Maybe We Shall Overcome
North of 50 - December 2008 “Fair Comment” column
Don Sawyer
I first heard the song “We Shall Overcome” in the winter of 1965. I was in my first year of university at Michigan State, and somehow I found myself crammed into the back of a van with a bunch of slightly scruffy people I didn’t know on the way to a party. A few were black. The white guys all had longish hair and wore old army shirts. The one woman had her brown hair in a long braid down her back. They were only a few years older than I was, but they seemed far wiser, far more adult somehow.
All of them, I learned, were veterans of 1964’s “Freedom Summer,” where they had risked their lives to help African Americans in Mississippi register to vote in the face of rigged “literacy tests,” threats, and intimidation. Some knew the three organizers who had been murdered by the Klan.
At first talk and laughter murmured softly in the back of the lurching van. Then a young man near the back began to sing:
“We shall overcome, we shall overcome, We shall overcome some day.”
The rest of the group picked up the chorus, and the sides of the van rang:
“Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe, We shall overcome some day.
I could see that some of the singers’ eyes were closed. Some stared grimly into the night. The voices swelled, intensified, and I remember a chill ran through me like an electric shock. I found my voice mingling with the others, singing from somewhere deep inside words I hardly knew. As we swayed from side to side, shoulder pressed against shoulder in that old van filled with such passion and conviction, I wept.
That was not the last time I sang “We Shall Overcome.” I sang it with 5000 others in April of 1968 shortly after Martin Luther king was assassinated. But this time we didn’t sing so much with confidence as with anger and disillusionment. I sang it again that September in Chicago with thousands of others jammed into Lincoln Park to protest the Vietnam War. Arms linked, we swayed in unison:
“We’ll walk hand in hand, we’ll walk hand in hand; We’ll walk hand in hand some day.”
Now the words were defiant, uncertain.
I sang it many more times in the following years: at a UBC observance for the students shot dead at Kent Sate. At a faculty strike at Simon Fraser University. At a Hiroshima memorial ceremony at McGuire Park in Salmon Arm. But each time, it seemed, the words sounded a little more hollow, the vision contained in them more distant. The US lurched through the cynicism of Nixon and Reagan and Bush Sr., the pragmatism of Clinton to the debacle of the current Bush regime. They careened into another war of aggression. Hatred and fear of the other characterized global geopolitics. The environment was melting down around us while the economy collapsed. If you were paying attention at all, it seemed increasingly unlikely that we would ever overcome.
Then this guy comes out of nowhere, this junior senator from Illinois. Not black, not white, but carrying the wisdom – and scars – of both, he kept preaching “Yes we can!” Yes we can create a better world. Yes we can be generous and compassionate. Yes we can have justice and equality.
How dare he raise my hopes again? How dare he suggest that we really might be able to overcome? And should I take the chance? Try to believe once more in the possibility just to have it all crushed again? Pretty risky.
But he just wouldn’t let up. He wasn’t fair. He employed what he termed “unrelenting hope.” He simply wore us down. He bypassed the more damaged of us and went straight to the kids, who didn’t know any better. Who didn’t know it was hopeless and that we didn’t have the power to change the way things are. He went to the African Americans and Hispanics, who had nothing to lose. And finally, I got sucked in too. The words came back, not as an ode to lost causes, but as a possibility:
“We shall walk as brothers, we shall walk as brothers; We shall walk as brothers some day.”
Was it possible to throw out the old power elite and replace it with something new and shining? Maybe, I and others thought, we can. Yes, maybe we can. Yes, we can!
And we did. We woke up on November 5th to a different world. With the bewildering array of crises facing the globe, it may indeed turn out that winning the election was the easy part. But for the first time in many years, I find myself singing that old song again, not with sadness for lost opportunities, but with hope.
We shall overcome,
We shall overcome,
We shall overcome some day.
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
We shall overcome some day.
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