Bob Dylan and the Civil Rights Movement, a Lecture by Steve Potts

Thursday night I went to see/hear Steve Potts' third Year of Dylan presentation. His previous two lectures, held at the Discovery Center in Chisholm, were on Dylan & the Beatles, and Dylan & the Vietnam War. Potts, who teaches at the community college on the Iron Range, is also an author, having published 150 children's books alongside his teaching career. 

Brian Simonson, a member of the committee involved in helping launch the St. Louis County Year of Dylan, welcomed the small but appreciative audience in attendance and introduced the speaker. The talk was dense with information, his style of delivery easygoing and authentic. 

Before diving into his theme Mr. Potts briefly touched on some personal stories that set up his lecture. Bob Dylan's presence at the August 28, 1963 March on Washington wasn't an aberration for Bob. In 1971 he participated--invited by his good friend George Harrison--in the Concert for Bangladesh, and later performed in the first globally broadcast concert for a cause, Live Aid. "Today everyone does concerts for charity," Potts said, noting these latter two events were groundbreaking.

In 1963 the times were indeed changing. The years leading up to the March on Washington included Freedom Rides, lunch-counter sit-ins, arrests and violence against Blacks who were striving to raise awareness regarding the injustices taking place. Southern Democrats were blocking the implementation of the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education and President Kennedy, fearing he would lose this voting block in the following year's re-election bid, did little to pressure the Southern Dems.

Black leaders from nearly all the major groups, decided to call for a March on Washington for jobs and an end segregation. The "Big Six" of this leadership coalition included Roy Wilkins, John L. Lewis, Whitney Young, James Farmer, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., A. Philip Randolph. Washington DC was chosen primarily for its symbolic value.

Dr. Martin Luther King was insistent that there be no violence. (Malcolm X, who was not part of this event, called it "The Farce on Washington.")

It's interesting that after the assassination of Dr. King, riots broke out in every major city in the U.S., except Minneapolis. Mr. Potts suggested that this was because Hubert Humphrey was mayor at that time. 

There were a lot of important people present that day. Jackie Robinson, James Baldwin, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, Ruby Dee and Sammy Davis, Jr. to name a few.

Joan and Bob. Post card on one of my cabinets.

How did Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul, and Mary end up singing there? Evidently someone felt that by having these young White singers perform it would reach other young people.

In July, two weeks after Medgar Evers was shot, Bob, Pete Seeger and others went to Greenwood, Mississippi to perform on behalf of voter rights for Blacks, the cause for which Evers. had been killed. Potts said, "You've got to respect a man who put his career on the line for a cause." 

Afterwards, there were requests made for Bob to be a spokesperson for other causes and Dylan stepped back from being the front man for causes. He denied being the voice of a generation and refused to be anyone's pawn. He did not, however, stop writing songs that challenged and informed people with a conscience. 

At one point the speaker drew our attention to another Dylan song about an event from the Sixties, Dylan's longest song. How long? 17 minutes. Mr. Potts noted that Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech is also 17 minutes. He then asked, "Coincidence?" (I'm referring to Dylan's Covid-era needle drop "Murder Most Foul" about the assassination of President Kennedy.)

For me it immediately brought to mind other layers of meaning regarding the number 17, which I wrote about in this blog post about the Alhambra. Since then, 17 is among my favorite numbers, and these new connections only served to reinforce that impression.

Much more can be said about the evening, but for now I hope you've enjoyed reading about the flavor of the lecture. It was tasty. Thank you, Steve, for all you shared. The audience was engaged throughout. We look forward to seeing you again at Duluth Dylan Fest.

George Harrison & Friends: The 1971 Concert for Bangladesh

Madison Square Garden, 1971

For Dylan fans it was one of his rare public appearances between the Woodstock motorcycle incident and the Rolling Thunder Revue. The Concert for Bangladesh, initiated by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar, served two important functions. First, it drew attention to a major catastrophe in a remote region that few Americans were even aware of, overnight turning Bangladesh into a household name. And second, by being the first concert of its kind to bring a host of famous rock musicians together for a charitable cause. The achievements and mis-steps would help future such efforts by famous musicians to bring aid to needy causes.

My aim in this blog post is to shed a little light on what was really happening in Bangladesh in the previous ten months before the concert. If you are like me, you only seem to remember the tragic cyclone, a natural disaster of epic proportions.

