On this day in history civil rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated. Born July 2, 1925, in Decatur, Mississippi he became, in 1954, the first state field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi. As such, he organized voter-registration efforts and economic boycotts, and investigated crimes perpetrated against blacks. For these "subversive" activities he was assassinated outside his Mississippi home 55 years ago today. It took more than three decades to send his killer to prison. Such were the machinations of Mississippi justice.
Evers served in World War II from 1943 to '45 and returned, like many other African Americans of his generation, to see the Jim Crow South with new eyes. He graduated college on the G.I. Bill and soon became involved with civil rights work. In 1954 he came field secretary for the NAACP, travelling extensively throughout the state, a witness to the widespread injustices that were a way of life there. For context, 1954 was the year of the landmark legislation Brown v. Board of Education, 1955 the death of Emmett Till.
After years of organizing and standing up to the powers that be, "Evers's efforts made him a target for those who opposed racial equality and desegregation. He and his family were subjected to numerous threats and violent actions, including a firebombing of his house in May 1963, shortly before his assassination."(1)
* * * *
August 28, less than two months later, proved to be one of the most memorable days in our history as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a march on Washington for jobs and freedom, galvanizing the civil rights movement with his epic "I Have A Dream" speech, which reverberates to this day. A young Bob Dylan was one of many singers who had been invited to perform at the event.(2) Even though he'd just released his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, with a number of suitable songs for the occasion ("Blowin' in the Wind" and "Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" come to mind) he sang three songs from his next album, including "Only A Pawn In Their Game" which he'd written in response to the shooting of Medgar Evers.
It's not possible for me to hear this song without being moved, and for decades I felt it to be the most powerful response ever written in response to Evers' assassination. Eventually, thanks to the Internet, I discovered Nina Simone's response to this and everything taking place in Mississippi at that time, a song which -- for reasons self-evident -- would not have been aired on the radio stations most of us listened to while growing up in the Sixties. It's called "Mississippi Goddam."(3)
The chorus, which also opens the song, goes like this: Alabama's gotten me so upset Tennessee made me lose my rest And everybody knows about Mississippi goddam
Lyrics like these reflect the burden of being black in the Deep South at that time:
Hound dogs on my trail School children sitting in jail Black cat cross my path I think every day's gonna be my last Lord have mercy on this land of mine We all gonna get it in due time I don't belong here I don't belong there I've even stopped believing in prayer Don't tell me I tell you Me and my people just about due I've been there so I know They keep on saying 'Go slow!'
It's a painful song, but its despairing tone reflects a strange beauty that I find incredibly moving.
Like Dylan's "Only A Pawn" it's the manner in which the song is sung that goes right through you. Let's mark the day by remembering.
Near the beginning of this month we were treated to an impressive Super Bowl performance by the Seattle Seahawks and a powerful two minute Chrysler commercial narrated by Bob Dylan. I'm not sure which of these was more startling. I do know that the buzz after the game, regarding the commercial was fairly substantial. I saw Facebook posts of "sellout" by a few people and I was going to write a blog post about it, but found Rolling Stone had already captured my sentiments when it wrote the next day, "A great many Super Bowl viewers were shocked to see Bob Dylan in a Chrysler commercial last night, but they really shouldn't have been."
Amongst the circle of Dylan fans I've gotten to know here in the North Country the unanimous sentiment seemed to be how cool it was. These are the people who have read the books, follow ExpectingRain.com, listen to his music and have all the albums, know the lyrics, have followed his career for their whole lives, and know all the highs and lows of the Never Ending Bob.
And their reaction was this: He's never done the expected. Why would he start now?
What prompted me to write about it this morning was yesterday's superb look-back at the Civil Right Movement on Minnesota Public Radio. The portions I got to hear while travelling back from lunch had to do with James Meredith at Ole Miss, and the shooting of Medgar Evers. In response to the first incident Dylan wrote Oxford Town. In response to the latter tragedy he produced what I consider one of his most powerful songs, Only a Pawn in Their Game.
