From Amorphous Idealism to Self-alienation - Using “We shall overcome” and “Ohio” as Indicators of the 60s’ Civil Right Movement

Title: From Amorphous Idealism to Self-alienation - Using “We shall overcome” and “Ohio” as Indicators of the 60s’ Civil Right Movement

By Gong Lei（江離）

 
Joan Baez’s “We shall overcome”(1963) and Neil Young’s “Ohio”(1970) are both anthems of the 60s’ Civil Right Movement, yet it is also easy for beholders to notice their stark contrast. Baez’s song is originally a hymn (likely owe its origin to Charles Albert Tindley’s “I’ll Overcome Some Day” in 1901), for which its gradual and serene melody pretty much exhibits the optimism and faith that most participants had immersed themselves in during the March on Washington, while Young’s rock ballad is clearly much more intense, bitter and desperate no matter of its lyrics or music. In my opinion, though not by design, both of them had respectively symbolized the heyday and the coda of the whole 60s’ movement.
 
Doubtlessly, “We shall overcome” was an inspiration to many left-wing activists and students of the generation, for it had not only represented a public stand up to the long-established “racial bigotry” and Jim Crow etiquette in the South, but also gave hope to many people that there would eventually be a genuine reconciliation between different races in America.[1] However, it should be note that the word which generated the most rallying power, i.e. the “we” in the song title, might also be a pretentious assertion, as one might easily ask, who are “we”? What makes us the same? And what gives you the right to use “we” and to represent “me”? Just as Bernice Johnson, a black female activist and founding member of the SNCC, once remarked,

 

“In the black community, if you want to express the group, you have to say ‘I,’ because if you say ‘we,’ I have no idea who's gonna be there. Have you ever been in a meeting, people say, ‘We're gonna bring some food tomorrow to feed the people.’ And you sit there on the bench and say, ‘Hmm. I have no idea.’ It is when I say, ‘I’m gonna bring cake,’ and somebody else says, ‘I’ll bring chicken,’ that you actually know you're gonna get a dinner. So there are many black traditional collective-expression songs where it's 'I,' because in order for you to get a group, you have to have I's.” [2]

 

Therefore, adopting “we” instead of “I” in the song was an effective but also a precarious move, especially when in today if we asked the question of “What’s left?”, it could actually be anyone who claimed himself to be embracing the label “progressive”.[3] Michael Lind has also observed that the egalitarianism in America has long been “greatly exaggerated”, as there were (and still are) different “castes” within both the black and white race.[4] And just by uttering “we” would not help to change any of these existing status boundaries in the US. It is even to an extent agreeable for Malcolm X’s to have his cruel slam at the March, as he lamented the original “militant, unorganized and leaderless” movement was compromised and hijacked by the Civil Right leaders,

 

“The marcher had been instructed to bring no signs - signs were provided. They had been told to sing one song: ‘we shall overcome’. They had been told how to arrive, when, where to arrive, where to assemble, when to start marching, the route to march. First-aid stations were strategically located - even where to faint!” [5]

 

Certainly, many of Malcolm X’s rhetorics are debatable, and historically speaking, the March was not completely fruitless at all, as it prompted the subsequent passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Yet if just by looking at “We shall overcome” as well as King’s speech “I have a dream”, it would be safe to say that their ideal was still somehow amorphous and uncertain. The object that they were “overcoming” was never stated explicitly in the lyrics, and “someday” still remained as an indistinct date in most people’s agenda. Public discrimination was driven out of historical stage successively but latent racism remained. Surely it might be a bit too much to demand a song to provide a full blueprint for a movement’s future, yet here was something raised by Tom Kahn that is worth-noting, as he pointed out that many intellectuals of the time were just treating the New Left as “a milieu, an atmosphere”, and the participants were “hunger to have their own contours delineated, their unique moods articulated”, and this could easily stray the movement’s objective to become just “presenting an image” rather than “changing the reality”.[6] “We shall overcome” is undoubtedly an excellent song-choice for a mass movement, yet its simplicity in language might also allow medias to dilute the real political meaning of the whole movement, or to fabricate it as just a delectable, socially-harmless cultural phenomenon, while “We shall overcome” was used nothing more than an empty slogan for some transient political fashion. The assertion of “we”, also lied the danger of framing historical sin into some kind of “collective virtue”. Its generic lyrics did not offer much space for introspective reflection, which is possibly a reason of why doubt did slowly grow in some intellectuals’ mind, and thus brought to their subsequent estrangement from the mainstream movement (e.g. Bob Dylan).

