On August 28, 1963, Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech to over 250,000 civil rights supporters during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. In that speech, King called for civil and economic rights and an end to racism in the United States. The speech became the foundation of the civil rights movement and is among the most iconic speeches in American history. Sharing the steps that day was a curly-haired mop-top folk singer named Bob Dylan. This is a story, an insight into the fertile mind of America’s greatest living singer/songwriter. A story most of you have likely never heard.
Born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, the youngster grew up listening to Hank Williams on the Grand Ole Opry. In his biography, Dylan wrote: “The sound of his voice went through me like an electric rod.” Soon, he began to introduce himself as “Bob Dylan” as an ode to poet Dylan Thomas. In May 1960, Dylan dropped out of the University of Minnesota at the end of his first year. In January 1961, he traveled to New York City in search of his musical idol Woody Guthrie, who was suffering from Huntington’s disease at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey. As a young man, Dylan read Guthrie’s 1943 autobiography, “Bound for Glory”, and Guthrie quickly became Dylan’s idol and inspiration.
By May 1963, with the release of his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, the Minnesota folksinger was on the rise as a singer/songwriter. On June 12, 1963, civil rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated in Jackson, Mississippi. Evers was a veteran U.S. Army soldier who served in a segregated unit during World War II and as the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi. Evers’s death spurred Dylan to write “Only a Pawn in Their Game” about the murder. The song exonerates Evers’s murderer as a poor white man manipulated by race-baiting politicians and the injustices of the social system. At the request of Pete Seeger, Dylan first performed the song at a voter registration rally in Greenwood, Mississippi on July 6, 1963. Two weeks later (August 7) Dylan recorded several takes of the song at Columbia’s studios in New York City, only to select the first take for his album The Times They Are a-Changin’.
Likely at the urging of Pete Seeger, who was busy preparing for a tour of Australia at the time, Dylan, and then-girlfriend Joan Baez, traveled to Washington DC for the March on Washington rally. Of that day, in the 2005 documentary No Direction Home, Dylan recalled, “I looked up from the podium and I thought to myself, ‘I’ve never seen such a large crowd.’ I was up close when King was giving that speech. To this day, it still affects me in a profound way.” On that day, Dylan performed “Only a Pawn in Their Game” and “When the Ship Comes In.” The songs were received with only scattered applause, likely because many marchers did not agree with the sentiments of the song. The famously reflective and observant Dylan walked away from that day contrarily looking inward.
According to a 1991 Washington Post article, while on the journey home to New York City the 22-year-old Dylan read a newspaper article about the conviction of a white man from a wealthy Maryland family named William Devereux “Billy” Zantzinger (1939-2009) for the death of a 51-year-old African-American hotel service worker named Hattie Carroll on February 9, 1963, at the Spinsters’ Ball at the Emerson Hotel in Baltimore, Md. The white tie event was a debutante ball designed to introduce women in their late 20s to the “right” sort of men. The details of the event are just as shocking today as they must have been to Dylan 62 years ago.
On February 8, 1963, 24-year-old Zantzinger attended the event with his father, a former member of the Maryland House of Delegates and the state planning commission who ran one of the most prosperous tobacco operations in Charles County. Before the ball, the Zantzingers stopped for an early dinner and cocktails at downtown Baltimore’s Eager House restaurant. According to witnesses, once at the Spinster’s Ball, a drunken Zantzinger stumbled into the ballroom wearing a tophat with white tie and tails and a carnation in his lapel and carrying a 25-cent wooden toy cane. “I just flew in from Texas! Gimme a drink!” a laughing Billy shouted to the packed crowd of 200 guests. Witnesses said that he was “pretending to be Fred Astaire and when he wanted a drink, he used the cane to tap smartly on the silver punch bowl; when a pretty woman whom he knew waltzed by, he’d tap her playfully, all in fun, no offense, of course.” By 1:30 in the morning, Billy’s mood had darkened and the imposing 6’2″ Zantzinger began to assault hotel workers with his cane, poking and slapping them with it at will. His targets of drunken rage included a bellboy, a waitress, and barmaid Hattie Carroll.
First Zantzinger berated a 30-year-old black employee named Ethel Hill, 30 years old from Belkthune Avenue in Baltimore, with the worst of racial slurs as she was clearing a table near the Zantzingers. Billy asked the young woman about a firemen’s fund, then, as the police reported it later, she was struck across the buttocks “with a cane of the carnival prize kind.” As she tried to move away, Billy followed her, repeatedly striking her on the arm, thighs, and buttocks. Mrs. Hill wasn’t seriously injured, but her arm hurt, causing her to flee the room in tears.
Next, the cane was used against a bellhop, accentuated with more insults toward the young man, calling him a “Black SOB.” Billy then attacked another employee by yanking the chain around the wine waiter’s neck. When Billy’s 24-year-old wife, Jane, tried to calm him down, he collapsed on top of her in the middle of the dance floor and began hitting her over the head with his shoe. When another guest tried to pull the madman off, Zantzinger thumped him too. Then, temporarily regaining his composure, he stood up and dusted himself off, and the University of Maryland student decided he needed another drink. That is when Zantzinger first encountered Hattie Carroll.
Part 2: The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest books are “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View,” “Irvington Haunts. The Tour Guide,” and “The Mystery of the H.H. Holmes Collection.” Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
