The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll

But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,
Take the rag away from your face, now ain't the time for
your tears. 

On this date in 1963, the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr gave his "I Have A Dream Speech" at the Lincoln Memorial on the Mall in Washington DC.

On that same day, a three judge panel found William Zantzinger guilty of manslaughter in the death of Hattie Carroll.  Zantzinger was sentenced to six months in jail.

Zantzinger was the son of a well-off tobacco farming family in Maryland, 24 years old, standing over 6 feet and close to 200 pounds.  Hattie Carroll was poor, the mother of nine children (or 10, 11, or 13 depending on other accounts), a grandmother, and 51.  Zantzinger was white; Carroll black.



Zantzinger and his wife were attending the Spinster's Ball, a high society charitable event with 200 guests, at Baltimore's Emerson Hotel on the evening of February 8, 1963.  They'd started off the evening with dinner and drinks (a lot of drinks) at a local restaurant and had whacked a couple of the staff with what's described as a wooden carnival cane.  (The best account of the events that evening can be found here).

Arriving at the Emerson the couple continued drinking becoming so drunk that when they attempted to dance they both collapsed on the floor with Zantzinger hitting his wife on the head with her shoe.  Jane Zatzinger was finally taken upstairs to a room where she could rest and recover.

William Zatzinger continued drinking and falling into an even fouler mood.  He yelled racial slurs at a waitress, chasing and hitting her in the arm with his cane.  At about 1:30am he approached the bar where Hattie Carroll was working and demanded a bourbon.  According to the later trial testimony of two other barmaids:

Zantzinger shoved his way through to the bar again, and was calling for more bourbon. Carroll, who was busy serving another customer, asked him to wait for a moment. “Mrs Carroll was fixing another drink,” Patterson testified. “So she didn't serve him immediately. He said ‘Nigger, did you hear me ask for a drink?‘ He said ‘I don't have to take that kind of shit off a nigger.’ He took the cane and struck her on the right shoulder. she leaned against the bar. Mr Zantzinger stood at the bar for a while, then he picked up his drink and left. She seemed to have been in shock. She said ‘That man has upset me so, I feel deathly ill’.”

“He hit her. He struck right down and hit her,” Burrell confirmed. “It was a hard blow. So hard that I couldn't understand how she could stand up. [...] She handed him the drink, and then she stood there for a minute, and then she fell on me. I was so shocked I couldn't say anything to her.”
 
“Zantzinger yelled ‘Why are you so slow, you black bitch?’ then hit Mrs Carroll with the cane,” Shelton added. “We were petrified. We were dumbfounded.” 

An unconscious Carroll was taken to Baltimore Memorial Hospital where she died eight hours later from a stroke.

Another hotel guest took the cane away from Zantzinger and snapped it in half to prevent him from using it again.  The police arrived and took Zantzinger to the station where he was held overnight before posting bail.  When news later arrived of Hattie Carroll's death a murder warrant was issued.  Eventually Zantzinger was charged with second-degree murder and released again pending trial which was moved to Hagerstown in western Maryland because of all the publicity in the Baltimore area.

Carroll's funeral was held on a wintery February afternoon at West Baltimore's Gillis Memorial Church, where she'd been a deacon and sung in the choir. Afro reporter Ralph Matthews put the crowd there at 1,600 mourners, only about half of whom were able to fit in the church for the service itself. White police, there to control the crowd, looked on as organisers distributed flyers for a rally to protest Carroll's death.

“It was a cold, grey day,” Matthews reports. “Silent intense-looking men passed through the onlookers, handing out leaflets with a headline ‘Who will be next?’ The people read news of a mass meeting. They did not throw the literature away, but read the message and shoved the paper into their pockets. [...] Among the watching crowd were well-dressed men and women, school children, people stopping on their way to work, veiled Muslim women in their long grey dresses. No white faces were to be seen, except in cars whizzing east on Mulberry Street, past the church.”
 
Although there were no white faces in the crowd, the National Council of Christians and Jews did send representatives to the funeral, and so did the Emerson Hotel. Messages of sympathy came in from as far away as Alabama, confirming that Carroll's case was now getting national attention. Inside the church, Rev Theodore Jackson preached that her death would mean more to the city of Baltimore than any other it had seen.

“The ministers of this city, the doctors, lawyers, all people should come together as never before and let people know that coloured citizens are not going to stand for certain things,” Jackson thundered from the pulpit. “We are in the hands of a just God, but not in the hands of a just people.” 

Zantzinger's trial began on June 19, 1963 and according to news accounts the Maryland prosecutors worked hard to obtain a conviction referring to the defendant as "the lord of the manor, lord of the plantation" and as someone who never accepted the defeat of the Confederacy and the end of slavery.

The three-judge court, Judge McLaughlin presiding, issued its verdict on June 27:

“We find that Hattie Carroll's death was not due solely to disease, but that it was caused or hastened by the defendant's verbal insults, coupled with an actual assault,” he said. “And that he is guilty of manslaughter.” . . .
 
“The court accepted medical testimony that the caning itself was not enough to cause death,” next day's New York Times explained. “But the combination of shock, produced by Zantzinger's abusive language and the blow with the cane were sufficient to cause a sudden blood pressure increase and fatal brain haemorrhage.

The manslaughter conviction carried a maximum 10-year prison sentence.  At the sentencing on August 28, Judge McLaughlin levied a 6 month term, to be served in a local jail, not state prison after stating:

“A review of this case discloses this was involuntary manslaughter, similar to manslaughter by automobile,” McLaughlin announced. “We don't feel that Mr Zantzinger is an animal type. Our problem is to view this case from the type of punishment Mr Zantzinger should have.”

Prior to leaving home to serve his sentence, the New York Herald Tribune interviewed Zantzinger, who did not sound as though he'd done much soul-searching over the death of Hattie Carroll:

The paper found Zantzinger in arrogant mood, declaring that all he was going to miss out on during his winter incarceration was “a lot of snow”. He also told the reporter that he had much more respect for some black people than for the “white niggers” he knew, and added: “Hell, you wouldn't want to go to school with Negroes any more than you would with French people”. Stepping in to defend her husband's generosity, Jane said: “Nobody treats his niggers as well as Billy does around here.” For some reason, she seemed to think that would be helpful. 

Bob Dylan, who sang at the Lincoln Memorial rally on August 28 as William Zantzinger was being sentenced, had been following events around the death of Hattie Carroll.  In early October, while in California with his then-girlfriend Joan Baez, he wrote The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, recording it on October 23, 1963.

It's a powerful song; like many based on historical events there are inaccuracies, Zantzinger did not wear a diamond ring, Hattie Carroll was a barmaid, not a waitress, Zantzinger is called Zanzinger, and Dylan confuses the original charge and bail situation (Zantzinger was originally booked for assault and released on bail before it was known Carroll had died) but it really doesn't matter because he gets at the truth of the story.

The lyric never mentions race.  The repeated incantation of the name William Zanzinger creates an unnatural aura because of its unusual use in a song.  In the third verse, Hattie Carroll's lowly status is emphasized in three consecutive lines that end, "of the table", "at the table", and "from the table".  The repetition, lack of rhyme, and interruption of the song's rhythm pounding the message home.

Dylan's chorus, quoted at the top of this post is repeated four times.  The first three times he tells the listener "Take the rag away from your face, now ain't the time for your tears" and then each following verse adds more terrible details.  After the final verse Dylan finally gives permission for releasing the listener singing, "Bury the rag deep in your face, for now's the time for your tears".