We Shall Not Be Moved/No Nos Moverán: Biography of a Song of Struggle

Publication Date

9-1-2017

Document Type

Article

Abstract

© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com....Labor and civil rights activists, Spanish and Chilean antifascists, and South African freedom fighters share the song “We Shall Not Be Moved” (in Spanish, “No nos moverán”). David Spener chronicles this song and its impact across multiple social justice movements, linking its origins to verses in the Bible and in hymnals dating to the Great Awakening in the 1830s. He believes that slaves sang a version of the song and shows how it wound through various African American churches and labor movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He even finds Elvis Presley recording it as a gospel song for Sun Records in 1956. I am most familiar with it as the anthem of the 1930s Southern Tenant Farmers Union in Arkansas....

Publication Title

Journal of American History

Volume

104

Issue

2

First Page

553

Last Page

554

DOI

10.1093/jahist/jax281

Publisher Policy

post-print (with 2 year embargo)

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