In honor of a great man whose eloquence should be a a course in colleges and in honor of Martin Luther King day, I share the “We Shall Over Come” speech text and audio in this post. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made use of “we shall overcome” in the final Sunday March 31, 1968 speech before his assassination[16].
Speech Text:
We Shall Over Come…
Deep in my heart I do believe… We shall over come.
Now I join hands often with students and others behind jail bars singing it: “We shall over come.”
Sometimes we’ve had tears in our eyes when we joined together to sing it, but we still decided to sing it! “We shall over come.”
Lord before this victory is won some will have to get thrown in jail some more but we shall over come. Don’t worry about us, before the victory is won some of us will lose jobs, but we shall over come…
Before the victory is won, even some will have to face physical death. But if physical death is the price that some must pay, to free their children from a permanent psychological death.. then nothing shall be more redemptive… We shall over come.
Before the victory is won.. some will be misunderstood and called bad names and dismissed as rebel-rousers and agitators… But we shall over come.
and I’ll tell you why.
We shall over come because the arch of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.
We shall over come because Carlyle is right: “No lie can live forever“.
We shall over come because William Collin Bryant is right: “Truth crushed to earth will rise again“.
We shall over come because James Russel Lowell is right: “Truth forever on the scaffold.. Wrong forever on the throne… Yet that scaffold sways the future. And behind the dim unknown standeth God within the shadows, keeping watch above his own“.
We shall over come because the Bible is right… “You shall reap what you sow.
“
We shall over come… Deep i my heart I do believe! We shall over come.
And this with this faith… We will go out and adjourn the counsels of despair and bring new light into the dark chambers of pessimism. And we will be able to rise from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope. And this will be a great America! We will be the participants in making it so…
And so as I leave you this evening I say… “Walk together children! Don’t you get weary!”
Speech Audio:
Martin Luther King Jr. – We Shall Overcome
