BLOGGING-THOMAS

It’s been called “The most important political protest song of all-time,” and it’s hard to argue with that claim. From Selma, Alabama, to Johannesburg, South Africa, “We shall overcome” expresses deep human longings for justice, solidarity, peace with God and peace with one another.  It became a central theme of many speeches and sermons by The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The song itself has a history that is worth celebrating this Martin Luther King Jr. Day Weekend, commemorating the birthday of the great civil rights leader on January 15, 1929.

• “We Shall Overcome” combines an older hymn, “I’ll Be All Right,” with “I’ll Overcome Someday,” a hymn by Charles Tindley, one of the most prolific and beloved writers of African American religious music, and the author of “Stand By Me” and “We’ll Understand It Better By and By” (which contains the line “We will tell a story of how we overcome”).

• Tindley based “I’ll Overcome Someday” on Galatians 6:9, chosen as our Epistle lesson for today: “And let us not be weary in well doing; for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.”

• The song became a favorite of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union in Arkansas, where it was adapted by Rev. Claude Williams, grandfather of contemporary singer and composer, Lucinda Williams.

• It was passed along from Claude Williams to Zilphia Horton, the music leader at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle,Tennessee, where most of the leaders of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s went to learn the principles and techniques of non-violence.

• Prior to being adopted at Highlander, “I Will Overcome” had been an up-tempo, rhythmic song, often accompanied by handclaps on the backbeat. But when the striking workers at a cigar warehouse in Charleston, South Carolina sang it on strike in 1945-46, they were carrying picket signs, so they couldn’t clap. So one of them, Lucille Simmons, adapted the tune to a much slower “long meter” with eight syllables to each line, which could be walked slowly in rhythm on the picket line.

• When Lucille Simmons, the cigar warehouse protester, went to Highlander to learn the techniques of non-violence, she brought along her union’s version in the slower tempo.

• And Zilphia Horton, the Highlander Folk School music leader then taught it in this style to the great folksong writer and performer Pete Seeger, who shifted the language to “We shall overcome.”

• He called it a “portfolio” song — it easily accommodates new verses, including ones made up on the spot.For example, the great verse, “We are not afraid,” was made up spontaneously during a mid-‘50s police/Ku Klux Klan raid on Highlander by 14 year old Jamilla Jones, who was there from the Montgomery, Alabama movement.

• A decade later, following participation in another non-violent protest march to Montgomery, Alabama, Episcopal seminarian Jonathan Daniels stepped in front of a young black woman protester who was being threatened at gunpoint and was shot dead. That young woman he saved is former St. Thomas’ Parishioner Ruby Sales.

• In 2011 The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson announced his desire to explore the establishment at St. Thomas’ Parish of a Center for Non-Violent Communication to become a center of his work following retirement as Bishop of New Hampshire in 2013. Discussions are ongoing.

• In the mystery of the wisdom of God, all things are somehow connected. And the goals of non-violence and reconciliation remain before us.

• So it is fitting that we join with humility this long tradition this morning, singing “we shall overcome,” as well ‒ in solidarity with those before us who risked so much, and with responsibility to cultivate a culture of reconciliation in the present so that in the future so much of what we care about will not be at risk.