Bob Dylan wrote songs about victims of racial injustice

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

The story

Bob Dylan's early albums turned the news of the civil rights era into song. When the folk magazine Broadside invited songs about the Ole Miss riot of October 1962, triggered by James Meredith's enrolment as the first Black student at the University of Mississippi, Dylan wrote Oxford Town. It never names Meredith or the university, which helped it outlast the headlines; years later Dylan said he could have written it yesterday, because nothing had changed. It appeared on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan in 1963.

His third album, The Times They Are a-Changin', went further. Only a Pawn in Their Game addressed the assassination of the civil rights leader Medgar Evers outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi, on 12 June 1963. Instead of simply condemning the gunman, it blamed the politicians and authorities who stirred poor white people to hate, and Dylan sang it at a voter registration rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, and at the March on Washington that summer.

The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll told the true story of a 51-year-old Black barmaid who died in February 1963 after being struck with a cane by William Zantzinger, a 24-year-old from a wealthy white tobacco-farming family, at a society ball in a Baltimore hotel. Zantzinger was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to just six months, and the start of his sentence was delayed so he could bring in his tobacco harvest. Dylan's song, with a chorus melody drawn from the old ballad Mary Hamilton, turns that sentence into a quiet, devastating indictment. The same album's Ballad of Hollis Brown and North Country Blues described the despair of failing farm and mining communities.

These songs named real people and real injustices at a time when many popular entertainers avoided controversy. They carried the stories to young listeners who might never have read about them, and showed that a popular song could be a serious act of witness.

They have kept that power. Evers's killer was finally convicted in 1994, and later musicians, from Public Enemy to John Mellencamp, have drawn on Only a Pawn in Their Game to address racism in their own time.