History of We Shall Overcome

from The Roanoke Times
>
>January 14, 2001
>
>Song of History, Song of Freedom
>
>Here's a look at the song that served as the anthem of the
>Civil Rights Movement
>
>By Mike Hudson <mikeh@roanoke.com>
>
>The song was born in slavery.
>
>It began as a field song, a work refrain that helped men and
>women in bondage endure from sunup to sundown. They would
>sing: "I'll be all right."
>
>Like many songs that began in slavery, it had no one author
>and no standard version. It spread and changed with the
>seasons and generations and as slaves were sold from one
>place to another in the American South.
>
>In time there was a war, and the slaves won their freedom,
>but only in a legal sense. The song survived in a new time
>of lynching and Jim Crow. In 1901, as laws decreeing
>separation between the races were being erected, a Methodist
>minister named Charles Albert Tindley published a kindred
>version: "I'll Overcome Someday."
>
>It was a song of hope, a hymn for a better tomorrow. It
>spread through black churches in the South and in the North,
>and then through the Southern labor movement.
>
>And in the year that the second World War ended, a faction
>of black women were on strike, picketing the owners of a
>tobacco plant in Charleston, S.C., at a time when mill
>owners controlled almost everything and everyone, white and
>black, and at a time when standing up for your rights could
>mean a one-way trip in the back of a police car.
>
>The strike dragged on and the women grew disheartened, and
>as the rain came down, many dropped off the picket line.
>
>One of the holdouts began to sing the song, vowing to
>overcome the odds. Soon they all were singing. In the spirit
>of union, they sang "we" instead of "I." And they invented a
>new verse:
>
>We will win our rights.
>
>
>And when the strike was over, they had won their rights, or
>at least a contract, and in that time and place that meant
>something.
>
>Two of the women visited a union and civil rights training
>school far from home, in the Tennessee countryside. It was
>at the Highlander Center that they taught the song and its
>new verse to a new generation.
>
>Along the way, the "will" became "shall," an old word, one
>that had the sound of the Bible in it, and people sang:
>
>We shall overcome
>
>We shall overcome
>
>We shall overcome someday.
>
>Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe
>
>We shall overcome someday.
>
>
>One night in the winter of 1957, officers of the law burst
>into the school - not policemen really, just angry white men
>who'd been deputized by the local sheriff and given license
>to put a scare into the students of social change. They cut
>the power and forced the students to lie in the dark as they
>smashed furniture and ransacked the place in search of
>"Communist literature."
>
>And there on the floor, the trembling students began to sing
>the song. Softy at first. Then louder.
>
>One of the students was a 13-year-old girl named was Jamalia
>Jones. She knew only one way to control her fear. In the
>darkness, she made up a new verse:
>
>We are not afraid
>
>We are not afraid
>
>We are not afraid today.
>
>
>Maybe it was her imagination, but the singing seemed to
>unnerve the intruders. The story goes that one of them
>trained a flashlight on her and said: "If you have to sing,
>do you have to sing so loud?"
>
>She answered by singing still louder. They sang for two
>hours until the men left that place and left them alone.
>
>Not long after that, a white man named Guy Carawan came to
>the school as music director. He had long hair and a curly
>beard. They called him a California hippie hillbilly. He
>took the song with him on the road, and he sang it for
>audiences of black and white folks around the nation.
>
>Over the years, the tempo had speeded up, as if the
>impatience for change had been pushing at its meter. But
>now, whenever Carawan sang it before a black audience,
>something happened. He felt them tugging at the words,
>tugging at the rhythm, slowing it down, bringing it back to
>its elegant, powerful meter, back to the hymn it had once
>been. He finally put his banjo down and let the people sing.
>
>The song insinuated itself into America's Civil Rights
>Movement. A young black quartet called the Freedom Singers
>and a folk singer named Pete Seeger carried the tune and the
>words with them as they traveled America.
