Only a Pawn in Their Game: Bob Dylan, Medgar Evers and the Delta Folk Jubilee of 1963

By Luke Dunavant

As Mississippi celebrates the 100th anniversary of Medgar Evers’ birth, his daughter Reena Evers-Everette, joined by Mississippi Today’s Jerry Mitchell and Dr. RJ Morgan, a professor at Ole Miss, talked about how she remembered her father and how Mitchell played such a big role within her family. 

The program, presented last Wednesday by the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics in the Overby Center Auditorium, was “Only a Pawn in Their Game: Bob Dylan, Medgar Evers and the Delta Folk Jubilee of 1963.”
Morgan opened the discussion by giving background, touching on how Dylan’s song about the assassination of Medgar Evers, “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” originally captured his interest and eventually became a book project about the singer’s first trip to Mississippi, then a whole class at Ole Miss. 

Evers-Everette, when asked about her father, said that he was “special, loving, extremely funny.” She praised Mitchell for his work on her father’s case, even referred to him as her brother because of how close he has gotten with her family over the years. 

“I feel that you wouldn’t have found all the things you found without him guiding you,” she said.

Mitchell is the author of “Race Against Time,” published by Simon & Schuster in 2021. The book details Mitchell’s reporting on four civil rights murders. His work helped bring killers to justice for the assassination of Evers, the firebombing of Vernon Dahmer, the 16th Street Church bombing in Birmingham and the so-called Mississippi Burning case. 

Evers-Everette said her father was not only an inspiration to her but to children and people within their community. She talked about how the kids would race her dad on bikes while he was on foot and he would “top the hill and blow past them.”

Evers, a civil rights leader as the first field secretary for the NAACP in Mississippi, was 37 years old when he was murdered on June 12, 1963. 

Evers-Everette, age 8½ at the time, remembered the entire day in her discussion, including a threatening phone call in which someone said that her dad would be dead within 24 hours.

“Our neighbors were our safety,” Evers-Everette said, “and my father’s friends were his safety because the NAACP didn’t want to pay for his safety. There’s still bitterness there.” 

When talking about the night of her father’s death, Evers-Everette said, “And as soon as Darrell (her brother) and I were saying ‘Daddy’s home,’ we heard the pow, and knew exactly what that was, too.”

Mitchell gave details on how he became intertwined with the Evers family. He said that sources leaked him information that while the state was prosecuting Evers’ killer, the state was also defending that same man - Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the Ku Klux Klan. 

De La Beckwith was tried twice for murder in Mississippi in 1964. Both trials ended in hung juries by all-male, white jurors. In 1994 he was tried again, convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 2001. 

Mitchell said that Evers fought against Nazi Germany in World War II and then came back home and fought against Jim Crow. Evers-Everette noted that her father had been fighting Jim Crow since he was 14 when a family friend - Willie Tingle - was murdered by lynching. 

The group also discussed the Greenwood Food Blockade in 1963. Mitchell touched on the protests and how the police made arrests, one of whom was Dick Gregory, a comedian and Evers-Everette’s godfather. Gregory found out about the food blockade and flew in an entire plane of food for people who didn’t have any.

Morgan shifted the conversation to Bob Dylan and the song titled “Only a Pawn in Their Game.” Sensing that his frontline workers needed a morale boost, Jim Foreman, executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, came up with the idea for an integrated “Delta Folk Jubilee” festival where artists would come down and perform for a small crowd on a farm just outside of Greenwood. One of them was a little-known Bob Dylan. Morgan noted some of the previous songs Dylan had written about other African Americans being killed.

“He had written songs about Emmett Till, and he wrote a song about James Meredith and the integration of Ole Miss, but ‘Only a Pawn in their Game’ was a leap forward in his songwriting.”

Dylan also had never been on the “front lines” of the movement that he wrote songs about until his trip to Greenwood with actor/activist Theo Bikel, Morgan said. 

“Bikel went to Dylan’s manager and said, “Pete (Seeger) and I are going to Mississippi. This is going to be a dangerous trip on the front lines, but Bob’s writing these songs. People are starting to hail him as the voice of a movement, but he’s never been to Mississippi, he’s never been in the movement.”

An excerpt of “Only a Pawn in their Game” was played, including its poignant lyrics about poor whites being just as trapped in the system of segregation as Evers and the local sharecroppers.

Evers-Everette recalled first hearing the song when she was in high school, several years after her father’s death. Mitchell remembers hearing it for the first time after he started working on Evers’ case, which he took as a sign.

Evers-Everette said, “It feels shameful that we allow each of us to humiliate another one of us for the game. Which is supposed to be for all of us.”

The song itself is really about the killer, De La Beckwith. “He fought in World War II as well,” Mitchell said, “and he became obsessed with race issues.”

The discussion ended with an audience question about current-day political violence. The topic brought about a very emotional monologue from Evers-Everette that led to a standing ovation from the crowd in attendance. 

“We could talk about politics, a lot of the thoughts that are in politics now at the higher level were in politics in the 1950s,” she said. “Murders have happened that should never have happened. Why do we think taking a person’s life is going to change things … either this side or that side?”

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Luke Dunavant is a junior from Hernando, Miss., studying Journalism at Ole Miss and a student assistant in the Overby Center.