On May 17, ten years ago, Bob Dylan performed at the Jackson Mississippi JAM - the city’s arts and music festival. (Yes, when Freddy Koella was on lead guitar.) What I missed at the time was an account in the Jackson Free Press on June 12, which concentrated not on the music, or the rain and mud, but on the attempt by Medgar Evers’ surviving older brother, Charles Evers, to meet Dylan to thank him for the song ‘Only A Pawn in their Game’. I wasn’t aware of this story the following year either, when I arrived by train to spend Martin Luther King Jnr. Day in Jackson MS, where I went to Medgar Evers’ house and stood at the edge of the suburban lawn where he’d been gunned down just over 40 years earlier.
Now the Jackson Free Press editor, Donna Ladd, has reprinted the story of Charles Evers’ attempt to meet Dylan - it was published June 5. The original account, which is the same, is from June 12, 2003. In neither does she explain how Charles Evers is related to Medgar, or that Charles (now 90) came back to Mississippi after his brother’s death, took over the local NAACP and became the first black mayor in Mississippi since the Reconstruction period after the American Civil War - she was writing for a local readership who know who Charles Evers was and is. Yesterday I republished that 2003 account, but I've been asked simply to link to it instead - which is fair enough - so here is that link.
With thanks to Andrew Muir for alerting me to the story.
Hi Michael
ReplyDeleteThanks for a fascinating post. How did Charles become a republican politician who,according to Wikipedia, counted among his friends George Wallace?
Am I missing something?
You'd have to pursue that with Donna Ladd - she comments that she doesn't always agree with his politics, though they're friends. But it's not exactly unique that even after all the political education gained from the struggles of the Civil Rights movement, he hasn't stayed "on the left". James Meredith, the black student at the heart of Dylan's 'Oxford Town', became an active Republican. I think both felt that the oppression they experienced and witnessed cut right across party lines, and that they had to take what chances they could, unhindered by political doctrine.
DeleteThere has always been a consevative wing in African American political thought. Booker T Washington favoured education, self help, and independence above the notion of victimhood. And Southern Democrats were originally the party of Slave holders and opposed emancipation. Democrat George Wallace who ran openly racist campaigns had a late conversion to equality.
ReplyDeleteWhat chance now of Dylan writing a song, say, about the shooting of Trayvon Martin?
He already has: it's called Only A Pawn In Their Game.
ReplyDeleteGiven Deportees it is fascinating the photograph of Medgar Evers in the paper does not name the three other people...
ReplyDeleteMedgar Evers, far left, is named. Unnamed, T. R. M. Howard is on the far right with glasses and distinctive moustache...
I can guess the other two but would rather have someone name them who recognises them?
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