 

And for Young’s “Ohio”, though it was only seven years later than Baez’s song, it was already emerged in a wholly different context. The Vietnam War had drew almost all the New Left’s attention since 1966, and the draft had now become an existential crisis for almost everyone in the country. “Ohio” was a direct response to the Kent State shootings of May 4, 1970, and though traditionally it was not uncommon for ballads to be “based on actual occurrence” (e.g. “Been On The Job Too Long” by Wilmer Watts & The Lonely Eagles), the anger as well as accusatory power that reflected in the song was unprecedented.[7] The famous call-out to Richard Nixon in its opening was no doubt deliberate: it set the belligerent tone of the whole song and identified the President as the one who should be held accountable for this tragedy. And for the following line “we’ve finally on our own”, it actually to an extent revealed the disillusionment and alienation that many activists had felt after Humphrey’s victory in the 1968 Chicago Convention as well as the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy at the same year.[8] Then for the chorus, “should have been done long ago” was probably the most extreme statement, as it contained the subtext (and also self-sarcasm) that “how did it took us so long to realize the government had wanted to gun us down ever since the movement’s initiation?” If Baez’s “We shall overcome” was a suggestion of national reconciliation, then “Ohio” was clearly a blunt answer by the movement’s successors, that there would be no possibility of reconciliation, not at least on this event. Interestingly, it was also seven years later when Young wrote another less-known song called “Campaigner”, a pensive yet unelaborated reflection, which included a refrain “Even Richard Nixon has got Soul”. What inspired Young to make such a remark is uncertain, yet if we concur with the expression that “to understand (all) is to pardon (all)”, then it might be because as years went on Young had also somehow sensed that Nixon might also had his own dilemma in his position. More importantly, is that when the whole euphoria of the 60s’ movement was over, and in face of a decade that was palpably loomed by the upcoming consumerism, even Young had to reconcile with the fact that his song might be a capitalization of those American students who died in the tragedy. And with both the loss and lost that many activists had experienced in the hippies’ self-anesthetized drug culture, as well as the discouraging performance of the Carter’s administration (mainly the pitiable domestic economy that he was incapable of relieving), it is also explainable of why no one in the left could continue to pretend oneself to be so self-righteous and confidence in preaching mere idealism or moral dogma to the mass. Perhaps the intervention of US in the Vietnam War was indeed morally untenable, yet neither could the “disinclination (of many leftists of the time) to develop an attitude toward (the Vietcong)” be considered virtuous by any standard.[9] As Tom Kahn had acutely foreseen, both the politics and youth culture of the 60s have long already become “a proper object of formal study”, yet whether to simply frame the object as nothing more than a “generational conflict” (e.g “don't criticize what you can't understand” from Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin'”), or to complement it with some of the more hesitant and introspective accounts (e.g. “Well maybe it is just the time of year/Or maybe it’s the time of man/I don’t know who l am/But you know life is for learning”, from Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock”), are two kinds of attitude. Roads did “stretch out like healthy veins” after the economic recovery in the 80s, and the former youth culture had also now already become a kind of cultural products under the trend of global commercialism, yet the true (and sometimes reserved) reflections of the past only existed as a faint undercurrent that is barely perceptible (if not totally murky) to the eyes of mindful observers.

14 March, 2021

Footnotes 

[1] Ferris State University, Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. “What was Jim Crow”. From(https://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/what.htm). Hayden, Tom et al. (Students for a Democratic Society). The Port Huron Statement, 1962.

[2] Adams, Noah, The Inspiring Force Of 'We Shall Overcome', NPR, August 28, 2013. From (https://www.npr.org/2013/08/28/216482943/the-inspiring-force-of-we-shall-overcome)

[3] Gregory, James N. "Remapping the American Left: A History of Radical Discontinuity." Labor, 1 May 2020 (vol. 17/2), pp. 14.

[4] Lind, Michael. "The New National American Elite." Tablet, Jan. 20, 2021

[5] Malcolm X, Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, London : Penguin Books , 2001, p.387.

[6] Kahn, Tom. "The Problem of the New Left." Commentary, July 1966.

[7] Hamm, Charles. Music in the New World. New York: Norton, 1983. pp. 463.

[8] Gregory, James N. "Remapping the American Left: A History of Radical Discontinuity." Labor, 1 May 2020 (vol. 17/2), pp. 31.

[9] Kahn, Tom. "The Problem of the New Left." Commentary, July 1966.

Bibliography
 
Adams, Noah, The Inspiring Force Of 'We Shall Overcome', NPR, August 28, 2013. From (https://www.npr.org/2013/08/28/216482943/the-inspiring-force-of-we-shall-overcome)
 
Ferris State University, Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. “What was Jim Crow”. From(https://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/what.htm)
 
Gregory, James N. "Remapping the American Left: A History of Radical Discontinuity." Labor, 1 May 2020 (vol. 17/2), pp. 11-45
 
Hamm, Charles. Music in the New World. New York: Norton, 1983. Ch. 16: "Diamonds in the Rough - Hillbilly and Country-Western Music," pp. 460-497
 
Hayden, Tom et al. (Students for a Democratic Society). The Port Huron Statement, 1962.
 
Kahn, Tom. "The Problem of the New Left." Commentary, July 1966
 
Lind, Michael. "The New National American Elite." Tablet, Jan. 20, 2021
 
Malcolm X, Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, chap. 15 “Icarus”, London : Penguin Books , 2001.

John Filo's photo: