If you're Pete Seeger in the early ‘60s, here's just one of
the things you do: You write a song. You call it "We Shall Overcome."
The song you've just written is not a formula for
"successful" records. Because it breaks all the rules for success. It
is not targeted to a group (say, single girls under 17). Or an interest, a
demographic, or a market segment. The song is not to somebody, it’s about something.
And that something is a very big idea... it's about optimism, persistence, and
about breaking down barriers.
(Remember). You're Pete Seeger. When you first started to
sing the song, you noticed that people joined in with you. You encouraged that.
It actually sounded better that way. In fact, collective voices always sound
better to you.
Lately, you've noticed still more people responding to the song
— some just hum it — as if that something you wrote is already half-engrained
in their memory. Sometimes the song brings people to their feet.
But then something else happens to the song. Something
exactly as extraordinary as writing it in the first place. A man named Martin
Luther King, Jr. hears it, and something in the song resonates with him. Later
that day, in the back seat of a station wagon, on his way to desegregate (how
old that word sounds now) Kentucky, he says to a friend of his (who was also a
friend of yours), "You know, that song really sticks with me." Did
King know that with that first question it was destined to be the song that
would come to represent everything he was doing? Was there a single moment of
recognition? Or was that first conversation just the initial spark, something
that in different circumstances could have sputtered and gone out?
"Aim at something that you can win," Martin Luther
King taught Pete. How to be part of "the teaspoon brigade" is what
Pete has taught us: "Imagine a big seesaw. One end of the seesaw is on the
ground, because on that end there's a big basket of rocks in there. The other
end of the seesaw has got a basket full of sand. Some of us have teaspoons.
We're trying to fill up that one with more sand. Most people are laughing at us
... We think that one of these days, that basket of sand is going to be more
than half full and that whole seesaw will go zoooop in the other direction, and
people will ask how it happened so suddenly."
Lucky for all of us, "we shall overcome" wasn't
the only fire Pete was going to light. There would be a long list of songs to
write. Causes to start. Big things that lit up the sky. Then. And now.
One of the big things Pete did was in his hometown Beacon:
He inspired other people to start things, really good things. Ned Sullivan of
Scenic Hudson described Pete to us as "the spiritual father" of the
Beacon Renaissance. For John Cronin, now president of the River Institute, Pete
just gave him a hammer and told him to get to work. It doesn't get more practical
or more profound than that.
One of main orders of business in this magazine is to report
on the people who are changing things. For this issue, we're celebrating some
of the people who helped make Beacon a kind of paradigm for smart planning (the
number on our list was set arbitrarily at ten). We are blown away by their
diversity, by their energy, by their conviction and by their generosity.
Here's to them.
