many stories about Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and other civil rights leaders who were influenced by the Highlander Folk School, which he founded.
I was intrigued by many stories in this book — such as the time, in 1928, that he organized an integrated (and thus illegal) dinner that included white and black high school students at the YMCA in Knoxville. After some hemming and hawing, the waiters shrugged and served everyone at the meal — quite possibly the first publicly integrated event in the city’s history. “I took the gamble of doing something about a moral problem instead of simply talking about it,” Horton wrote. “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.”
“Cash: The Autobiography” (1997)
Johnny Cash was a Tennessee history buff. He was especially interested in the Chickamaugan Indians and the geography of the Tennessee River just downstream from Chattanooga, and he wrote about both in a song called “The Whirl and the Suck.”
Cash also went through a stage of his life when he was addicted to drugs. In his autobiography, he says that, in 1967, he chose Nickajack Cave to be the site of his suicide because of all the events that had occurred there. “(An) army had slaughtered the Nickajack Indians there, men, women and children, and soldiers from both sides of the War Between the States had taken shelter in the caves at various times during the conflict.… If I crawled in far enough, I thought, I’d never be able to find my way back out, and nobody would be able to locate me until I was dead, and indeed if they ever could. (Nickajack Dam) was going in soon.”
Instead, Cash found Jesus, crawled out of the cave and turned his life around. “I told my mother that God had saved me from killing myself. I told her I was ready to commit myself to Him, and do whatever it took to get off drugs. I wasn’t lying.”