Oh Be Cruel!

“People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties.”
-Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan performing “Only a Pawn in Their Game” in 1963.  The song was first played  at a civil rights and voter registration rally in Mississippi organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The song details the assassination of Medgar Evers, a civil rights activist from Mississippi who returned from World War II to renew his fight against discrimination at home. The “pawn” in Dylan’s song is Evers’ assassin, Byron De La Beckwith, who Dylan holds responsible for Evers’ death alongside the institutionalized racism that pervaded in the south.