We Shall Overcome - Anti-Racism, Earworms and the Power That Music Has to Make the World a Better Place

I am writing this series to consider and assert the place that music has in the rampant societal discord over race. This cancer that grows amongst us cannot be cured by chemotherapy or radiation. Instead, it will require each of us to strongly consider what we value—competition versus cooperation, isolationism, and individuality versus the collective good. Can we value another human who has a different opinion than we do? Can we build bridges of peace within our own hearts, our homes, our neighborhoods, our communities, states, and nations?

It would help to better understand others’ lives and how we have invalidated them, reducing them to be less than us, not worthy of our attention or affection. This societal tipping point requires enhanced compassion and empathy for one another, a viewpoint that each of us has inherent worth and dignity. Declaring our interdependence can help build stronger, healthier, more loving communities and music has a key role here.

Pete Seeger long fought the good fight and made “good trouble” as a U.S. Rep. John Lewis would say. He did it with a banjo. Pete was not an entertainer. He was an artist that started a movement called the People’s Songs, using folk music to force social change. Fighting racial injustice was central to this movement.

We Shall Overcome was first published in the People’s Song bulletin in 1947. It was picked up and became central to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In the great civil rights march on Washington in 1963, Joan Baez led over 300,000 people in singing it. Following the 1965 Bloody Sunday attack in Selma, the phrase ‘we shall overcome’ was used by President Lyndon Johnson in his speech made just days after the bloodshed. In 1966, Robert F. Kennedy sang it from the rooftop as he toured South Africa. In Martin Luther King Jr.’s last speech in 1968, he used the song’s lyrics:

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.

And it was sung at his memorial just a few days later.

The song went viral and has spun around the world over and over again. It became a world-wide earworm, boring not just into the ear but into the heart. The song traveled as quickly as COVID has in 2020. But this song enriches our life, calls us to do better and be better. It supports us to persist, to clutch hands together, and walk forward even in fear, creating “good trouble.”

Look at the faces of these people singing this—the earnestness, the focus, the blessing, and grave the song offers. Listen deeply, sing-along (Pete wouldn’t have it any other way). Finds ways in your life to use music that connects us. Listen to as many variants of it and claim your favorite. Let it breathe, give it life.

Pete’s description of it

Joan Baez performing at the March on Washington

Sing along with Pete

In his last album, Louis Satchmo Armstrong sang it with the likes of Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Tony Bennett, George Wein, Father O’Connor, and Chico Hamilton. The trumpets just lift it up!