On January 5, Malia and Sasha Obama enrolled at Sidwell Friends school in Washington, DC.

Sidwell Friends is a quaker school, founded in 1883. For more than seventy years Sidwell was whites-only, but in 1956 the school’s trustees announced that they would allow African Americans to enter the following year. The class of 1957 was thus the last to experience Sidwell as an all white school.

William Zantzinger was among the graduates that year.

Zantzinger was the son of a prominent Maryland tobacco farming family. In the years after he graduated from Sidwell, he married and took over the operation of the family plantation. On the evening of February 8, 1963, Zantzinger and his wife went out to dinner and a society ball.

Zantzinger drank quite a bit at dinner, and quite a bit more at the ball. Over the course of the evening, he verbally and physically harassed several black serving staff. At about one-thirty in the morning, annoyed that she hadn’t returned quickly enough with a bourbon he’d ordered, Zantzinger struck African-American barmaid Hattie Carroll in the head with a cane.

Hattie Carroll was fifty-one years old, and the mother of eleven children. She collapsed not long after Zantzinger struck her, and was taken to the hospital, where she died of a brain hemorrhage the following morning.

Zantzinger was indicted for murder. He said he was so drunk at the time of the assault that he didn’t know what he was doing. His lawyers said it was stress, not physical injury, that caused Hattie Carroll’s death.

After a three-day trial, Zantzinger was convicted of manslaughter. He was fined $500, and sentenced to six months in jail, with the sentence to begin after the tobacco harvest. (While he was still in jail, Bob Dylan wrote and recorded a song about his crime.)

On January 3 of this year, William Zantzinger died.

On January 5, Malia and Sasha Obama enrolled at Sidwell Friends school in Washington, DC.