The song that fueled protests and a legacy of hope

In our final installment of AP250, how We Shall Overcome became the anthem of generations of protestors. Today on the show, we revisit an episode from the NPR archives about the legacy of hope found in the lyrics of this timeless song. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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  This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from NPR and Throughline. I'm Randa Fattah.

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  Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the U.S. that began 250 years ago. If you listened really closely, you might have noticed, as we did, that there's a song that keeps creeping up in the background of many of our recent stories in this series.

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  It's a song that has fueled war protests, political protests, and the fight for civil rights.

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  On this episode, we go deep into the NPR archives to share one of our favorite radio broadcasts. The story of how this song, "We Shall Overcome," was passed down from farmworkers to churchgoers to student protesters, how its lyrics were transformed, and how it's left a legacy of hope for so many, not only in the U.S., but around the globe. NPR's Noah Adams reported the story back in 1999 to mark the 70th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birth. That's coming up after a quick break.

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  It is not a marching song. It is not necessarily defiant. It is a promise. "We shall overcome someday." Deep in my heart, I do believe.

• 3:32Speaker 05

  "We Shall Overcome" has been heard in North Korea, in Beirut, in Tiananmen Square, in South Africa's Soweto township.

• 3:50Speaker 05

  It has been a civil rights song for years now, but it began as a folk song, a work song. Slaves in the fields would sing "I'll be all right someday." It became known in the churches. A Methodist minister, Charles Albert Tinley, published a version in 1901, "I'll overcome someday." The first political use came in 1945 in Charleston, South Carolina. There was a strike against the American Tobacco Company. The workers wanted a raise. They were making 45 cents an hour. They marched and sang together on the picket line. "We will overcome, and we will win our rights someday." Four decades later, some of the strikers got together for a reunion.

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  From a 1989 PBS documentary, these are the memories of Delphine Brown, Anna-Lee Beno and Corrine Chisholm.

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  When I first heard of the song in my church, they sang it in the gospel fast, and people shouted, "We will see the Lord. We will see the Lord. We will see the Lord someday. Deep in my heart, I do believe we will overcome someday." And that's the way we used to sing it. And the church.

• 5:10Speaker 07

  In church, but not when we were in the...

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  No, not when it was on the picket line.

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  When we first started singing it, I thought it was kind of silly. But as the strike went along, it gave me a whole lot of encouragement and believing that we would overcome, and it made me fight that much harder. And we did overcome. We won.

• 5:31Speaker 05

  The Tobacco Workers' Strike, 1945. In 1947, two of the union members from South Carolina traveled to Tennessee and the town of Montego. They came for a workshop at the Highlander Folk Center. Blacks and whites had been meeting together about labor issues at Highlander for many years. Highlander had started with a focus on labor unions. The civil rights struggle came later. It was believed at Highlander that the people who have the problems are the ones who have the answers. It was important to talk together, and especially to sing. The tobacco workers brought their song to Tennessee, and Zofia Horton, Highlander's music director, started using it in workshops in Tennessee and beyond.

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  On this tape from the late 1940s, she's with a group of farmworkers in Montana.

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  This is a song of "We Will Overcome." It's spiritual.

• 6:27Speaker 09

  I sing it for many different nationality groups. And it's so simple, and the idea is so sincere, that it doesn't matter that it comes from the tobacco workers. When I sing it for people, it becomes their song. We will overcome. We will overcome. We will overcome someday. Oh, down in my heart, I do believe we will...

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  In 1947, Zofia Horton went to New York City, as she did every year, to raise money for Highlander. She sang the song there for Pete Seeger.

• 7:15Speaker 10

  She had a beautiful alto voice and sang it with no rhythm. "We shall overcome." Down south, they call this long meter style of singing hymns. And I gave it kind of "oom chinga, oom chinga, oom chinga, oom chinga, oom chinga." It was medium slow as I sang it, but the banjo kept a steady rhythm going. I remember teaching it to a gang in Carnegie Hall that year. And the following year, I had put it in a little music magazine called People's Songs. Over the years, I remember singing it two different ways.

