Pete Seeger, one of the first artists to record “We Shall Overcome,” notes that versions of the song can be traced to black churches in the 1800s and integrated meetings of black and white coal miners in the early 1900s. The song, sung as “We’ll overcome” or “I’ll overcome someday,” was sung as “We’ll Overcome” in a 1946 American Tobacco Company strike. One of the mostly African American women on the picket line, Lucille Simmons, sung a long slow version of the song, and taught it to Zilphia Horton. Horton, a white woman and wife of the co-founder of the Highlander Folk School (now Highlander Research and Education Center), taught the song to Pete Seeger in 1947.

Even Pete Seeger isn’t certain who changed the line “we will overcome” to “we shall overcome”—perhaps Seeger, perhaps Highlander’s Septima Clark. Seeger sang the song with others at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Raleigh, N.C., in 1960. The song (and Seeger himself) made the rounds of civil rights and peace activist training grounds, from Highlander and SNCC to other parts of the struggle. After being re-introduced to the activist community at Highlander in 1959, the song spread orally and became one of the most recognizable anthems of southern African American labor union and civil rights activism.

The song has become part of American history. Joan Baez recorded and performed the song at many civil rights marches, and years later at the Woodstock Festival in 1969. President Lyndon B. Johnson used the phrase “we shall overcome” in a 1965 speech before Congress just a few days after the “Bloody Sunday” of the Selma to Montgomery marches. Farmworkers in the United States sang the song in Spanish during the strikes and grape boycotts of the late 1960s. Bruce Springsteen recorded his own interpretation of the song, included on Where Have All the Flowers Gone: A Tribute to Pete Seeger, and Springsteen’s 2006 album We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions. National Public Radio included this song in the “NPR 100.” The song also found its way to South Africa and the later years of the anti-apartheid movement. “We Shall Overcome” has been reinterpreted by a variety of social justice struggles worldwide, and is an enduring musical legacy of people’s historical struggles for civil rights.