Gospel- & labor-rooted protest song · anthem of the U.S. civil-rights movement
“We Shall Overcome” grew out of the African-American church and labor traditions — Rev. Charles Albert Tindley’s 1901 hymn “I’ll Overcome Some Day,” carried by striking Charleston tobacco workers in 1945–46 and taught by Zilphia Horton of the Highlander Folk School. Published as “We Will Overcome,” it was reshaped — Pete Seeger is credited with the “will”-to-“shall” change — and spread by Guy Carawan until it became the unofficial anthem of the civil-rights movement. When Lyndon Johnson reached for its words in 1965, they already belonged to the marchers.