>
>The movement's most eloquent spokesman, the Rev. Martin
>Luther King Jr., heard the song and understood its power. He
>knew that when you are fighting an evil that has the
>strength of myth and tradition behind it, you need your own
>rituals, traditions that will inspire and unite people
>around a common goal. And he knew leaders were nothing
>without the strength and creativity of average folks ready
>to make a change.
>
>So as the song trickled upward through the grass roots, from
>the sharecroppers and cleaning women and mill workers
>marching the marches, taking the blows and doing the work of
>a new American revolution, King understood that the movement
>now had an anthem.
>
>In Greensboro and Nashville, in Atlanta and St. Augustine,
>college kids sang the song in tones of sweetness and
>defiance as they were hauled out of lunch counters and
>thrown into police wagons, their suits and ties and Sunday
>dresses spattered with mustard and ketchup and spit and
>blood.
>
>The song sustained John Lewis, an Alabama farm kid who
>endured threats and jailings and beatings after signing onto
>the movement. His skull was fractured on Bloody Sunday,
>1965, when a phalanx of white-helmeted Alabama state
>troopers advanced on horseback and on foot, firing tear gas
>and clubbing peaceful demonstrators as Sheriff Jim Clark
>yelled, "Get those goddamned niggers!"
>
>For Lewis, singing the song was a sacred ritual that washed
>away the fear and fatigue.
>
>"It gave you a sense of faith, a sense of strength, to
>continue the struggle, to continue to push on," Lewis, now a
>U.S. congressman, would recall. "And you would lose your
>sense of fear. You were prepared to march into Hell's fire."
>
>Mourners sang the song after the bodies of four little girls
>were pulled from the rubble of a dynamite-torn church in
>Birmingham. Viola Liozza, a mother of six who had come from
>Detroit to join the movement, sang it as she drove on a
>lonely road in Alabama. She was silenced by a shotgun blast
>that shattered her window, ripped into her face and took her
>life.
>
>In Mississippi, a handful of civil rights workers sat on a
>front stoop at dusk, watching the sun sink into the flat
>country. First, they saw the cotton harvesters go by. Then
>the sheriff. Then a 6-year-old black girl with a stick and a
>dog, kicking up dust with her bare feet. As she strode by,
>they could hear her humming "We Shall Overcome."
>
>In the nation's capital, hundreds of thousands sang the song
>as they gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and heard
>King describe his dream that justice would someday "ring out
>across this land."
>
>When people sang the song now, they crossed their arms and
>held hands, swaying back and forth, carried away by the
>power of the music they were creating. Along the way, they
>invented new verses for the song:
>
>We will walk together someday.
>
>And:
>
>Black and white together someday.
>
>
>In 1965, a knot of demonstrators sang these words on a
>street corner in Washington, D.C., outside a well-guarded
>seat of power, hoping their words would be heard by the man
>inside.
>
>President Lyndon B. Johnson had pushed through the Civil
>Rights Act of 1964 as television cameras brought the
>movement and its song into the nation's homes. But for
>decades before, this son of Texas had been an
>obstructionist, the voice of filibuster, a friend of
>segregation, and even after he pushed the civil rights bill
>into law, he did little to enforce its letter or its spirit,
>or to protect the protesters who were being beaten and
>murdered in the South.
>
>So when his black limousine pulled through the White House
>gates and past that corner, the demonstrators sang even
>louder. Their message was clear: We will overcome. With or
>without you.
>
>And so, finally, with the song of protest and the current of
>history sweeping him along, Johnson stood before the members
>of Congress, the justices of the Supreme Court and 70
>million Americans tuned in on their television sets. And he
>said these words: "At times history and fate meet at a
>single time in a single place to shape a turning point in
>man's unending search for freedom."
>
>He promised to pass a voting rights law that would sweep
>away the barriers and violence that prevented citizens from
>exercising their rights. And he would do so now, with no
>compromise or backsliding.
>
>Then he paused, and ended with the words that no American
>president had ever said:
>
>"And we shall overcome."
