Bob Dylan sang at the 1963 March on Washington

Person: Bob Dylan
Lived: b. 1941
Field: Music
From: American

The story

By the summer of 1963 Bob Dylan, then just 22, had become one of the leading voices of the folk revival, and with Joan Baez he was prominent in the civil rights movement. His songs drew directly on the news. In June 1963 the civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi, and Dylan responded with Only a Pawn in Their Game.

He first sang the new song on 6 July 1963 at a voter registration rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, at the invitation of Pete Seeger, and again at the Newport Folk Festival later that month. Rather than simply condemning the gunman, the song blamed the politicians and authorities who stirred up poor white people to hate their Black neighbours, describing the killer as a pawn in their game.

On 28 August 1963 Dylan and Baez performed together at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where between 200,000 and 300,000 people gathered to demand civil and economic rights for Black Americans. Dylan sang Only a Pawn in Their Game and When the Ship Comes In, sharing a programme that included Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson. The Evers song received only scattered applause from a crowd that did not all share its view of the killer, but Dylan never forgot the day. He later recalled that he had never seen such a large crowd and that he was close by when Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his I Have a Dream speech, which still affected him profoundly.

The march is credited with helping to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and it was followed by the campaign that led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Dylan's presence showed how closely the new generation of songwriters had tied their music to the struggle for equal rights. Both songs appeared on his album The Times They Are a-Changin' in 1964.

The Evers song has kept its force. In 2020 John Mellencamp reworked it as A Pawn in the White Man's Game to address the racial conflicts that followed the murder of George Floyd, and Dylan's songs from that summer are still sung at rallies for justice.