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 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 SouthAfrica'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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- '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 Copyright (c) 2001 The Roanoke Times. 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