Tag: civil rights

William Zantzinger just died the other day at the age of 69. If you’re a part of my generation, you probably have no idea who he was. I certainly didn’t know who he was until I decided to read about him today and I’m not too sure whether that’s a good or a bad thing.

Zantzinger was a well-off tobacco farmer who, in 1963, in a still segregated Maryland, killed a 51 year old black woman named Hattie Caroll while she was working. She was guilty of not getting his drink fast enough for him. He called her a “black, son of a bitch” and hit her in the head with a cane. She died eight hours later of a brain hemorrhage. Zantzinger was given six months in a county jail and a $500 fine and had his imprisonment deferred so that he could take care of his tobacco crop yield first.

This most likely wouldn’t go down in history as anything different from all the other screwed up things that were done to blacks in America during the first half of the 20th century except for one thing, Bob Dylan wrote a song about it:

Zantzinger was made famous because of this song which Dylan, so I’ve read, still plays up to this day.

To me, not to downplay the tragedy of the event, there’s a lot of symbolism in all this. This man, who was by all accounts a terrible racist, who was able to murder a black woman and practically get away scot-free, has died less than twenty days before a black man enters into the presidency of the United States. Also, the fact that he is, most likely, completely unknown to people born after 1980 (yeah I know I’m conjecturing) says a lot about where we are with race relations in this country.

We could very well be past the point where we need these types of stories to remind us of what racism can do. Or maybe we’re just ignorant and don’t realize, or aren’t told, how often these types of things still happen. Maybe they don’t happen anymore. Maybe we’re giving people like Zantzinger their just rewards by relegating them to the position of relics that will be happily forgotten. Maybe we’re being foolish by forgetting.

My opinion is that we just don’t need to feel angry anymore. We don’t need to ignore racism or let it slide or anything like that, but grudges from 46 years ago will no longer move us forward. It was probably a good thing that every time Zantzinger showed up in the paper that Dylan’s song showed up as well. It was probably a good thing that he has never stopped playing that song. The man is dead now, though, and the current racial challenges are different. The generation that was capable of committing such acts is disappearing and a generation that is willing to make a black man into the most important figure in our country is now at the helm. We’re one step closer to finding a balance.