We Shall Overcome

We Shall Overcome, protest song that became an anthem of the American civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s. The modern version of the song derives from the folk music of enslaved people in the United States and an early 20th-century gospel song written by minister Charles Albert Tindley. Notable performers in the mid- to late 20th century include Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Bruce Springsteen. It has become a standard song for protest movements around the globe.

Origin and history

Folk artist Pete Seeger sings perhaps the best-known version of “We Shall Overcome.” The song, however, is the product of decades of adaptation and collaboration. Some of its lyrics date to as early as 1901 (some sources suggest 1903), when Black gospel composer and minister Charles Albert Tindley wrote the song’s first iteration: a Christian hymn titled “I’ll Overcome Someday.” Tindley’s song begins with “This world is one great battlefield,” and the first chorus sings, “I’ll overcome someday. / I’ll overcome someday. / If in my heart I do not yield, / I’ll overcome someday.” Lyrics in other verses include religious references to Jesus and God. Tindley, who was born into enslavement, may in turn have been inspired by a folk song sung by enslaved people working in plantation fields that chorused, “I’ll be all right.”

In the decades following Tindley’s writing, “I’ll Overcome Someday” became popular in the American South—though its melody and rhythm were transformed from Tindley’s original before the 1940s. It was first used as a protest song in 1945, when workers—mostly Black and female—striking against the American Tobacco Company in Charleston, South Carolina, performed union songs and hymns on the picket line.

One of the striking workers at that protest, a Black woman named Lucille Simmons, changed the main refrain from the singular (“I’ll overcome”) to the plural (“We will overcome”) and slowed the tempo. Simmons’s version adapted it to a pro-union context with lines such as “We’ll get higher wages,” “We’ll get shorter hours,” “We will win our rights,” and “We will organize.”

Pete Seeger’s version

Simmons’s performance of the song during the 1945 Charleston protest led to Seeger’s famous rendition. Zilphia Horton, a white community organizer, heard “We Will Overcome” on the tobacco workers’ picket line. She then began teaching it to students at Highlander Folk School (after 1961, the Highlander Research and Education Center) in Monteagle, Tennessee—an institution devoted to social justice that served Appalachian communities and trained civil rights activists. On a Highlander fundraising trip to New York City, Horton performed it for Seeger for the first time. Seeger and Horton published it together as “We Will Overcome” in 1948 in a periodical called People’s Songs.

Seeger is typically credited with changing will to shall in the song’s lyrics, though he was not the only one to have done so. Others at Highlander, including teacher and famous civil rights activist Septima Poinsette Clark, also sang the song with the verb shall independently of Seeger, which he acknowledged. In an interview with Seeger conducted by historians William Ferris and Michael Honey in 1989 (reprinted in Ferris’s 2013 book The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists), Seeger, perhaps jokingly, attributed the shift from will to shall to his (unfinished) education at Harvard University.

Seeger’s iteration of the song evolved naturally, as had prior versions, and included new instrumentation and rhythm. Musician Frank Hamilton added guitar chords, and Highlander Folk School music director Guy Carawan added a soulful triplet-feel rhythm that he had learned from some Black students at Highlander who performed the song a cappella.

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The first verse of the famous song includes the line “We shall overcome,” which became a slogan of the civil rights movement. Other verses added at various times and occasions have included lines, some of which Seeger wrote, such as “We’ll walk hand in hand,” “The truth will make us free,” “The Lord will see us through,” “We will end Jim Crow,” and “We will live in peace.” Beyond the first iconic verse, there is an inherent freedom and versatility to succeeding verses that befits a protest song that has appeared in many contexts.

Civil rights anthem

“We Shall Overcome” was popularized as a civil rights protest song through Highlander Folk School’s network of young activists and organizers. Martin Luther King, Jr., heard Seeger perform “We Shall Overcome” at Highlander in 1957. As King left Highlander accompanied by civil rights activist and journalist Anne Braden, he expressed his appreciation for the song, although his specific wording has been recollected and quoted with slight differences. Seeger, in the 1989 interview with Ferris and Honey, said that Anne Braden told him that King remarked, “That song really sticks with you, doesn’t it?” Braden, in a short remembrance of King written after his assassination in 1968, wrote of his reaction to the song: “I recall that he hummed it as we drove that day. ‘There’s something about that song that haunts you, doesn’t it?’”

Many of the singers who popularized “We Shall Overcome” at civil rights protests nationwide were white. Some Black organizers initially resisted Seeger’s lyric change from I to we. Freedom Singers member Bernice Johnson Reagon explained her hesitation and eventual acceptance of the word “we” in a 1999 interview with Noah Adams of National Public Radio (NPR):

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 gonna be there.…There are many Black traditional collective-expression songs where it’s I, because in order for you to get a group, you have to have I’s.

We’d been singing the song all 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 [“We shall overcome”] does for me is document the presence of Black and white people in this country, fighting against injustice. And you have Black people accepting that need because they were also accepting that support and that help.

In 1963 Joan Baez performed “We Shall Overcome” at the March on Washington. When Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson introduced the 1965 Voting Rights Act, intended to overcome legal barriers that prevented Black Americans from voting, he quoted the song in his speech before the U.S. Congress: “It’s all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” In a later reference to the song in the same speech, Johnson reiterated, “These are the enemies: poverty, ignorance, disease. They are our enemies, not our fellow man, not our neighbor. And these enemies too—poverty, disease, and ignorance—we shall overcome.”

Global reach

The song has spread beyond the context of the American civil rights movement to become an anthem of protest, civil rights, and democracy around the world. The song was popular among student demonstrations in the 1970s in South Korea that led up to the Gwangju Uprising in 1980 and was banned by the South Korean government in 1975, along with other American music. It was sung during the 1976 Soweto Uprising in South Africa. In Beirut, Lebanon, in 1979 a group of Black Americans headed by civil rights leader Joseph Lowery, while meeting with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), sang it together with PLO leader Yasser Arafat. It was intoned at the Tiananmen Square protests in China in 1989. It was also a rallying cry of the opposition movement in East Germany prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The song’s roots in the civil rights movement have translated its simple message of insistent perseverance, and its plaintive hopefulness, into a staple of protest repertoire.

In India “We Shall Overcome” was translated into Hindi as “Hum Honge Kamyab” by Girija Kumar Mathur for the 1983 film Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro. Indian versions of the song, which artists have given unique Indian musical characteristics, have been translated into multiple languages. The song “Hum Honge Kamyab” has been used both as a song of protest for various causes and as standard musical fare of Indian patriotism performed at Independence Day and Republic Day celebrations and is often taught to schoolchildren.

Legal matters and the public domain

Hamilton and Carawan (with Horton listed posthumously) filed a copyright on “We Shall Overcome” in 1960. An additional copyright for the song was filed in 1963 to cover new additional verses and added Seeger to the list of authors. Since 1966 the Highlander Research and Education Center has run the We Shall Overcome Fund, which used royalties from the commercial use of the song to fund projects for arts, activism, and preservation of civil rights materials in the American South.

In 2016 musician and filmmaker Isaias Gamboa filed a lawsuit to nullify the copyright because of documentary evidence of prior versions of the song. His lawsuit was joined by the producers of the film Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013), who had wanted to use the song in the film but found the cost charged by the copyright holders, music publishers The Richmond Organization and Ludlow Music, to be prohibitive.

A federal district court judge in New York ruled in 2018 that the copyright on the version of “We Will Overcome” that Seeger and Horton published in 1948 had expired in 1976, that the later copyrights of “We Shall Overcome” were of particular variations, and that the well-known song’s lyrics and melody, particularly the first verse, are thus in the public domain.