‘We Shall Overcome’ endures and soars through the decades

By Robert F. DARDEN

The Dallas Morning News

When Rep. John Lewis and his colleagues sang “We Shall Overcome” on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives a few weeks ago, some jeered, some laughed, some taunted. House Speaker Paul Ryan’s attempt to frame the sit-in as a publicity move was echoed by others on the right, who called for Lewis and his cohorts to StoptheStunt.

That’s OK. Lewis has heard it all before – and worse – when he’s sung this song. He has the scars to prove it. He just kept singing.

The Democratic sit-in demonstration in June provided a much-needed reminder that some things are worth singing about.

When the awful, unthinkable news of the Orlando Massacre reached the nation’s capital, members of the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington met outside the White House, linked arms and sang “We Shall Overcome.” Doubtless, some scoffed then as well, or tried to drown out the chorus’s song with negative commentary.

It didn’t work.

People have been trying to shout down “We Shall Overcome” for more than seven decades, and like those who sing it, the song has endured.

Old Baptist hymn

The song combines bits of the old Baptist hymn “I’ll Be Alright” and C. A. Tindley’s “I’ll Overcome Someday” among others. Zilphia Horton of the famed Highlander Folk School of Tennessee said she first heard the patchwork song sung by striking North Carolina tobacco workers in the 1940s. Legendary folk singer Pete Seeger is widely credited with changing the title to “We Shall Overcome” as it was taught to each new generation of Highlander attendees. Rosa Parks, John Lewis and Martin Luther King Jr. are among those who heard it at Highlander. Returning home from Highlander’s 25th anniversary in 1957, King told Anne Braden and Ralph Abernathy, “There’s something about that song that haunts you.”

Singer-activists Guy and Candie Carawan continued the spread of “We Shall Overcome” and by the time the 1960 sit-ins began, the song was well-known and widely sung by those involved in the civil rights movement. Even as early as the protests in Albany, Ga., the tradition of standing with crossed arms and singing the song at the close of each movement meeting was well in place. To this day, it remains the only civil rights song that is sung solemnly, unaccompanied by the elaborate, rhythmic clapping that characterizes many protest songs at demonstrations, marches and church gatherings.

From the beginning, “We Shall Overcome” was the anthem of the civil rights movement, traveling with supporters from Birmingham to Washington to Selma to Chicago to Memphis and a thousand movement sites in between. Most of the time, it was sung without a song leader. Someone would shout out a line – “Black and white together!” – and the rest of the congregation or marchers or prisoners would incorporate it and sing along.

Freedom songs

There is a host of extraordinary freedom songs, including “Up Above My Head, I See Freedom in the Air,” “This Little Light of Mine,” “Oh Freedom,” “Ninety-Nine and a Half Won’t Do,” “Amen,” and “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round.” There are freedom songs that were adapted from old union songs, including “We Shall Not Be Moved” and “Which Side Are You On!” But there is only one “We Shall Overcome,” and Rep. John Lewis knows it well.

He has sung it at every movement site, in every possible environment. He sang it before menacing mobs, before leering prison guards, and in hushed African-American churches in rural Mississippi and Alabama. He sang it, bleeding and battered, in the bloody aftermath of the Edmund Pettus Bridge attack in Selma, Ala.

“The music created a sense of solidarity,” Lewis once told me, “it brought us all together. When there was a sit-in, or a stand-in at a theater, on Freedom Rides, we would sing and sing and sing because when you have some sense that troubles – there was a possibility that you were going to be arrested or jailed or beaten – it just gave you the faith, the encouragement to keep going.”

What separates this music, in my mind, is that it continues beyond the civil rights movement, and not just in an academic or historic sense. It continues to be vital, perhaps essential, to movements near and far.

Freedom songs, particularly “We Shall Overcome” were sung at the fall of the Berlin Wall, and by protesters in Tiananmen Square. I’ve seen clips on CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera of protesters singing it at various places during the Arab Spring. It was sung during Hong Kong’s Umbrella Revolution. It was sung by Occupy Wall Street demonstrators.

Churches, funerals, protests

And with the rise of the blacklivesmatter movement, “We Shall Overcome” is sung in churches, funeral processions and in the ensuing protests – from Ferguson to Baltimore to Staten Island to Charleston to Chicago – often by people too young to have been alive during the civil rights era. These songs are being sung by people who may or may not be Christians, who may or may not be white. But they’re still being sung.

How is this happening? Why is this happening?

It is because these songs endure. They are part of the DNA of oppressed people, of people fighting for justice, of people dying for a cause. They endure and flourish and spread because they are the gift of the American civil rights movement. The songs have been anointed in blood and transfigured by pain.

People in positions of power, the majority, those who are happy with the status quo, those who have never been oppressed because of their race or gender or religion generally don’t understand. This is a difficult song for members of, say, a white fraternity in an exclusive private university, to sing, much less embody.

Robert F. Darden is a journalism professor at Baylor University in Texas. He wrote this for the Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.