>
>During all his years of struggle, death and defeat, Martin
>Luther King's assistants had never seen him cry. But in this
>moment, as he watched the president's speech on a
>black-and-white television screen in a living room in Selma,
>Ala., King's eyes filled with tears.
>
>Johnson's speech and the passage of the Voting Rights Act
>were not the end of the battle. They were simply significant
>moments on a timeline of struggle that has stretched over
>decades. In the spring of 1968 in Memphis, Martin Luther
>King sang the song in support of striking garbage workers
>who held aloft a sea of signs that said succinctly, "I AM A
>MAN." The next day, as he stood on a hotel balcony, a
>sniper's bullet cut him down.
>
>One voice of the dream had died, but the song survived and
>proliferated. In New York City, demonstrators sang the song
>to protest the death of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed citizen
>killed by police in a hail of 41 bullets. In Indonesia,
>hundreds of demonstrators risked their lives by marching on
>parliament and demanding the resignation of the president of
>their country's bloody regime: "Down with Suharto, the
>people shall overcome." In Northern Ireland, in South Korea,
>in Lebanon, in India, in China's Tiananmen Square, in South
>Africa's Soweta township, anywhere people were desperate for
>freedom, men and women and children sang the song in a
>multitude of languages.
>
>Tomorrow the song will be sung across America as businesses
>and governments and citizens pause to observe Martin Luther
>King's birthday. In the nation of its birth, in a new
>century, it is less a song of sit-ins and marches, but more
>one of reverence and nostalgia, of anniversaries and
>ceremonies. In America, King's movement has splintered into
>a series of spirited but isolated skirmishes, the momentum
>of the 1960s now stalled by changing times, intramural
>squabbles and a political backlash that portrays "reverse
>racism" as a malignant force upon the land.
>
>But the song remains.
>
>Deep in my heart, I do believe
>
>We shall overcome someday.
>
>And someday, at another time and another place, at another
>moment in history, inertia will give way to movement, and
>people will sing the song again, loudly and defiantly and
>joyfully.
>
>And they will write new verses of their own.
>
>--
>
>Mike Hudson can be reached at 981-3332 or mikeh@roanoke.com
>
>--
>
>'We Shall Overcome'
>
>We shall overcome,
>
>we shall overcome
>
>We shall overcome someday
>
>Oh deep in my heart,
>
>I do believe
>
>That we shall overcome someday
>
>
>We'll walk hand in hand,
>
>we'll walk hand in hand
>
>We'll walk hand in hand someday
>
>Oh deep in my heart, I do believe
>
>That we shall overcome someday
>
>
>We shall live in peace,
>
>we shall live in peace
>
>We shall live in peace someday
>
>Oh deep in my heart,
>
>I do believe
>
>That we shall overcome someday
>
>
>We shall brothers be,
>
>we shall brothers be
>
>We shall brothers be someday
>
>Oh deep in my heart,
>
>I do believe
>
>That we shall overcome someday
>
>
>The truth shall make us free,
>
>truth shall make us free
>
>The truth shall make us free someday
>
>Oh deep in my heart,
>
>I do believe
>
>That we shall overcome someday
>
>
>We are not afraid,
>
>we are not afraid
>
>We are not afraid today
>
>Oh deep in my heart,
>
>I do believe
>
>That we shall overcome someday
>
>- A version of "We Shall Overcome."
>
>--
>
>Learn more about the Civil Rights Movement
>
>Books
>
>"I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and
>the Mississippi Freedom Struggle," by Charles M. Payne
>
>"Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson," by Robert
>Caro
>
>"This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer,"
>by Kay Mills
>
>"If You Don't Go, Don't Hinder Me: The African American
>Sacred Song Tradition," by Bernice Johnson Reagon (to be
>published in February)
>
>
>Radio
>
>"All Things Considered," National Public Radio, Jan. 15,
>1990 (story by Noah Adams on "We Shall Overcome," audiotape
>or transcript available at 1-877-NPR-TEXT)
>
>
>Video
>
>"We Shall Overcome" (1989 PBS documentary, available through
>Roanoke Public Library's main branch)
>
>--
>
>'No lie can live forever'
>
>There's a little song that we sing in our movement down in
>the South. I don't know if you've heard it. It has become
>the theme song: "We shall overcome. We shall overcome. Deep
>in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome." You know,
>I've joined hands so often with students and others behind
>jail bars singing it, "We shall overcome."
