And the folk singer Guy Carawan, who popularized the song “We Shall Overcome” for activists in the civil rights movement, has died at the age of 87. Carawan became music director of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee in 1959. In a 2004 interview on Democracy Now!, Carawan’s friend, the late, great Pete Seeger, recalled how Carawan helped make the song “We Shall Overcome” a rallying cry.

Pete Seeger: “It was a friend of mine, Guy Carawan, who made it famous. He picked up my way of singing it, 'We Shall Overcome,' although Septima—there was another teacher there, Septima Clark, a black woman. She felt that ’shall’—like me, she felt it opened up the mouth better than 'will,' so that’s the way she sang it. Anyway, Guy Carawan in 1960 taught it to the young people at the founding convention of SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC for short. And a month later, it wasn’t a song, it was the song, throughout the South.”

Guy Carawan died in his sleep at home after a battle with Alzheimer’s disease on Saturday, one day before what would have been Pete Seeger’s 96th birthday. Pete Seeger died last January.