Use in The 1960s Civil Rights and Other Protest Movements
In August 1963, 22-year old folksinger Joan Baez, led a crowd of 300,000 in singing "We Shall Overcome" at the Lincoln Memorial during A. Philip Randolph's March on Washington. President Lyndon Johnson, although himself a Southerner, used the phrase "we shall overcome" in addressing Congress on March 15, 1965, in a speech delivered after the violent, "bloody Sunday" attacks on civil rights demonstrators during the Selma to Montgomery marches, thus legitimizing the protest movement.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. recited the words from "We Shall Overcome" in his final sermon delivered on in Memphis on Sunday March 31, 1968, before his assassination. He had done so previously in 1965 in a similar sermon delivered before an interfaith congregation at Temple Israel in Hollywood, California:
We shall overcome. We shall overcome. Deep in my heart I do believe we shall overcome. And I believe it because somehow the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. We shall overcome because Carlyle is right; "no lie can live forever". We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right; "truth crushed to earth will rise again". We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right:.
Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne.
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the then unknown
Standeth God within the shadow,
Keeping watch above his own.
With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to speed up the day. And in the words of prophecy, every valley shall be exalted. And every mountain and hill shall be made low. The rough places will be made plain and the crooked places straight. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together. This will be a great day. This will be a marvelous hour. And at that moment—figuratively speaking in biblical words—the morning stars will sing together and the sons of God will shout for joy
"We Shall Overcome" was sung days later by over fifty thousand attendees at Dr. King's funeral.
Farmworkers in the United States later sang the song in Spanish during strikes and grape boycotts of the late 1960s., and it was notably sung by the U.S. Senator for New York Robert F. Kennedy, when he led anti-apartheid crowds in choruses from the rooftop of his car while touring South Africa in 1966. It was also the song Abie Nathan chose to play as the Voice of Peace on October 1, 1993, and as a result it found its way to South Africa in the later years of the anti-apartheid movement.
The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association adopted "we shall overcome" as a slogan and used it in title of their retrospective autobiography publication, We Shall Overcome - The History of the Struggle for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland 1968-1978. The film Bloody Sunday depicts march leader MP Ivan Cooper leading the song shortly before the Bloody Sunday shootings. In 1997, the Christian men's ministry, Promise Keepers featured the song on their worship CD for that year - The Making Of A Godly Man featuring (black) worship leader Donn Thomas (along with the Maranatha! Promise Band). Bruce Springsteen re-interpreted the song, which has been included on Where Have All the Flowers Gone: A Tribute to Pete Seeger and his 2006 album We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions.
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