On a lazy September day in 1957, Pete Seeger took up a twelve-string guitar at the Highlander Folk School in southern Tennessee.  The song he performed, “We Shall Overcome,” was  old hat for him by then.  But a young preacher in attendance was hearing it for the first time.   The next day, as he crossed the border into Kentucky, Dr. Martin Luther King hummed the tune from a backseat, and remarked: “That song really sticks with you, doesn’t it?”

There’s little in the human experience that art cannot digest. Art clarifies what cognition alone cannot. And when it reflects not just individual experiences, but collective pains and aspirations, its power to unite people is unparalleled. While King’s and Seeger’s childhoods were wildly divergent, the civil rights movement subsumed them both around one human truth: we are all equal, and we have a responsibility to one another.

Homelessness, like segregation, is a blight on our conscience; it’s a monument to apathy, revealing a systemic failure to honor our most basic obligations. Bruce Springsteen once said that he seeks in his music to “measure the distance between the American promise and the American reality.” (more…)