For many years now, I challenged us to begin to celebrate The Overcome on the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, April 4. I believe we should stop referring to MLK’s death as an assassination. Rather, we should treat April 4th as the day on which MLK was sacrificed for us. And we should stop singing the song “We Shall Overcome Someday,” and claim that we have already overcome through the victories of our ancestors, who, in worse times, fought and won great battles, giving us the success stories we needed to authentically claim that we have indeed overcome.
We must always remember that these victories were won for us by those who went before us and we are now claiming that the life, ministry, death and elevation of MLK is the event we will use, going forward, to mark and crown “The Overcome,” for which many marched, sang, bled and suffered over centuries of systemic oppression.
See, victories MUST be both named and dated! The name and date capture the moment and create the dividing line between the before/after of the event. In this way, we can clearly define what went before with all its pain and gore, and what comes after— those big victories, with all their promises! The victories confirm “The Overcome.” We date it on April 4th, the day MLK was martyred, like Jesus was! Providentially, this year, April 4, OVERCOME DAY, falls between GOOD FRIDAY and EASTER DAY! WOW. Is God trying to tell us something special here?
Today, I want to impress on our minds the power that is resident in the concept, Overcome. Notice I did not call it just a word. There is so much power resident in the concept, Overcome, that I decided to simply google some of the synonyms of the word, Overcome.
Synonyms of OVERCOME: Conquer, master, surmount, get, beat, dispatch, succeed, best, worst, lick, overmatch, ‘get around,’ stop, take, subdue, overbear, overwhelm, upend, overbear, overwhelm, upend, surpass, bury, trim, finish, ‘do down’, exceed, crush, prevail-over, ‘get the better of’, triumph over, vanquish, win (against), ‘knock for a loop, score, excel, sweep, upset, slaughter, annihilate, transcend, ‘blow out,’ break, excel, sweep, upset, slaughter, annihilate, transcend, flourish, ‘blow away,’ top, nose out, flatten, trounce, better, subjugate, whip, overthrow, overpower, bomb, cap, skin, ‘snow under,’ rout, clobber, outdo, smoke, cream, unseat, outshine, knock over, outdistance, pip, drub, trash, outstrip, wallop, shellac, eclipse, wax, edge-out, outfight, knock off, overtop, ‘ace-out,’ defeat!
Whatever you do with this short column, make sure you preserve those synonyms of the working concept used so effectively during the Civil Rights Movement. Those synonyms capture the hopes, desires and intentions of our forebears as they fought for our freedom. They persisted despite water hoses, dogs, beatings, arrests, lynchings and more. And now, we need to honor their legacy by boldly claiming that they did overcome, as captured in the synonyms above, and they did it so successfully that in less than a generation we were able to field a two term president and a recent vice president. How impressive is that?
Now, the main reason I am personally so passionate about establishing the Overcome (as understood through the enumerated synonyms) is very simple. I have been harboring these thoughts for years. When I was rector of St Katherine of Alexandria Episcopal Church in Baltimore, with very sophisticated and accomplished members among the congregation, Congressman Parren J. Mitchell included, I had great difficulty watching these very successful people singing in dirge-like fashion the song “we Shall Overcome Someday.” Perhaps it was because I was from the Caribbean. But I often wondered “what the hell these guys needed to overcome?” They were all so successful. Then I looked in the records and discovered that Thurgood Marshall, Parren Mitchell and Clarence Mitchell Sr. were baptized or confirmed in that little parish at the corner of Presstman and Division Streets in the late 1920s.
Wow! I was looking up to these people, thinking that they had arrived, but people were still singing that they would Overcome “someday.” I knew that “someday” can never arrive if one continued to sing a song like that. I knew that not even tomorrow ever arrived, because what was called tomorrow, on its arrival immediately becomes “today” with its own tomorrow. This is when my training in language analysis from my time at Yale University came into play. My analysis led me to conclude that the Overcome we all sought must be declared by us and celebrated by us. I concluded that the moving, lineal understanding of overcome, as a verb, must be changed into the character resident noun, “The Overcome” and that that concept should be used to collect, hold and pass on all the victories of black people.
Now that I am getting old, knowing I will die soon, I know that I do not want to die having my children and grandchildren singing that they will win “someday!” That demeans me and my work, personally. But more so, it demeans Martin Luther King, Thurgood Marshall and the stalwarts of liberation who accomplished so much for us. Therefore, we must boldly claim our having Overcome through their work and we must celebrate it continuously. And I am begging you to date it on the day MLK was sacrificed, April 4, which miraculously falls between GOOD FRIDAY and EASTER THIS YEAR. We henceforth name ourselves OVERCOMERS. Why, because overcomers by nature and character must live overcoming lives.