We Shall Overcome

A Reason To Smile

In our last newsletter, we observed the 60th anniversary of the terrorist bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. We featured an excerpt of a speech by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who spoke at the church this year to honor the memory of the four girls who were killed — and to share a passionate plea for learning the lessons of history. 

Justice Jackson said that, as a child, she was inspired by songs from the Civil Rights Movement. They served as a powerful soundtrack to an era of action and consequence. Perhaps the most well known of these is the iconic “We Shall Overcome.”

The song’s famous melody likely has its origins in 18th century Europe. In the United States, enslaved Black people adapted the music into numerous songs. 

Inspiration for the lyrics of “We Shall Overcome” is often credited to Reverend Dr. Charles Tindley, a Methodist minister and gospel music composer. Born a freeman to a formerly enslaved father in the decade before the Civil War, Dr. Tindley wrote several hymns, including one in 1901 called “I’ll Overcome Someday.” Its first verse and chorus were:

This world is one great battlefield,
With forces all arrayed;
If in my heart I do not yield
I’ll overcome some day.

I’ll overcome some day,
I’ll overcome some day;
If in my heart I do not yield
I’ll overcome some day.

This song had a different tune, and the perspective was first person: “I’ll overcome.” A series of revised arrangements in the 1940s continued the song’s musical and lyrical evolution, including incorporating the melody we now know so well and changing “I’ll overcome” to “We will overcome.”

Labor and civil rights activists quickly saw the resonance of “We Will Overcome” as a protest song. In the mid-1940s, it was adopted by striking tobacco workers in South Carolina, where, as fate would have it, it was overheard by Zilphia Horton, musical director of the Highlander Folk School, a training center for civil and labor rights activists in Grundy County, Tennessee. Horton taught the song to a supporter of the school, folk singer Pete Seeger, who is credited for replacing “will overcome” with “shall overcome” in the lyrics. Seeger performed his version at the school’s 25th anniversary in 1957. In attendance was a young reverend who had come to give a speech: Martin Luther King Jr. 

Dr. King is said to have expressed enthusiasm for the song immediately. And he and other Civil Rights leaders helped turn it into an anthem for the movement. A key to the song’s strength lies in its clarity — the repetition of the words and a tune accessible even to voices of modest ability. “It’s the genius of simplicity,” Seeger would say of the song. “Any damn fool can get complicated. I like to compare it to the backboard in basketball. You bounce your life experiences off it and they come back with new meaning.” Eleven years after Dr. King first heard “We Shall Overcome,” his wife, Coretta Scott King, and other luminaries of the Civil Rights Movement sang the song as they marched through the streets of Atlanta behind the wagon bearing Dr. King’s coffin. 

“We Shall Overcome” is a song of hope and struggle, resilience and challenge. There are too many famous versions to count, but the song is just as defined by the millions who have sung it without recognition. So we wanted to use our platform here to share a rendition that deserves greater awareness. A friend introduced us to a performance by the AfterGlow Chorus in Oakland, California. It took place as part of a program commemorating another act of racist violence — the murder of nine Black parishioners in Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015 in Charleston, South Carolina.

Music can provide a salve for our pain — especially when it emanates from a place of love and support. What impressed us about this version was not only the musicality but the diversity of voices rising in exquisite harmony. It is testimony to all the choirs across the country and around the world that bring joy to our lives. And it is an affirmation of what we can overcome if we walk hand in hand without fear. It is A Reason To Smile.

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