We Shall Overcome
Preached by the Rev. Timothy B. Safford
Christ Church, Philadelphia July 9, 2006
Most Americans, of every creed and culture, and probably
most of the world where there has been a struggle for equality and human
rights, know, by heart, the hymn: We
Shall Overcome. I suspect that if we just
started singing it right now, we could get through most of the verses without
much help.
We Shall Overcome is
the pure form of folk music,
meaning, verse and music that is slowly composed, shaped, passed among, and
arranged by the folk. Folk is a
powerful word, often misused. A subtle meaning is the “commonality of people,
the shared identity and experience—the ethos and the passion of life.”
In German, the word is Volk, so a
Volkswagen is the common car for
the common person. In Eastern European languages, the word is Polk, so the Polka is the common dance and music of the people. Folk music conjures up images of hippies playing long dirges in
the coffee houses, but in reality it is music generated by a group of people,
that then defines that people, and brings more people in to identify with that
original. Folk music defines
culture and human experience, and then it naturally evangelizes more people
into that experience.
We Shall Overcome may
be the most definitive piece of folk music in American history, partly because
so many different people shaped it over more than 100 years. Its composition
has a Philadelphia chapter. In 1901, the Rev. Charles Tindley, the
African-American Methodist minister who pastored the large church on Broad
Street, wrote and published a gospel music hit: “I will overcome one day,”
expressing the sentiments that Jesus Christ will lead a believer through every
hardship and burden. This hymn was based, so the musicologist say, on an old
slave chant common to the brutal chain gangs of the plantations, no doubt
taught to Tindley by his parents who had been slaves.
In 1946, African-American women were striking for better
wages at a tobacco plant in Charleston, South Carolina, and Lucille Simmons
sang the familiar hymn slowly, mesmerizing the crowd. She made an important
change to the lyrics that galvanized the strikers: “I will overcome one day”
became “We will overcome one day.”
Soon, this new version was being sung in the meetings at
Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. A school for the folk, Highlander Folk School, played an important role in
the history of the nascent Civil Rights movement. It offered classes and
workshops that were integrated in the segregated South. A student at the
Highlander Folk School in 1947 was the great folk singer Pete Seeger. He
learned the revised hymn that had been heard at the Tobacco strike, and made it
his own, and started performing it at rallies and concerts. Seeger made it “We Shall Overcome” and added some new verses, including, “We’ll walk
hand in hand,” and some attribute the change in tune to him. He claims that
the tune just came out of the people, as did new lyrics, and the song became
ingrained in the soul of people involved in the struggles of the 1950’s and
60’s. In 1953, jail cells occupied by the Freedom Riders had this slogan
carved on the walls, “We Shall Overcome.” Rosa Parks, in her work with the
NAACP in Montgomery, would attend workshops at Highlander Folk School,
sponsored by Clifford and Virginia Durr, shortly before December 1955 when she
refused to move her seat on the Montgomery Bus, the simple action that moved
the world. While at Highlander, she no doubt heard the hymn that had become
popular. President Lyndon Johnson had used “We Shall Overcome,” as the basis of
his speech supporting the Voting Rights Bill in 1965, a speech with a
conclusion that may have wisdom for today:
This is the richest, most
powerful country which ever occupied this globe. The might of past empires is
little compared to ours. But I do not want to be the president who built
empires, or sought grandeur, or extended dominion. I want to be the president
who educated young children to the wonders of their world. I want to be the President
who helped to feed the hungry and to prepare them to be taxpayers instead of
tax eaters. I want to be the President who helped the poor to find their own
way and who protected the right of every citizen to vote in every election. I
want to be the President who helped to end hatred among his fellow men and who
promoted love among the people of all races, all regions and all parties. I
want to be the President who helped to end war among the brothers of this
earth.
When the sheet music for We Shall Overcome was finally published in 1965, four composers were
listed on that sheet music, but none of them had really written the song; they
had merely midwifed it into its present form. The song had slowly bubbled up
from the folk.
We Shall Overcome is
now in every major church hymnal, and it was included in the Episcopal hymnal, Lift
Every Voice and Sing, in the 1980’s.