• 7:59Speaker 10

  I'm usually credited with changing it to "shall," but there was a black woman who taught at Highlander Center, a wonderful person named Septima Clark. And she always liked "shall" too, I'm told. For those who don't know it, now's a good time to learn it. It's not hard. Only one line changes in each verse. The next verse says, "We'll walk hand in hand."

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  We'll walk hand in hand.

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  Sing it again.

• 8:31Speaker 07

  We'll walk hand in hand.

• 8:36Speaker 05

  In Southern California in the early 1950s, the song reached Guy Carrawan. He was finishing graduate work in sociology at UCLA and doing some singing himself. He also learned about the Highlander Center in Tennessee, and that's where he ended up. Candy Carrawan and her husband have been teaching together at Highlander for many years now. They met as the center's focus was shifting to civil rights, and "We Shall Overcome" was about to become an inspiring force.

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  Let's see. I first heard this song from a friend of mine, Frank Hamilton. Frank was my singing partner in Southern California, and he taught me this song. And he also had put some chords to it. He sang the guitar with it. So he had a guitar with harmony like, "We shall overcome someday. Oh, deep in my heart."

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  I do believe, yes, that we shall overcome someday. And when I came to Highlander, 1959, Zoffy Horton had died. And I had some singing and musical skills, and they needed somebody there. So by the time I came to Highlander, I was playing it with the guitar like that.

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  Candid, do you recall the first time you heard the song?

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  I had come south myself from California to Nashville. And it was the spring of 1960 when the sit-ins took place in Nashville. I'd gotten very involved in the sit-ins and came up to a Highlander weekend for students from about half a dozen cities who'd been carrying on the sit-in movement. And Guy was there trying to find out what songs we were using as part of our demonstrations. And mostly, we didn't have a lot of songs. And he taught us a number of songs that weekend. And one of them was "We Shall Overcome." And I can remember this electrifying feeling when we heard it, that that song just said exactly what we were doing and what we were feeling.

• 10:49Speaker 11

  But two weeks later, at Shaw University, 200 student leaders from around the South had come together to have their own youth gathering. Because two weeks later, SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, would be having their gathering. But the students said, no, we're going to have our own gathering and figure out our version of this. But that song caught on that weekend. And then, at a certain point, those young singers who knew a lot of a cappella styles, they say, lay that guitar down, boy. We can do this song better. And they put that sort of triplet to it and sang it a cappella with all those harmonies. It had a way of rendering it a style that some very powerful young singers got behind and spread.

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  "We shall overcome."

• 11:40Speaker 07

  Lord.

• 11:42Speaker 11

  "We shall overcome. We shall overcome someday. Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe that we shall overcome someday."

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  The Freedom Singers. The group was organized in Albany, Georgia, by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The singers were Cordell Regan, Charles Neblet, Rutha Harris, and Bernice Johnson, who was a preacher's daughter and knew the song as "I Will Overcome." She recalls the change to "we shall overcome" as a concession that helped bring whites and blacks closer in the civil rights struggle.

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  The left, dominated by whites, believed that in order to express the group, you should say "we." In the black community, if you want to express the group, you have to say "I." Because if you say "we," I have no idea who's going to be there. Have you ever been in a meeting? People say, "We're going to bring some food tomorrow to feed the people." And you sit there on the bench and say, hmm, I have no idea. It is when I say, "I'm going to bring cake," and somebody else says, "I'll bring chicken," that you actually know you're going to get a dinner. So in there are many black, traditional, collective expression songs where it's "I."

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  Because in order for you to get a group, you have to have "I."

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  So you have to have people willing to stand up?

