ipl-logo

Bob Dylan's 'Only A Pawn In Their Game'

425 Words2 Pages
In 1963, the black civil rights activist from Mississippi, Medgar Evers, was assassinated. In response to the murder of Evers, Bob Dylan wrote the song, “Only a Pawn in Their Game”, which identifies the effects of institutional white supremacy in America. Dylan addresses the death of Evers as a result of the implementation of white supremacy rather than the lone act of a racist white man. A frequent line sung throughout the song is, “But it ain’t him to blame/ He’s only a pawn in their game”. Here, Dylan acknowledges that the assassin acts as a pawn carrying out racism and oppression in the game of maintaining white supremacy within the racial hierarchy. Dylan explains that part of the reasoning for white supremacy in the south is that
Open Document