One is a song that had been sung for a long time before the 1960s. It’s “We Shall Overcome,” of course. We all know it, maybe some of you actually sang it when you were young, holding hands with the people alongside you. I wrote a few pages about it in Book Two of my Johnson biography, Means of Ascent, saying that that song had been sung for a very long time before the Sixties, that it was a hymn that was sung at the beginning of the nineteenth century, probably even earlier, in African-American churches. Sung probably by people who were slaves.
