We Shall Overcome

This song is based on the early hymn "U Sanctissima." Charles Albert Tindley, who was a minister at Bainbridge St. Methodist Church in Philadelphia and also a gospel music composer, added the words in 1901 and called this new hymn "I'll Overcome Some Day." In the ensuing decades, the song became a favorite at black churches throughout the American south, often sung as "I Will Overcome." The song evolved at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, which was a meeting place and activity center for civil rights activists founded in 1932 (it was later renamed the Highlander Center and relocated to New Market, Tennessee). In 1947, striking tobacco workers from Charleston, South Carolina attended a workshop there and introduced the song (as "I Will Overcome") to the cultural director of the school, Zilphia Horton. She began performing the song at her workshops, and taught it to Pete Seeger when he visited the center. Seeger published the song in 1948 in the newsletter for his People's Songs collective and began performing it. He changed the title to "We Shall Overcome" and also added two new verses and a banjo part. In 1959, Guy Carawan took over as cultural director at the Highlander school, where the song was now a staple. Carawan brought it to the burgeoning civil rights movement when he played it at the first meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in April 1960. Members of this group spread word of the song, and soon it was sung across America at vigils, rallies, protests and other gatherings that called for an inspirational song of freedom. While the song is most closely associated with Pete Seeger, he downplayed his contribution, saying that the song already existed and that all he really did was change "will" to "shall" because it "opens up the mouth better."

When Pete Seeger played his updated version of "We Shall Overcome" to the American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., he gave King's civil rights movement its anthem. Seeger performed the song for King on September 2, 1957 when they attended the 25th anniversary of the Highlander Center in Tennessee, where King gave the keynote address at the seminar titled "The South Thinking Ahead." In his speech, King talked about bringing together communities to work past differences in religion, race and economic class. Among those in the audience was Rosa Parks, whose refusal to move to the back of a bus in 1955 galvanized the civil rights movement in Montgomery, Alabama. (King mentioned her in his speech: "You would not have had a Montgomery story without Rosa Parks.") King was pragmatic but optimistic in his address. "The future is filled with vast and marvelous possibilities," he said. "This is a great time to be alive." The seminar caught the attention of politicians who opposed integration efforts, and propaganda spread, labeling the school as "communist" - something Seeger had been called for years.

The only artist to chart with this song was Joan Baez, whose version reached #90 in the US in November 1963. She performed the song at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963 before Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. The album containing the audio from the event was released as We Shall Overcome: Documentary of the March on Washington. After her first trip to England in 1965 (where she performed with Bob Dylan), Baez' version of this classic protest anthem went to #26 on the UK chart. Baez also sang it at Woodstock in 1969, closing out Day 1 of the festival around 2 a.m. with the song. At the time, Baez was pregnant with her son, Gabriel, and her husband, David Harris, had recently been thrown in jail for resisting the draft (Harris led an anti-war movement called The Resistance). She dedicated the song to Harris, and encouraged the crowd to sing along. In 2009, Baez posted a version on YouTube for the people in Iran, singing a verse in Farsi.