William Devereux Zantzinger, 69, whose six-month sentence in the fatal caning of a black barmaid named Hattie Carroll at a Baltimore charity ball moved Bob Dylan to write a dramatic, almost journalistic song, "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," that became a classic of modern American folk music, died on Jan. 3 in Maryland. The incident occurred on Feb. 8, 1963. Zantzinger, a 24-year-old Maryland tobacco farmer, was on a drinking spree in Baltimore. At the Emerson Hotel, where he used racial epithets and hit several hotel employees with a toy cane, including Carroll, 51. He repeatedly struck her and she died of a stroke the next morning.
A three-judge court ruled a caning alone could not have caused the death and reduced the charge to manslaughter.
NEW YORK TIMES