In the MPR piece they shared how Medgar Evers put his life on the line in his fight to abolish Jim Crow laws and to obtain the same rights for blacks that all other Americans had. Evers had put his life on the line for American freedom in World War II at both Normandy and the European Theater. The racist ways of the Deep South stood in stark contrast to things he had seen overseas and he took steps to rectify the injustices he saw all around him.
MPR aired the vitriol that white callers directed to the television station that aired his seventeen minutes of FCC-enforced "equal time" in response to a white politician who had previously denounced the notion of equality for blacks. These hate-filled calls painted a painfully vivid picture.
Dylan's Times They Are A-Changin' captured this moment and the songs he wrote became anthems for civil rights. And there were expectations that he would keep producing this kind of music, expectations that he dashed in a relatively short time.
Two decades later a new wave of Dylan fans began following him. Slow Train Coming brought converts from the Christian sub-culture who embraced the "born again Dylan" and now claimed him as their own. But a few years and three albums later these fans became confused, wondering why he didn't continue producing Gospel songs.
I recall Dylan answering this matter in an interview about the time his Oh Mercy album came out. He said, in essence, that once he said what he had to say he didn't feel a need to keep saying it again. He gave us the songs and others could take them forward into the world.
In short, he wasn't going to be what this new group of followers wanted him to be either.
A hallmark of the American dream is its homage to the notion of rugged individualism. Though Dylan's career has exemplified this, being a man who marches to his own drum has scraped more than a few people the wrong way over the years.
Was the Super Bowl ad a surprise? Maybe. But it shouldn't have been. Whatever happens next, we already know Dylan is never going to be what others others want him to be. Kudos to you, Bob. Whatever you've got up your sleeve for the rest of 2014, we're looking forward to it.
"'Only A Pawn In Their Game' is one of Dylan's truly great songs, and what puts it over the top... is its unmatched tone." ~ John Hinchey, Like A Complete Unknown
While driving to Morris to pick up my daughter, now finished with school and coming home before the next chapter of her life begins, I was listening to the soundtrack of Martin Scorcese's Dylan bio No Direction Home. What caught me is that lonesome, mournful quality in his delivery that must have been so out of step with the pop world of its time.
Those early Sixties saw groups like The Four Seasons, The Chiffons, The Crystals and The Safaris putting records to the top of the charts. Smiles and good cheer were the order of the day. In 1963 The Ronettes produced the top hit of the year, Be My Baby, with the Kingsmen's Louie, Louie right on its heels at #2. Against this backdrop Dylan was nowhere, out of step and out of sight.
His roots: the classic folk tradition. His aim: to wear the mantle of Woody Guthrie for a new generation, drawing attention to the outcast, the forgotten, the downtrodden, the misfit, the alienated and disenfranchised. In 1963 Dylan produced an album lyrically rich and socially pointed, The Times They Are A-Changin'. Some might describe it as bleak, but I say otherwise. It's a harsh realism. Dylan's grim countenance is a counterweight to the cheery, oblivious lighthearted distractions of the pop culture within which much of America was bathing.
The images on this page were produced last night based on the somber Dylan that sears the cover of this album.
Only A Pawn In Their Game
A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers' blood
A finger fired the trigger to his name
A handle hid out in the dark
A hand set the spark
Two eyes took the aim
Behind a man's brain
But he can't be blamed
He's only a pawn in their game.
A South politician preaches to the poor white man
"You got more than blacks, don't complain
You're better than them, you been born with white skin" they explain
And the Negro's name
Is used it is plain
For the politician's gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.
The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid
And the marshals and cops get the same
But the poor white man's used in the hands of them all like a tool
He's taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
'Bout the shape that he's in
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.
From the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks
And the hoof beats pound in his brain
And he's taught how to walk in a pack
Shoot in the back
With his fist in a clinch
To hang and to lynch
To hide 'neath the hood
To kill with no pain
Like a dog on a chain
He ain't got no name
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.