• 13:40Speaker 13

  And name themselves. However, I remember when the organizers came to Albany, and I was singing "I'll Overcome." And I was stopped by Cordell, who says, "It's not 'I,' it's 'we.'" And he had gotten this lesson from Highlander and from Guy. And I looked at him, and, you know, we've been singing this song all of our lives, and here's this guy who just learned the song, and he's telling us how to sing it. And you know what I said to myself? If you need it, you got it. What that statement does for me is document the presence of black and white people in this country fighting against injustice.

• 14:25Speaker 13

  And you have black people accepting that need because they were also accepting that support and that help.

• 14:33Speaker 11

  "We shall overcome. We shall overcome."

• 14:48Speaker 05

  The song was carried by the civil rights movement throughout the South, a song that rose in air that was tinged with tear gas, that was a murmur of men and women at night in a southern jail, and an affirmation sung by hundreds of thousands within sight of the Capitol Hill.

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  "We believe that we shall overcome someday."

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  On March 15, 1965, President Lyndon Baines Johnson used the phrase "we shall overcome" in his voting rights speech. He appeared before Congress and 70 million Americans watching on television. He called for legislation that would assure every citizen the right to vote.

• 15:36Speaker 14

  It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it's not just Negroes, but really, it's all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.

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  There may have been some in the civil rights movement who felt that President Johnson co-opted the phrase. But John Lewis watched the speech that night with Martin Luther King. About the president, Lewis writes, "His were the words of a statesman, and more, they were the words of a poet." And Lewis adds, "Dr. King must have agreed. He wiped away a tear at the point where Johnson said the words, 'we shall overcome.'" In his book, Walking with the Wind, he tells of joining the movement as a teenager off the farm in Alabama. He became a leader. He was jailed. He was beaten. His skull was fractured in Selma on the day that was called Bloody Sunday. And he says "we shall overcome" sustained him throughout the years of struggle.

• 16:56Speaker 15

  It is one of the most powerful, at the same time sacred, moment when we were saying "we shall overcome." And especially if you had been beaten, arrested, in jail, and thrown into a paddy wagon, thrown into some waiting area, and a group just standing there and saying together, "we shall overcome." It gave you a sense of faith, a sense of strength, to continue to struggle, to continue to push on. And you would lose your sense of fear. You were prepared to march into hell's fire.

• 17:37Speaker 11

  "We shall overcome. None shall be afraid. I still believe that we shall overcome."

• 17:53Speaker 05

  The power and the promise of the song turned up in many of Dr. King's speeches and sermons.

• 17:59Speaker 16

  "We shall overcome because the Bible is right. You shall reap what you sow. We shall overcome. Deep in my heart, I do believe we shall overcome. And with this faith, we will go out and adjourn the counsels of despair and bring new light into the dark chambers of pessimism. And we will be able to rise from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope. And this will be a great America. We will be the..."

• 18:33Speaker 11

  "We shall overcome someday."

• 18:45Speaker 17

  And so, however dark it is, however deep the angry feelings are and the violent explosions are, I can still sing "we shall overcome." We shall overcome because the ark of the moral universe has longed but had been stood justice.

• 19:01Speaker 11

  "We shall overcome someday."

• 19:10Speaker 01

  That final excerpt was from March 31, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. giving a sermon at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. Dr. King was assassinated four days later. We're listening to an excerpt of an arrangement of the song that was commissioned by NPR and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra back in 1999.

• 19:37Speaker 11

  "Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe that we shall overcome someday."

• 20:16Speaker 01

  And that's it, the final episode of our America in Pursuit series. But don't go anywhere on Tuesdays, because, starting in September, every Tuesday, we'll be rolling out answers to questions you, the listeners, have sent us. So stay tuned. That's coming soon. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. This episode was produced by Nick M. Neves and Kiana Mogadem, and edited by Julia Redpath, with support from the Throughline production team. Music by Ramtin Arablouei and his band, Drop Electric. Special thanks to Noah Adams, Irene Noguchi, Yolanda Sangueni, Leanna Simms-Drum, Johannes Dergi, Mary Glenn Denning, and Lindsay McKenna. Thanks for listening.

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