Today, we will sing it as hymn at our close, probably for the first time in
these hallowed halls. Most of the hymns we love the most are at their heart
folk music
To sing it today is to connect one’s self to the slaves who
first hammered out the melody as they hammered rocks in the tobacco fields. To
sing it today is to connect to the experience of the struggling African
American in Philadelphia at the turn of the last century during the great
migration north. To sing it today is to connect to the labor struggles of the
1930’s and 40’s. To sing it today is to feel, deep in your heart, what Rosa
Parks felt in 1955, when the bus driver told her to relinquish her seat on that
Montgomery, Alabama bus, that, one day she, and we, might overcome the
injustices bequeathed by a racist society. To sing it today is to hear the
echoes of the I Have a Dream Speech 43
years later, the sounds of crude hammers tearing into the Berlin Wall, the
cries of South Africans fighting apartheid, and the shouts of joy when
Katherine Jefferts Schori was announced as the next Presiding Bishop of the
Episcopal Church.
Most profoundly, to sing it today is to connect to, and to
embody, the very hope at the center of the hymn, and the source from which that
hope comes—Jesus Christ. Some 2,000 years ago, Jesus walked from edges
of his hometown in downtrodden Nazareth, despondent that his own kin could not
believe he carried within him, as a gift of God, the hope that would transform
life, give love, and end death. As he walked through every dusty village in
the dark and diseased outskirts of the once promised land, he taught the people
who lived beyond destitute in the regions of desperate that they would overcome
the oppression of evil, the burden of disease, the pain of hunger, and the
inhumanity of racism. Then he took his friends, the rather scraggily bunch of
ex-fishermen and tax-collectors whom he called disciples, and he gave them the
hope of “We shall overcome.” He sent them two by two, with nothing—just
sandals, one set of clothes; no bread or money—just the divine message,
“We shall overcome, one day.” They went into every region, and proclaimed
their message of hope, and the people were set free from every bond of doubt,
disease and fear.
On Good Friday, when Jesus was nailed to the cross, all hope
died, and the people walked away muttering, “We shall overcome? What a crock!”
But on Easter morning, the women went to the tomb and discovered that Christ
overcame death in the resurrection. Because he overcame death, we shall
overcome death, and all its minions, one day.
Now, many, and increasingly more in our possessed and
obsessed American culture, would say this is an idle tale, a fond myth, simply
a folk tale created and told to keep us
warm on the cold nights of staring into a dark, empty sky full of meaningless
existence. But I say if you want to call it a folk tale, I say fine, for it is a tale that has come
from the folk, starting with the
first of all folk, Jesus Christ,
who was spoken as the Word from the mouth of God, the source of all that is folk. The composer of folk music, like We Shall
Overcome, O God our Help in Ages Past, A Mighty Fortress is our God, and The Battle Hymn of the Republic is the very God in whose image we are made.
Not slaves, not Charles Tindley, not Lucille Simmons, not
Pete Seeger, but God almighty, through the flesh of Jesus Christ, wrote We
Shall Overcome. In different forms 39
founders of this church sang a version in 1695 when they asked Wm Penn for the
land to worship God as they pleased. Our founders sang another version on July
4, 1776, when they thundered, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” that
all of God’s creatures are equal, endowed by God with a human dignity that no
tyranny nor tyrant can destroy.
A year ago, we buried a man who left very specific funeral
instructions. His body was to be cremated, and his ashes placed in the garden
of the church, just outside these windows.
When his ashes went into the ground, he directed that the
old venerable bells of Christ Church would toll the tune, We Shall Overcome. We all thought he just wanted the venerable Civil
Rights tune played, but when I turned his ashes and my tears into the wet dirt,
and the bells tolled the tune, I realized that he was sending another message.
He was telling us his faith. Now, buried in sure and certain hope of the
resurrection, he had overcome.
He had received the promise that the folk had passed over the centuries. Every time I see his name out on the
memorial wall, I hear him say, “I have come over. Don’t come over any sooner
than you have to. Until then, don’t just sing We Shall Overcome, make it true.”
Once, I think it was the theological writer Will Campbell,
was challenged to summarize the Gospel of Jesus Christ in as few words as
possible. He simply said, “Love trumps.” That’s good, but I want to use three
words, not of my own composition, but carried by the folk since the creation first had voice:
We Shall Overcome.