Poetry Friday: We Shall Overcome

Last week was the 50^th anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It’s the perfect time to read poet Debbie Levy’s new picture book WE SHALL OVERCOME: THE STORY OF A SONG.

Read more about it at Debbie's website.

I’m featuring the book for Poetry Friday today, but be sure to stop back next week when Debbie visits Author Amok. She’s joining me for “5 Questions for the Author.”

Today's host is my friend
Linda Kulp at Write Time!

I picked up WE SHALL OVERCOME for several reasons:

1.   Debbie Levy is a local author whose work I’ve enjoyed and admired. 

2.   “The Story of a Song” is an intriguing topic for a picture book.

3.  This is the kind of book I like to recommend to educators when I visit our diverse local schools.

WE SHALL OVERCOME lived up to my expectations on all three counts. But it also made me cry. Like big, blubbery, I-can’t-see-what-I’m-reading-because-tears kind of cry.

With a deceptively light tough, WE SHALL OVERCOME traces the song that became a Civil Rights anthem to its roots in American slavery. The book opens with these lines:

Back in slavery times—

when enslaved people worked long days

with no pay and no say,

no freedom, no fairness,

no choice and no change—

the people sang.

They suffered, yet they sang—

to soothe the hurt,

to fight the cruelty,

to declare that—yes!—they were human beings.

Each spread shows how the song moved from cotton fields to black churches, from community to community, evolving over time. “I’ll overcome” became “We will overcome” during the early years of the Civil Rights movement.

They started to protest.

They brought a church song, “I Will Overcome,”

to the streets.

But since they were marching and working together,

they sang “We will Overcome.”

We, together, will overcome.

We see the song’s power to comfort protesters at segregated lunch counters. It is taken on the road by a group called the Freedom Singers, and sung at the historic 1963 March on Washington. But the story doesn’t end when the Civil Rights Act passes. Debbie continues to follow “We Shall Overcome” as it travels to South Africa and throughout the world.

I loved this book’s combination of music, history, and human rights. But I think what made me cry was how Debbie gets this point across: the words of “We Shall Overcome” represent a deep faith in humanity and in our ability to—someday—value all human beings as equals.

Debbie was kind enough to provide this wonderful photograph of herself and the book's illustrator, Vanessa Brantley-Newton, at the Martin Luther King Memorial in Washington, DC.

King incorporated the words "We shall overcome" into his speeches.

A spread from WE SHALL OVERCOME
from Vanessa Brantley-Newton's website.

One feature of the book I’d like to highlight comes after the text. WE SHALL OVERCOME includes an easy-to-follow timeline of the events mentioned in the book. Thumbnails of Vanessa's wonderful art brings these dates to life.

Thanks to Debbie Levy for giving me permission to post excerpts from WE SHALL OVERCOME today. For more information about the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, visit the Civil Rights 50 website.

Next week, Debbie will be here in person to tell us about her writing process. I can’t wait to hear how she developed, researched, and wrote the story of this important song.