08/29/2026
Yes!
In 1946, Tennessee state law demanded a physical wall between Black and white adults gathering inside a public building. The wooden library at the Highlander Folk School simply ignored the law.
The school sat in the mountains of Monteagle, Tennessee. Its director of music was a woman named Zilphia Horton.
She did not view music as mere entertainment. She taught labor organizers and factory workers how to use songs to hold a picket line when local police showed up with weapons.
Zilphia grew up in a coal mining town in Arkansas. She understood how company towns controlled their workers, and she knew a song could communicate courage faster than a speech. She carried an accordion and kept a file of more than a thousand union songs.
During the Jim Crow era, Highlander was one of the few places in the American South where integrated groups could sit at the same dinner table. They came to learn the practical mechanics of the labor movement. They learned how to run a mimeograph machine, how to read a union contract, and how to survive a protracted strike.
In the early spring of 1946, a group of factory workers traveled up to the mountains from Charleston, South Carolina. They were members of the Food, To***co, Agricultural, and Allied Workers Union.
The workers were mostly Black women. They had just survived a brutal winter strike against the American To***co Company, standing outside in the freezing rain for five months to win a wage increase of a few cents an hour.
A woman from Charleston named Lucille Simmons closed their evening meetings at the school. She sang a slow, heavy hymn based on a turn-of-the-century gospel song.
The original lyrics said, "I will overcome someday."
The state of Tennessee did not view this wooden school as a harmless mountain camp. Local authorities and federal investigators recognized that the economic order of the South depended on keeping white and Black workers strictly separated. A room where both groups realized they shared the same poverty and the same antagonists was a direct threat to the established power structure. The state treated Highlander as a serious security risk because teaching poor people to strike was considered subversive, and operating an integrated classroom was against the law.
The school operated under constant threat of closure and local violence.
The Ku Klux Klan marched past the property in the dark.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation opened a file on Zilphia.
Plainclothes informants sat in the back of her classes, taking notes on who attended.
She kept playing her accordion anyway.
When Lucille Simmons sang that slow hymn, Zilphia heard a tool. She wrote down the notes and adjusted the rhythm so a large crowd could sing it while walking a picket line. She began teaching it to every group of organizers who came through the Monteagle campus.
She added verses about walking hand in hand. She taught the students to cross their arms over their chests and hold the hands of the people standing next to them. This physical lock made it much harder for police to pull a line of protesters apart. A spiritual hymn had become a tactical weapon.
In the winter of 1947, folk singer Pete Seeger visited the school.
Zilphia taught the song to him.
He took it back to New York and published it in a national bulletin for union workers.
The lyrics shifted from the singular "I" to the plural "We." The promise changed from "will" to "shall." The song spread through union halls across the entire country.
Zilphia Horton died in 1956 after accidentally drinking a glass containing typewriter cleaning fluid.
She never saw the song she adapted echo across the National Mall in Washington. She never saw it sung on the bridge in Selma.
The state of Tennessee eventually revoked the school's charter, confiscated its property, and forced the organizers to relocate.
The state used the law to dismantle the school. The school used a song to dismantle the law.
The song was copyrighted in 1960 to protect it from being exploited by commercial record labels. The writers listed on the federal registration included Pete Seeger, Zilphia Horton, Guy Carawan, and Frank Hamilton.
Today, proceeds associated with the song flow into the We Shall Overcome Fund, administered by Highlander in Tennessee, which provides grants to support cultural and activist organizing throughout the South.
Zilphia Horton taught a song to an integrated room and helped change history.
