"We Shall Overcome" is a protest song that became a key anthem of the US civil rights movement. The lyrics of the song are derived from a gospel song by Reverend Charles Tindley. The song was published in 1947 as "We Will Overcome" in the People's Songs Bulletin (a publication of People's Songs, an organization of which Pete Seeger was the director and guiding spirit).

It appeared in the bulletin as a contribution of and with an introduction by Zilphia Horton, then music director of the Highlander Folk School of Monteagle, Tennessee, a school that trained union organizers. It was her favorite song and she taught it to Pete Seeger, who included it in his repertoire, as did many other activist singers, such as Frank Hamilton and Joe Glazer, who recorded it in 1950. The song became associated with the Civil Rights movement from 1959, when Guy Carawan stepped in as song leader at Highlander, and the school was the focus of student non-violent activism.

It quickly became the movement's unofficial anthem. Seeger and other famous folksingers in the early 1960s, such as Joan Baez, sang the song at rallies, folk festivals, and concerts in the North and helped make it widely known. Since its rise to prominence, the song, and songs based on it, have been used in a variety of protests worldwide.

The phrase "We Will Overcome" first appears in print in the published lyrics to a 1901 hymn or gospel music composition by Rev. Charles Tindley of Philadelphia. Tindley was an African Methodist Episcopal Church minister who composed many hymns and lyrics, some 50 of which are known to have survived.

Over time, others added newer lyrics from the common store of stock phases used in spirituals, including the repeated line "I'll overcome someday," and the phrase, "Deep in my heart," which also appears in a later gospel song. Various versions of the spiritual were sung in black churches in the 1800s and at integrated meetings of black and white coal miners in the early 1900s. According to music historian James J.

Fuld, although Tindley's lyrics are similar to those sung today, his tune was not the one now associated with the song. Sometime between 1900 and 1946, someone, most likely Atron Twigg, married Tindley's lyrics to the opening and closing melody of the famous nineteenth century spiritual, "No More Auction Block For Me", also known as, "Many Thousands Gone". This song, or rather the lyrics to this song, under the title "Many thousands Gone", was number 35 in Thomas Wentworth Higginson's collection of Negro Spirituals that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly of June, 1867, with a comment by Higginson on how such songs were composed: Coincidentally, Bob Dylan claims that he used this very same tune from "No More Auction Block" for his composition, "Blowin' in the Wind." Thus similarities of melodic and rhythmic patterns imparted cultural and emotional resonance ("the same feeling") to three different, and historically very significant songs.

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