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There were actually two trigger events that led to the concert, the first this natural disaster, and the second a monumental man-made disaster. I've just finished reading Paul Thomas Chamberlin's The Cold War's Killing Fields, subtitled Rethinking the Long Peace. I can't recall when I've been so moved by a single book. While reading it I have mentioned to several friends that "this is the saddest book I've read in my life." The underreported human suffering that has been perpetrated in the course of our lifetimes since World War II is nothing short of shocking when you lay it all out in one book. What Chamberlin does, probably unique, is to show how a single thread actually connects all these disparate atrocities, that thread being the cold war and corresponding fears of the major superpowers.

So much of what has happened these past 70 years was delivered through the media piecemeal so that Americans not only were left in the dark much of the time, the general impression has been that Americans have always been the good guys, the white horse heroes. The tragedy of Bangladesh was two-fold. The first was a destructive cyclone of historic proportions that devastated the country and left as many as 500,000 dead in its wake. Because East Pakistan was located 1000 miles from Pakistan there was a move for liberation which led to a military incursion by the Pakistan army that resulted in the deaths of a quarter million civilians and seven million refugees fleeing to India. This latter had been building for years and did not occur overnight, but the timing of its escalation couldn't have been worse.

The Chamberlin book outlines how WW2 changed the face of the world's power game. We tend to forget that before the World Wars European powers were colonialists whom for hundreds of years had their fingers in every corner of the known world. Suddenly this all changed. The aftermath of WW2 resulted in a variety of complicated conflicts as groups within various regions struggled for freedom and autonomy. Looking back, we've forgotten, or failed to notice, the relationship between the collapse of Colonialism and the various mini-wars in all corners of the world.

The subsequent power struggles occurred against a new backdrop, the Cold War. The big players in this new game interpreted events through their own lenses. Pakistan was an ally of the U.S. so when it began committing horrors against its own people, President Nixon and his advisors chose to support Pakistan with arms and did nothing to restrain the genocidal horror under the pretext that we need an ally like Pakistan in this part of the world. China was breaking with Moscow, and we wanted to be tightly embedded in the region.

After the cyclone the United States initially wanted to help alleviate suffering, but then National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger weighed in, indicating it would make Pakistan look bad in the world's eyes if we did more than they did for their own people. After West Pakistan's bungling relief efforts, a December election showed how divided East Pakistan sentiments were from West Pakistan. In their divine wisdom the West Pakistani leaders decided in March that instead of meeting needs they would invade and slaughter, using American made M-24 tank units. Within a few days there were radio reports of three hundred thousand killed.

Reports like this were easily dismissed as Bengali exaggerations, but when Nixon's own foreign office reported how brutal the atrocities were Nixon and Kissinger applauded the success of the Pakistan army in crushing the "uprising."

I don't need to repeat all the details, only that U.S representatives in Pakistan wrote a scathing indictment of our leaders that begins with this: "Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy." The London Times reported "This is genocide, conducted with amazing casualness." Millions of refugees fled to India. Cholera and smallpox began breaking out, taking even more lives.

You can be sure that all these horrors weighed heavily on Ravi Shankar, the Bengali musician who  taught George Harrison how to play the sitar which is featured on "Within You, Without You," the opening track on side two of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album. Ravi Shankar, who had remained a friend of Harrison since that time, had relations in East Pakistan and he (Shankar) was well aware of the trauma there.

The Concert for Bangladesh took place at the beginning of August featuring "a supergroup of performers that included Harrison, fellow ex-Beatle Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Billy Preston, Leon Russell and the band Badfinger. In addition, Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan – both of whom had ancestral roots in Bangladesh – performed an opening set of Indian classical music. Decades later, Shankar would say of the overwhelming success of the event: 'In one day, the whole world knew the name of Bangladesh. It was a fantastic occasion.'"*

The  account here is much abbreviated from that which is in The Cold War Killing Fields.  When I think back on that period in my life I can't recall a single word about the atrocities that took place after the initial devastation of the cyclone. The war in Viet Nam was the focus of our media and the complexities surrounding the political struggles of these various nations made it easy to not really say much. Americans were too distracted by other things to really try to figure out what was happening here or what happened in Indonesia where in 1965-66 500,000 to a million civilians were similarly slaughtered by their own government for reasons of their own while the U.S. simply stood by and watched.

All this to say that it was a beautiful thing what these performer did. But it makes me sad to reflect on how little I knew about the world we've lived in all the years. And this is but one chapter.

Related Links
Bob Dylan's 18-minute set during the Concert for Bangladesh
The Feature Film of the Concert directed by Phil Spector

"Still my guitar gently weeps..."

*Wikipedia