We Shall Not Be Moved/No nos moverán

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. The singers John Handcox, Lee Hays, Zilphia Horton, Pete Seeger, and others spread it far and wide. Left-wing radio stations played it, and Victor Jarra and others sang it as they went to their deaths at the hands of the Chilean junta in a U.S.-backed coup on September 11, 1973. Spener is unrelenting in his search for its appearance in every social movement imaginable

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