NY Times - On an April night in 1960, Guy Carawan stood before a group of black students in Raleigh, N.C., and sang a little-known folk song. With that single stroke, he created an anthem that would echo into history, sung at the Selma-to-Montgomery marches of 1965, in apartheid-era South Africa, in international demonstrations in support of the Tiananmen Square protesters, at the dismantled Berlin Wall and beyond.
The song was “We Shall Overcome.”
Mr. Carawan, a white folk singer and folklorist who died on Saturday at 87, did not write “We Shall Overcome,” nor did he claim to. The song, variously a religious piece, a labor anthem and a hymn of protest, had woven in and out of American oral tradition for centuries, embodying the country’s twinned history of faith and struggle. Over time, it was further polished by professional songwriters.
But in teaching it to hundreds of delegates at the inaugural meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee — held in Raleigh on April 15, 1960 — Mr. Carawan fathered the musical manifesto that, more than any other, became “the ‘Marseillaise’ of the integration movement,” as The New York Times described it in 1963.
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