinhold Niebuhr and like so many who studied under that great man, he found his views challenged and changed. Horton fought and strove and got himself an education, eventually ending up in New York at Union Theological Seminary. Given how much Horton learned from his parents, a core lesson of his life was that formal education was not necessary to teach people to do good. Despite being sharecroppers, his parents had aspirations of being educators but did not have the high school degree to do so. Horton’s father was a member of the Workers Alliance, a local leftist worker organization. But there was more working class ferment among southern whites at this time than is often remembered. There’s little reason to think that a person who grew up in these circumstances would later be one of the great fighters for justice in twentieth century America. This is the grave of Myles and Zilphia Horton.īorn in 1905 in Savannah, Tennessee, Horton grew up poor and white in the peak of Jim Crow America.
