Links to Song: Only a Pawn in Their Game
Bob Dylan and Joan Baez 1963 March on Washington: Only a Pawn in Their Game
What you should know about this song: After the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, the emergence of Martin Luther King Jr., the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, and the numerous “sit ins” across the country, the civil rights movement was coming to a head. Enter Medgar Evers, a young civil rights activist from Mississippi. He became the first state field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi and played a key role in organizing voter-registration efforts, demonstrations, and boycotts of companies that practiced discrimination (source).
In June, 1963, Evers was assassinated by a white segregationist who shot him in the back, leaving him dead in the streets of a local church for his wife and three kids to find. Within a few days, Bob Dylan wrote “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” his response to the racist system in the US that was the catalyst for the murder. Typical Bob Dylan… he chose to debut the song at a voter registration rally in Greenwood, Mississippi.
“All the other protest songs were very self-righteous polemics on the terrible rednecks of the South… This song had a much more cosmic and far-reaching overview. He pointed out that the people the movement were vilifying as the enemy were really just pawns in the larger game, a game where corporate greed and the politicians were playing them against the blacks and keeping everyone down. I loved the song.” – Maria Muldaur*
*Source: “Bob Dylan: 100 Songs and Pictures” by Fine Communications
Photo Source: Mississippi Library Commission. July 2, 1963: Bob Dylan at civil rights gathering in Greenwood, Mississippi singing ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game.”
