From legalized bigotry to Obama in Baltimore

Sometimes history offers a few ticks of the clock that feel like theater. The nation’s first African-American president, Barack Obama, prepares to take center stage in Baltimore this Saturday just as the curtain descends on two minor players from a bygone era of institutionalized racial segregation, William Zantzinger and Cornelia Wallace.

Zantzinger raised a cane “with his diamond-ring finger,” and struck poor Hattie Carroll in a Baltimore hotel in 1963, and moved Bob Dylan to write a song that became an anthem for the civil rights era.