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JACQUELYN HALL:

Were you in contact with Highlander Folk School?

HOWARD KESTER:

Yes.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did you go up there for workshops?

HOWARD KESTER:

Well, not so much for workshops, I got interested in Highlander in the very beginning but it became too close to the Communists to suit me like Commonwealth.

JACQUELYN HALL:

How was Highlander connected to the Communist party?

HOWARD KESTER:

Well I think Jom Dombrowski, do you know Jim?

JACQUELYN HALL:

Yes.

HOWARD KESTER:

I think he was a fellow traveler . . . I won't say, I certainly don't want to be sued. I don't think he carried a red card, but I think he was a fellow traveler, and Myles seemed to . . . Myles Horton seemed to impress me as being very sympathetic to the Communists, and Don West, you know. He became a member of the Communist party and his sister married the district organizer of the Communist party here in the South. Nat Ross, I think was his name.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Well, it seems to me that the work that Highlander was doing with labor organizers was very much the kind of thing that you were doing.

HOWARD KESTER:

Yes, but I didn't, I didn't want to be associated with the Communists.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Why was that?

HOWARD KESTER:

I just didn't believe in them.

JACQUELYN HALL:

You didn't see them as part of a movement, as one part of the larger movement that you were part of, as doing some constructive things, or as being worth supporting anyway?

HOWARD KESTER:

Well, I think at first I felt that way. That was one reason why I went to New York to see Earl Browder but I got to know, not by name, but by face, a lot of Communists.

JACQUELYN HALL:

In the South?

HOWARD KESTER:

In the South, and they just didn't strike me as the kind of people that would push along the basic ideals and ideas of the Christian faith, and that is what I was concerned about.

JACQUELYN HALL:

How strong was the Communist Party in the South in the thirties?

HOWARD KESTER:

It was pretty strong.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Stronger than the Socialist Party?

HOWARD KESTER:

Well, I can't say, but it was pretty strong, I expect that it was stronger than the Socialist party because they were revolutionaries, you know. I went to many meetings, I was invited to a meeting in Birmingham, to a Negro church on Easter afternoon . . . Easter Sunday afternoon, and it was about the time of the Scottsboro Boys . . . it might have been Angelo Herndon, I can't remember. But it was a protest meeting, and the place was so jammed packed I could hardly get up to the pulpit where I was to speak.