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.
Wallace stood next to her husband, Alabama’s bulldog segregationist Gov. George Wallace, when he came through Maryland campaigning to be president in 1972, and she tried to shield his body after the gunshots were fired into him on a Laurel parking lot.
The deaths of Wallace, 69, from cancer, and Zantzinger, 69, from unknown causes, offer two more signposts marking the distance America has traveled from its time of legalized bigotry to the arrival of Obama.
Wallace’s husband, George, was one of a generation’s most malignant symbols of America’s enforced racial divide; Zantzinger was a blip on the radar screen until Dylan’s song turned him into a symbol of white privilege bullying black helplessness.
George Wallace, representing the power of his state, stood in the doorway to keep black students from entering the University of Alabama. William Zantzinger, representing only the power of white skin, raised a cane against a black woman that turned into a death blow.
A generation of Baltimoreans can still remember the Zantzinger story, and a generation of Americans can still recall the lyrics to Dylan’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” She was a barmaid at the old Emerson Hotel on that winter night in 1963 when Zantzinger, a drunk, husky 24-year old with a 630-acre farm in Southern Maryland, entered and demanded service.
“Hey, black girl, bring me a drink,” he said.
“Just a minute, sir,” said Carroll, a 51-year old woman with 11 children and a history of heart problems.
Zantzinger shouted a curse and struck her with his cane. “That man has upset me so,” Carroll told kitchen workers at the hotel. Hours later, she collapsed and died of a stroke.
Dylan sang how Carroll “got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane/That sailed through the air and came down through the room/Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle./And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger”
Zantzinger was charged with homicide. This was reduced to manslaughter. Held on bond, he was freed long enough to finish harvesting his tobacco crop. When he returned and faced sentencing, he was given six months behind bars and fined $625. That was it, for the loss of Hattie Carroll’s life.
Dylan sang: “Ah, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears/Bury the rag deep in your face/For now is the time for your tears.”
The case (and the song) seemed symbolic: Of any white man with money and political connections casually beating a vulnerable black person to death, and a court of law so unrepentantly racist, and so disdainful of the value of a black person’s life, that it offered the merest slap on the wrist as punishment.
With Wallace, the racism was played out as theater for the whole country. You watched and chose up sides, like a ball game with life-and-death consequences. It was George Wallace who stood in the schoolhouse doorway proclaiming, “Segregation now, segregation forever,” and riding his Alabama popularity so hard that it propelled him into a race for the White House.
He was doing pretty well, too. He’d tapped into white resentment that black people were getting too many breaks, that the courts and the Congress had somehow overstepped their bounds when they’d granted voting rights, and fair housing rights, and the right to fair employment.
Imagine such a concept today: The “unfairness” of black people simply wanting the same rights as their fellow citizens, and a country agonizing over such issues.
Wallace’s time in the spotlight brought him here. In Baltimore, he spoke to an overflow crowd at the Fifth Regiment Armory. A few days later, he went to Laurel, where that deranged Milwaukee kid named Arthur Bremer waited for him with a gun.
Cornelia Wallace was by his side. A few years later, she wrote, “My first impression was: They’ll finish him off while he’s lying on the ground. I rushed to him and fell over him, trying to cover his head and his heart with my body.”
That’s the lingering image of Cornelia Wallace: A desperate woman trying to protect her husband, who was desperately trying to hold back the tide of history.
Now both Wallaces are gone, and so is Zantzinger. As Barack Obama moves toward the White House, memories of their time mark the distance traveled along America’s racial pathways.
