New Haven Independent

Salt and Pepper Gospel Singers performed the civil rights classic at the event Monday afternoon at Immanuel Baptist Church. (Click play arrow for a sample.)

And it was the message of the main sermon delivered for the event, the annual community-wide Interfaith Cooperative Ministries.

Rev. Frederick Streets delivered the sermon. He called it “The ‘We’ in ‘We Shall Overcome.’”

Some people interpret the “we” in the song as African-Americans fighting for civil rights. That interpretation is accurate, but “incomplete,” said Streets, who since his tenure as Yale University’s chaplain has been teaching at Yeshiva University.

“The ‘We’ in ‘We Shall Overcome’ includes each of us sharing and carrying the heavy burdens of our nation regardless of if we contribute to their weight,” he said.

“The ‘We’ in ‘We Shall Overcome’ is us. We compose the picture of America,” Streets told the multiracial gathering. “… The ‘We’ in ‘We Shall Overcome’ is all of God’s people on this planet joined in that great march of freedom.”

Streets began by describing a picture shot when he was a child. He was accompanying his grandmother, a domestic in Chicago, to a white family’s house. The family had been chosen to be filmed for a bread company commercial about an all-American family, circa the 1950s. He assumed he’d be in the picture, too.

“I’d been told that I was a member of the family…. So I stood there with the rest of them, who were all white, waiting for the instructions to say, ‘Cheese.’ I was gently told to stand to the side.”

(Click on the play arrow to watch Streets’ moving recitation of the full story.)

In Streets’ telling, “We” all belong in any picture of the all-American family, circa 2008.