"Miles Horton founded the Highlander Center in 1932, in its time a center for adult organizing and education throughout the South, and indeed throughout the country. He often told a simple little story. In the mid-sixties, the Klan put up a series of billboards across the South with a famous picture of Martin Luther King at Highlander. It showed several people from the Communist Party, as well as Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, sitting in the front row of a lecture. It had a circle around Dr. King's head and the caption "Martin Luther King at communist training school."Various other pictures include: Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, Russian women soldiers, and a graph of U.S. Incarceration rates from 1925 to 2001.
Miles described going with a carload of young teenagers to a civil rights demonstration in the South, and as they passed one billboard nobody in the car said anything. As they passed a second one somebody in the back said, "Hmmm." And when they passed a third one, a kid in the back seat said, "You know, that's the dumbest poster I've ever seen, because they don't tell you who to call." The powers that be think they're giving one message, but it's actually being received in other ways."