Bob Dylan's Crusade for Social Justice

Bob Dylan's Crusade for Social Justice

Bob Dylan’s song The Times They Are A-Changin’, from which the album takes its name, was hailed by contemporaries and is remembered by posterity as the song which best captured the spirit of the sixties. Although he personally spurned the title, he has been anointed the zeitgeist of his generation. The album itself provides perhaps the best example of Dylan writing protest songs, political attacks and anthems advocating social justice. In North Country Blues, Dylan once again assumes the form of Guthrie’s dust bowl chronicling. He tells the harrowing story of an orphaned woman raised by her brother, born in a mining town experiencing steady decline. She marries a local miner after he brother dies, and after several bountiful years a period of sharp decline follows. Eventually all work in the mines cease as “its much cheaper down in the South American towns, where the miners work almost for nothing”[1]. Another song on the album, With God On Our Side, rails against the idea that divine favour is bestowed upon America’s military exploits. He reduces the reasoning of this religious way of thinking to absurdity when he mentions the American Civil War and the fact that both sides saw themselves as having God on their side. The most searing lyrics of the song refer to the Second World War:

“We forgave the Germans

And then we were friends

Though they murdered six million

          In the ovens they fried

The Germans now, too

          Have God on their side.”[2]

As a Jew, he must have been outraged at the fact that Germany were so quickly forgiven, and a mortal enemy had so promptly been made of the Russians. 

Bob Dylan and Joan Baez at the March on Washington in 1963

The most potent of his songs however are those related to civil rights and racial discrimination. The Death of Hattie Carroll, yet another song from The Times They Are A-Changin’, is a civil rights anthem. It the death of a fifty-one year old black housemaid who was brutally murdered by a young man from a rich tobacco farm-owning family, named William Zanzinger in 1963. Dylan’s fiery tongue condemns the judiciary system for giving him such a light sentence but also society at large for not even perceiving a crime, for not taking any action against it, and for allowing things to remain as they were in terms of segregation in southern states such as Maryland, where Hattie Carroll lived and was murdered.

Emmett Till before and after his murder in 1955

A year before Hattie’s murder, Dylan wrote and regularly performed a song of the same vein, called The Death of Emmett Till. Ever since his murder in 1955, fourteen year old Emmett Till became a martyr for the civil rights movement and his story was universally known. He was tortured, maimed and killed whilst visiting family in Mississippi from Chicago, after making an inappropriate remark or whistle in the direction of a white woman. She told her husband, who in turn recruited his brother-in-law to exact revenge. The body was so disfigured it could only be identified by the ring his uncle had given him. The brothers confessed the crime but the jury found them innocent regardless. Again, Dylan’s anger is directed at society’s response to the crime:

“I saw the morning papers but I could not bear to see 

The smiling brothers walkin’ down the courthouse stairs 

For the jury found them innocent and the brothers they went free

While Emmett’s body floats the foam of a Jim Crow southern sea. 

If you can’t speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that’s so unjust 

Your eyes are filled with dead men’s dirt, your mind is filled with dust

Your arms and legs they must be in shackles and chains, and your blood 

it must refuse to flow 

For you let this human race fall down so God-awful low!”[3]

The vehemence of Dylan’s poetry in this song is typical of the protest songs of his early years. Outraged at a story of racial discrimination or social injustice, he lambasts those who refuse to even acknowledge the crime. Joan Baez also wrote a song under the same name but with different lyrics and to a different tune, but expressing the same disgust. Dylan, along with the wider folk movement of the sixties, crusaded against social injustice wherever it could be found, and in whatever form it manifested itself.

Bob Dylan, ‘North Country Blues’, https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bobdylan/northcountryblues.html (last accessed 23rd November 2017)

Bob Dylan, ‘With God on Our Side’ https://bobdylan.com/songs/god-our-side/ (last accessed 20th November 2017)

Bob Dylan, ‘The Death of Emmet Till’, https://bobdylan.com/songs/death-emmett-till/ (last accessed 20th November 2017)

Bibliography 

Dylan, Bob, ‘North Country Blues’, https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bobdylan/northcountryblues.html (last accessed 23rd November 2017)

Dylan, Bob, ‘With God on Our Side’ https://bobdylan.com/songs/god-our-side/ (last accessed 20th November 2017)

Dylan, Bob, ‘The Death of Emmet Till’, https://bobdylan.com/songs/death-emmett-till/ (last accessed 20th November 2017)