Why is we shall overcome important

It is easy to walk hand in hand when you can see who you are walking with. It is easy to have no fear when you know who the enemy is. What happens when the lines blur? Friend today, enemy tomorrow. Bradley talked about how music was used to uplift black people when they were marching. That black joy was a form of protest. Maybe this is because their humanity was on the line.

Seven percent. That is the number of Fellows that Humanity in Action selected out of thousands of applications. This coalition of activists and freedom fighters are supposed to be the best and brightest in the world. It makes me think that if this is our best chance, if these are our best arc benders, then the fight for justice is already lost. Why even try? Why even try, because if there is one thing I have learned in life is that failure is not an option.

The only thing this changes is the stakes and as an NCAA division one athlete I am used to high stakes. Mawuli Davis from the Sports as a Platform for Protest and Activism panel said organization is needed not just mobilization. He said make friends outside of your organizing group. In the film we watched Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin, he made a groundbreaking observation when being accused of selling out when he became involved into politics.

He said that in protesting you never compromise but in politics there is always compromise. Make your investment into the leaders of tomorrow through the Bill of Rights Institute today! Learn more about the different ways you can partner with the Bill of Rights Institute. The Bill of Rights Institute engages, educates, and empowers individuals with a passion for the freedom and opportunity that exist in a free society.

The song was popularized in the s by folk singers and activists Pete Seeger and Joan Baez and became the unofficial anthem of the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr. This version of the song was performed by Joan Baez in at the White House during a celebration of music from the civil rights movement. Upcoming Events Explore our upcoming webinars, events and programs. View All Events. Invest In Our Future The most effective way to secure a freer America with more opportunity for all is through engaging, educating, and empowering our youth.

In , the United Mine Workers union in Birmingham held a two-month labor strike against the coal companies which ultimately failed. But white and black miners joined together in singing a song with a message, "We Will Overcome Some Day.

Songs about work and the work experience were common in the colonial period and extended into the throes of industrialization when union organizers saw songs as a way to foster labor solidarity and fuel passion on the picket line — and convey a radical political message.

Workers in some regions had more of a musical tradition than others, and the South was particularly fertile ground. Protest music could be heard in Birmingham, Alabama in When coal-mine operators there tried to cut wages, more than 10, black and white workers belonging to District 20 of the United Mine Workers staged a two-month strike.

If we stick together, we will overcome some day Four decades later, that same song echoed in another Southern strike. In October , a thousand black and white workers at the American Tobacco Company in Charlestown, South Carolina, struck for higher pay and better working conditions.

For five months, Lucille Simmons, a black worker with a lovely alto voice, led workers each night in song. Zilphia Horton of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee taught folk music to many civil rights leaders. Photo courtesy of the Highlander Research and Education Center. Subsequently, several participants in the strike, including a woman named Anna Lee Bonneau, traveled to the Highlander Folk School in southeastern Tennessee.

Established in , Highlander was a training center for Southern industrial and farm laborers, and a meeting place for black and white civil-rights activists. His wife, Zilphia Horton, was deeply committed to music and made it a part of the Highlander curriculum. I sang it with many different nationality groups. When I sing it to people, it becomes their song. One of those who learned the song from Zilphia was Pete Seeger.

Horton had gone to New York City on a fundraising trip in , and there she sang the song for Seeger, whom she knew from an earlier visit he had made to Highlander. Seeger was a lanky musician who had worked with the folklorist Alan Lomax at the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress in the s, had traveled out West in with Woody Guthrie, the legendary folksinger seven years his senior, and had then sung with a ramshackle group known as the Almanac Singers before being drafted.

Music was his passion, and he wanted people to sing together. Seeger liked the song Zilphia taught him, and the way she sang it. But to make it more accessible, he changed it a bit. It sort of stops them cold silent. The song undoubtedly drew on a variety of influences in addition to Charles Tindley. Courtesy of the Woody Guthrie Archives. The song also went through a number of other changes in those early years.

Seeger, a Harvard dropout, cited his wife Toshi as he reflected on the shift. Though Seeger sometimes received credit for that change, he attributed it to Septima Clark, an African-American educator and civil-rights activist from South Carolina. Over the next few years, the song began to be recorded.

Seeger had suggested the three men stop at Highlander, and there they would have heard Zilphia sing the song. Seeger himself returned to Highlander a few years later, in , and sang to an audience that included Martin Luther King, Jr.