Big Highlander Update

The original owners are getting back (part of) their land in Grundy County.

Reporting is the best job in the world, but it’s also a slog. There so many boring meetings that you have to sit through, like school board meetings that last five hours (or more) for no good reason. There are the mean emails and the rape threats. There’s the worst thing of all: transcribing interview tape.

Still, the grimmest, saddest part of the job isn’t covering mass shootings and natural disasters. It’s when you spend weeks or months or longer reporting something really, really important — and then nothing happens. Nothing changes. Bad laws or policies stay the same. Shady politicians don’t resign (and later get reelected over and over again). All your hard work has no impact. No one cares. And you wonder, again, why you’re even doing this.

I haven’t been a full-time reporter in a while, but it’s hard to imagine a more dispiriting time to practice journalism than this moment, because facts simply do not seem to matter any more. So when you do report something and it does have an impact of any kind, it’s the best kind of feeling. And this is why I was so excited to get a call Wednesday letting me know that three months after my reporting, Highlander is getting to buy back (part of) the land the state of Tennessee took from them over 60 years ago.

Of course, in an ideal world, the state would have atoned for its reprehensible behavior years ago, fairly compensating the residents who have since purchased the former Highlander land and then donating everything to the nonprofit. That’s not happening, and it probably won’t ever happen. However, Todd Mayo, owner of the Grundy County concert venue The Caverns, is letting go of the land he just bought from the Tennessee Preservation Trust in September. Highlander is paying for it (how much is still unclear), and after all the dust and paperwork settle, they will once again own 8.5 acres of the land on which they began. As I report today in the Tennessee Lookout:

“It’s righting a historic wrong, and it’s correcting something that never should have occurred,” says Dr. Learotha Williams, a Tennessee State University professor and historian who has supported Highlander’s bid to regain their land. “I think this will introduce a new generation of young people to the type of work [Highlander does].”

Highlander purchased the land just a few months after it was sold to someone else — and after a public dispute over that sale made headlines. ​​The announcement of Highlander’s purchase does not include plans for the site, only that Highlander will work with MASS Design Group, the architectural firm that designed the National Memorial for Peace and Justice honoring victims of lynching in Montgomery, Alabama. 

“This is an historic moment for Highlander, the social movements we accompany, and the people of this region,” said co-executive director of Highlander Salimah Muhammad in a press release. (Both parties said that their statements in the press release would be the only comments on the sale and did not talk to a reporter.)

If you read my story about the fight for the site in September, you might be as surprised as I was that this turnaround has happened so quickly — during my reporting, people on every side¹ were furious (and even more furious off the record). I’m not sure exactly what happened — Highlander said it can’t provide details of the negotiations at this point — and I am certainly not taking credit for any changes of heart. However, it’s thrilling to learn that even in this moment when political tensions could not be higher, a group of people were able to put their differences and enmity aside and do what is probably the best thing for the site. It’s not that Mayo’s plans would have been bad — they probably would have been lovely — but that land was stolen from Highlander, and now they have a small part of it back. As Dr. Williams told me:

“Usually we don’t win these types of battles,” Williams says. “Highlander’s return [to Monteagle] is a moment of great joy. But it also should be a moment that inspires us to be better human beings.”

I’ll hopefully have more to follow on all the details of the sale, once things are firmed up and people are once again open to talking, but for now, at least, there’s truly something to celebrate. Something good happened, and for today, that’s enough.

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1. Except Todd Mayo. He wasn’t mad at anyone, or at least he didn’t convey any anger to me.