The song we shall overcome is a protest song that became a key anthem of the civil right Movement. Which derives from a gospel song, possibly a 1903 song by Rev. Charles Tindley of Philadelphia containing the repeated line "I'll overcome some day", In Charleston, South Carolina in 1946, striking employees the American Tobacco Company, mostly African American women were singing hymns on the picket line. A woman named Lucille Simmons sang a slow "long meter style" version of the song, as "We'll Overcome". Zilphia Horton, a white woman and one of the founders of the Highlander Folk School (later Highlander Research and Education Center) learned it from her. The next year she taught it to Pete Seeger. [Dunaway, 1990, 222-223], [Seeger, 1993, 32]
