We Shall Overcome Began on a Picket Line in Charleston

The building on East Bay Street that once housed the American Tobacco Company's Cigar Factory is still standing. In the summer of nineteen forty-five, approximately eleven hundred workers came out of that building on strike. Most of them were Black women. They were earning significantly less than their white counterparts for the same work, and they wanted union recognition and equal pay.

During the strike, on the picket line, a worker named Lucille Simmons began singing a version of a gospel hymn called "I'll Overcome Someday." She slowed it down. The slow version carried differently than the original. It moved across the line. People joined her.

The song left Charleston in the hands of a union organizer named Zilphia Horton, who had been watching what was happening in South Carolina and brought the song back to the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, an institution that trained labor organizers and, later, civil rights workers. At Highlander, Pete Seeger learned it. Seeger carried it into the American folk revival circuit. A folk musician named Guy Carawan brought it to the Nashville sit-in movement in nineteen sixty, where it was adopted by student activists from the movement that would become the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. From Nashville it spread to every march, every demonstration, every moment where people needed a sound that was slow enough to mean it.

"We Shall Overcome" is the anthem of the American civil rights movement. It began as a labor song on this street, in this city, because a Black woman on a picket line knew how to slow something down until it had weight.