In 1957, on a lazy September day, Pete Seeger took up a twelve-string guitar and did something rather ordinary. At the Highlander Folk School in southern Tennessee, Seeger performed “We Shall Overcome” to an audience of civil rights activists. But while he’d performed the song so often it had become an impalpable appendage, there was a young preacher in attendance hearing it for the first time. The next day, as he drove across 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 which art cannot digest. Art clarifies what cognition alone cannot. And when it reflects not only our individual experiences, but collective hurts and aspirations, its power to unite disparate peoples is unparalleled. King’s and Seeger’s childhoods were wildly divergent, but both men were subsumed by the movement for civil rights, because they were alike in their belief in our most human truth: we are all equal, and we have a responsibility to one another.

Homelessness, like segregation, is a blight on this nation. Its existence is a testament to entrenched interests and apathy, and speaks to a systemic failure to honor our obligations to one another. Bruce Springsteen once said that he seeks in his music to “measure the distance between the American promise and the American reality.” (more…)