"There's something about that song that haunts you," musedMartin Luther King, Jr., the first time he heard "We Shall Overcome," performedby activist folksinger Pete Seeger, in 1957. By the time it was sung by aquarter of million people at the March on Washington six years later, it wasthe most famous protest song in America. It was a hymn that became a union songand then a civil rights anthem, and it grew heavy with history. Mourners sangit at the funeral for three of the four girls killed in the Birmingham, Alabamachurch bombing. President Johnson cited it in his speech urging Congress topass the 1965 Voting Rights Act. When Malcolm X questioned nonviolence, he said"I don't believe we're going to overcome [by] singing." When Watts exploded in1965, Attorney General Ramsay Clark moaned, "The days of 'We Shall Overcome'were over." After the song was overtaken by the battle cries of Black Power, itwas sung as far afield as South Africa and Eastern Europe, Northern Ireland andIndia. And at Obama's inaugural concert, the President paid homage to the songthat had filled the Washington Mall 46 years earlier by promising, "We willovercome what ails us now."