The day Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet he caught
They lowered him down as a king
But when the shadowy sun sets on the one
That fired the gun
He'll see by his grave
On the stone that remains
Carved next to his name
His epitaph plain:
Only a pawn in their game.
Recorded June 1963 Copyright Bob Dylan ENDNOTE: Click on images to enlarge. Bottom image is available as a limited edition giclee reproduction.
Presidential elections, fortunately, occur only once every four years. For 2008 it seems the sawdust trail of stump speeches and all that goes with it has been longer than ever. With the conventions now behind us, we’re finally in the last leg of the journey.
This week the real head-to-head action was scheduled to begin. The plan was for a first debate to take place Friday night at Ole Miss in Oxford Town. Yes, the same Ole Miss made famous by its historical refusal to allow blacks as students less than fifty years ago.
The same Oxford Town where MedgarEvers led the fight for voters rights, for civil rights for blacks, and for one James Meredith to be enrolled at Ole Miss.
The same Oxford Town where MedgarEvers, a World War II veteran who put his life on the line for the freedoms we enjoy, put his life on the line for fellow black Americans to become recipients of the rights our laws had promised but failed to deliver in the deep South.
The same MedgarEvers whose life was taken for taking such a stand.
And so it is, all eyes were to be turned toward Oxford Town this coming Friday. Incredible as it seems, a black candidate for the president of the United States was poised to debate another candidate in the very town where a black man could not even enroll as a student. What an awesome twist.
Unfortunately, and it’s hard to say what the fallout will be from this, but John McCain announced today that the debate was off because of our national financial crisis.
Upon further investigation, it appears that both McCain and Obama had agreed that maybe the debate should be put off, but McCain announced it first as if it were his idea.
Again, hard to say what is really going on at this point. The New York Times produced an editorial stating that McCain was the better man on foreign policy, the topic of this week’s debate at Ole Miss. In fact, the editorial so puffed up McCain’s dominance in this arena that some felt they were raising expectations for malicious purposes. (i.e., if Obama fared well, then McCain bobbled an opportunity.) You would think, however, that McCain would use this opportunity to show his stuff. Who knows?
As of this moment, I can’t comment on the candidates’ maneuvers, but I can shine a light on Oxford Town. First, Bob Dylan’s tribute to Medgar Evers, Only a Pawn In Their Game. Both the lyrics and the manner in which it was sung, on his Times They Are A-Changin’ album, is on my top ten list of Dylan works.
How anyone can seriously listen to this song without at some point getting tears in his or her eyes over the tragedy of American race relations I will never know. Here are the lyrics.
Only A Pawn In Their Game
A bullet from the back of a bush took MedgarEvers' blood
A finger fired the trigger to his name
A handle hid out in the dark
A hand set the spark
Two eyes took the aim
Behind a man's brain
But he can't be blamed
He's only a pawn in their game.
A South politician preaches to the poor white man
"You got more than blacks, don't complain
You're better than them, you been born with white skin" they explain
And the Negro's name
Is used it is plain
For the politician's gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.
The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid And the marshals and cops get the same
But the poor white man's used in the hands of them all like a tool
He's taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
'Bout the shape that he's in
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.
From the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks
And the hoof beats pound in his brain
And he's taught how to walk in a pack
Shoot in the back
With his fist in a clinch
To hang and to lynch
To hide 'neath the hood
To kill with no pain
Like a dog on a chain
He ain't got no name
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.
The day MedgarEvers was buried from the bullet he caught
They lowered him down as a king
But when the shadowy sun sets on the one
That fired the gun
He'll see by his grave
On the stone that remains
Carved next to his name
His epitaph plain:
Only a pawn in their game.
Another evocative tune along the same lines is Dylan’s Oxford Town. At this point there will apparently not be a debate Friday night in Oxford Town. But, here are Mr. Dylan’s lyrics from that time. And in the meantime, this soap opera of a campaign will give us more to talk about tomorrow, I am sure.
The chorus, which also opens the song, goes like this:
