Racial Injustice Analysis

Above the pulse of an acoustic guitar, Bob Dylan evokes the howling chant of a streetcorner newsboy: “William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll!…At a Baltimore hotel society gathering!” The 1963 song, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, eulogizes the eponymous Hattie Carroll, an African-American barmaid “killed for no reason” by a white aristocrat. The repetitive melodic phrases demand my attention, and force me to consider Baltimore’s present-day racial tensions—or rather, the country’s tensions.
In the wake of the Baltimore riots and the Ferguson riots, the deaths of Freddie Gray and Michael Brown, I listen to the ballad and wonder, “What has changed?” Though we may beat the drum of progressivism, what progress can we claim in the face of continued injustice or, at the very least, perceived injustice? In the era of segregation, Zanzinger was found guilty of manslaughter; yet in our time, guilty verdicts are few, and the public remains conflicted, rushing to define the parties involved as victims and killers, or as criminals and heroes.

Are the killings just? Or are are we, as Dylan puts it, merely “philosophiz[ing] disgrace and criticiz[ing] all fears?” And what of Dylan? Is he a prophet, alerting America to its systemic bigotry? Or is he a clock, chiming inevitably on the hour as two groups of people continue to misunderstand each other?
The song closes with a harmonica solo, voiceless and answerless. I sit here, still feeling the aftershocks of the last guitar chord, caught in the tremor of my