The political game endures: Both parties treat immigrants as pawns

In Bob Dylan’s song “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” from his 1964 album, The Times They Are A-Changin’, Dylan lamented the 1963 assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith. While Dylan’s song specifically addresses Evers’ murder, it has broader lessons for the current immigration crisis. Much of the dispute about immigration and deportation is nothing more than partisan posturing, with immigrants — both documented and otherwise — caught in the crossfire of a cynical political war.

Medgar Evers was a decorated World War II veteran and 1952 graduate of historically Black Alcorn A&M College, now known as Alcorn State University. In 1954, after the United States Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Evers applied to the University of Mississippi Law School but was denied admission because of his race. In November of that year, he became the first field secretary for the NAACP in Mississippi. In that role, Evers led the campaign against racist Jim Crow laws by organizing boycotts and helping to set up new regional chapters of the NAACP throughout Mississippi.

Byron De La Beckwith was also a decorated World War II veteran, honorably discharged in 1945 after being wounded in the Pacific theater. After the war he settled in Greenwood, Mississippi, with his wife and young son. In 1954, after the Brown decision, De La Beckwith joined his local White Citizens’ Council, a white supremacist group similar to the Ku Klux Klan, which he later also joined. The White Citizens’ Counsel, which boasted about 60,000 members throughout the South, was dedicated to opposing racial integration in schools and other public institutions.

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