The historic Highlander Folk School has recently been recovered as a unique model of rhetorical education that significantly impacted labor organizing and civil rights work in the United States. While scholarship and mainstream publications consistently celebrate the folk school as a gender inclusive, racial sanctuary, this dissertation reorients readers to a more complicated Highlander history. Taking up Achille Mbembe's position that archives do the rhetorical work of verifying an imagined past, I destabilize the Highlander archive by illuminating the linguistic processes through which power is inscribed and identity is enacted. Through feminist discourse analysis of primary texts, I explore how documents from Highlander's integrated residential workshops held during the civil rights era construct and maintain a cohesive narrative of social justice at the folk school. My findings suggest only certain voices are made legible within that narrative. I argue that white, masculine dominance is subtly enacted and normalized through the repetition of indexical forms, and this process results in a highly constrained discursive environment. Layered onto one another, indexical forms enact a narrow, deracialized, social justice identity that allows for some Highlander stories to be told while others are silenced. Drawing on theories of intersectionally inscribed identities in discourse, I analyze how archival texts capitalize on Highlander's associations with Black civil rights leaders while rendering the women leaders "visibly invisible." This, I argue, amounts to discursive erasure and prompts a call for archival expansion. In response, I locate utterances outside of the official archive, focusing on the autobiographical tellings of Highlander participants Rosa Parks and Septima Clark. I find their stories comply with, interrupt, and renegotiate an otherwise homogenous social justice narrative. By employing acts of narrative authorization, Parks and Clark subtly innovate the Highlander script, thereby disrupting a facile representation of racial stratification and gender norms, both at Highlander and within the freedom struggle writ large. I argue their counternarratives represent rhetorical intervention that has yet to be coupled with the folk school's history and suggest their hybridized tellings offer a rhetorically rich, multivocal contribution to Highlander past. Ultimately, I argue for a more intersectionally attuned history that complicates the past and teaches us about the stories we tell in the present. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]