Zilphia Horton
*Zilphia Horton was born on this date in 1910. She was a white-American musician, community organizer, educator, activist, and folklorist.
Zilphia was born Zilphia Mae Johnson in the coal mining town of Spadra, Arkansas. She was the second child of Robert Guy Johnson and Ora Ermon Howard Johnson. Her father was superintendent of the local coal mine, which he later owned and operated, and her mother was a schoolteacher. She was a graduate of the College of the Ozarks, formerly known as the University of the Ozarks, where she was trained as a classical musician.
After graduating, Johnson was determined to use her talents for the betterment of the southern working class. Her political interest was awakened by a Presbyterian minister who attempted to organize her father's workers for the Progressive Miners' Union. She joined the unionization efforts despite her father's disapproval and was subsequently disowned by him. In 1935, she attended a workshop at the Highlander Folk School, a social justice leadership training school and cultural Center. Johnson arrived committed to the idea that music and drama could help organize labor.
Months after attending her first Highlander workshop, she married the school's founder, Myles Horton, that year, and began working for the Highlander Folk School. Horton was the music and drama director from 1938 to 1956. She enhanced the school's cultural pluralism by developing a curriculum that incorporated and elevated the importance of folk music, dance, and drama. She directed workers' theatre productions, junior union camps, and various community programs; organized union locals; and led singing at workshops, picket lines, union meetings, and fund-raising concerts.
She had students collect folk songs, religious music, and union songs from around the South, which she then rewrote or reworked into protest songs to serve in political struggles, including labor movements and the Civil Rights movement. She is perhaps best known for adapting an early version of "We Shall Overcome," which would become an essential civil rights anthem of the twentieth century. Originally a Black Church 'Baptist' hymn by Charles Tindley, the song came to Highlander from the picket lines of the 1945–1946 Charleston Cigar Factory strike by the South Carolina CIO Food and Tobacco Workers Union in Charleston. Other musicians credited with transforming the song are Frank Hamilton, Guy Carawan, Candie Carawan, and Pete Seeger.
On April 11, 1956, she died after accidentally drinking a glass of typewriter cleaning fluid containing carbon tetrachloride, which she mistook for water.
To Become a musician or Singer
To become a High School Teacher