>
>Sometimes we've had tears in our eyes when we joined
>together to sing it, but we still decided to sing it, "We
>shall overcome." Oh, before this victory's won, some will
>have to get thrown in jail some more, but we shall overcome.
>
>Don't worry about us. Before the victory's won, some of us
>will lose jobs, but we shall overcome. Before the victory's
>won, even some will have to face physical death.
>
>But if physical death is the price that some must pay to
>free their children from a permanent psychological death,
>then nothing shall be more redemptive. We shall overcome.
>Before the victory's won, some would be misunderstood and
>called bad names and dismissed as rabble rousers and
>agitators, but we shall overcome.
>
>And I tell you why: We shall overcome because the arc of the
>moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. We shall
>overcome because Carlisle is right, "No lie can live
>forever."
>
>We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right:
>"Truth crushed to earth will rise again."
>
>- THE REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
>
>--
>
>PROTEST SONGS
>
>Here are 20 of the most famous protest songs (in
>alphabetical order) that often are sung at marches and
>rallies. They were compiled for a recent Washington Post
>article:
>
>"Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me 'round," traditional
>
>"Blowin' in the Wind," Bob Dylan
>
>"Follow the Drinking Gourd," traditional
>
>"Free Nelson Mandela," The Specials
>
>"Get Up, Stand Up," Bob Marley
>
>"Give Peace a Chance," John Lennon and Yoko Ono
>
>"I Ain't Marchin' Any More," Phil Ochs
>
>"If I Had a Hammer," Pete Seeger
>
>"John Brown's Body," traditional
>
>"Keep Your Eyes on the Prize," Alice Wine
>
>"Fish Cheer (Feel-Like-I'm Fixin'-to-Die Rag)," Country Joe
>and the Fish
>
>"The Internationale," words by Eugene Pottier, music by
>Pierre Degeyter
>
>"The Times They Are A-Changin," Bob Dylan
>
>"This Land Is Your Land," Woody Guthrie
>
>"This Little Light of Mine," traditional
>
>"Universal Soldier," Buffy Sainte-Marie
>
>"We Shall Not Be Moved," traditional
>
>"We Shall Overcome," various, traditional
>
>"Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" Pete Seeger
>
>"Which Side Are You On," Mrs. Sam Reece
>
>--
>
>The Washington Post recently compiled a list of songs that
>address racial and social justice. They include:
>
>Songs of protest and pride
>
>"Beds Are Burning," Midnight Oil
>
>"Big Yellow Taxi," Joni Mitchell
>
>"Biko," Peter Gabriel
>
>"Black Boys on Mopeds," Sinead O'Connor
>
>"51 Shots," Bruce Springsteen
>
>"Fight the Power," Public Enemy
>
>"For What It's Worth," Buffalo Springfield
>
>"Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)," Marvin Gaye
>
>"Help Save the Youth of America," Billy Bragg
>
>"Hurricane," Bob Dylan
>
>"Masters of War," Bob Dylan
>
>"Ohio/Find the Cost of Freedom," Crosby, Stills, Nash &
>Young
>
>"One Time One Night," Los Lobos
>
>"(Pride) In the Name of Love," U2
>
>"Smallpox Champion," Fugazi
>
>"Strange Fruit," Billie Holiday
>
>"Sun City," Artists United Against Apartheid
>
>"Message," Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
>
>"Tramp the Dirt Down," Elvis Costello
>
>"War," Edwin Starr