Shall
Overcome
Posted on 05/08/2015 10:12:10 AM PDT by Borges
On an April night in 1960, Guy Carawan stood before a group of black students in Raleigh, N.C., and sang a little-known folk song. With that single stroke, he created an anthem that would echo into history, sung at the Selma-to-Montgomery marches of 1965, in apartheid-era South Africa, in international demonstrations in support of the Tiananmen Square protesters, at the dismantled Berlin Wall and beyond.
The song was “We Shall Overcome.”
Mr. Carawan, a white folk singer and folklorist who died on Saturday at 87, did not write “We Shall Overcome,” nor did he claim to. The song, variously a religious piece, a labor anthem and a hymn of protest, had woven in and out of American oral tradition for centuries, embodying the country’s twinned history of faith and struggle. Over time, it was further polished by professional songwriters.
But in teaching it to hundreds of delegates at the inaugural meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee — held in Raleigh on April 15, 1960 — Mr. Carawan fathered the musical manifesto that, more than any other, became “the ‘Marseillaise’ of the integration movement,” as The New York Times described it in 1963.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Things that make you go Hmmmm ...
NPR was playing audio the other day of praise from his long-time best bud, Pete Seeger.
Just ordinary country folks ...
Pete Seeger came from a highly cultured and affluent family. His ‘country boy’ shtick was transparently fake.
I remember it as the “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” of the civil rights movement. Good song.
Hanging out with Woody Guthrie and tried to step into Woody’s character when he got sick.
When I hear this song, I think of Michael “Unarmed” Brown.
And I laugh...
Shall
Overcome
My favorite version of the tune is “Gun rights, Yes We Can!” .
I remember as a small white kid in grade school in the 1960s being forced to sing this song at an auditorium event.
I refused. My parents agreed.
Myths die hard.
Hey come on now. No generation before the Boomers ever overcame anything!
What the world needs now is another folk singer, like I need a hole in my head. - Cracker
What has been overcome in 5 decades ? Intact, two-parent families for starters. Make no mistake, these folks were not for helping Blacks, they were for destabilizing America acting as a vanguard for Communists. Mission accomplished.
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