Charles Albert Tindley's early gospel hymn of personal faith and endurance. Written as an 'I' prayer for the church, it seeded the freedom song that would follow.
At the 1963 March on Washington, Joan Baez carried 'We Shall Overcome' before a crowd of hundreds of thousands. The solidarity spirit forged from 'I will' into 'We shall' rang from the podium to the world and settled as the soul of the civil rights movement.
A church hymn of private faith was subject-shifted through Joan Baez's March on Washington into a collective anthem of resistance.