The Death of Emmett Till Lyrics
Not so long ago
When a young boy from Chicago Town
Walk in a southern door
This boy's fateful tragedy
We should all remember well
The color of his skin was black
And his name was Emmett Till
And there they beat him up
They said they had a reason
But I disremember what
They tortured him and did some things
Too evil to repeat
There was screamin' sounds inside the barn
There was laughin' sound out on the street
Amidst a bloodred rain
And they through him in the waters wide
To sease his screaming pain
The reason that they killed him there
And I'm sure it ain't no lie
He was a blackskin boy
So he was born to die
Of yelling for a trial
Two brothers they confessed that they
Killed poor Emmett Till
But on the jury there were men
Who helped the brother commit this awful crime
And so this trial was a mockery
But nobody seemed to mind
But I could not bear
To see the brothers smiling
On that courthouse stairs
For the jury found them innocent
And the brothers they went free
Whilt Emmett's body floats the foam
Of a Jim Crow southern sea
A crime that's so unjust
Your eyes are filled with deadman's dirt
Your mind is filled with dust
Your arms and legs, they must be in shackles and chains
And your blood it must cease to flow
For you'd let this human race
Sick so God-awful low
To tell my fellow man
That this kind of thing still lives today
In that ghost-robed Klu Klux Klan
But if we all then think alike
If we give all we can give
We'd make this Great land of ours
An even greater place to live
The picture was placed in the paper because Emmett's mother wanted the world to see what he really looked like, and how horrible it really was.
A true story about a fourteen-year-old boy who was killed for saying "Thanks, hon" to a female clerk as he left a convieniance store in Mississippi in 1955. A photograph of his dead face was placed in many northern newspapers, even though he had been shot in the head and one of his eyes were gauged out. Two men were acquited, even though they later admitted they were guilty, becuase the body was too mangled to properly identify. It was an important event because it generated a lot of sympathy from northern people for the plight of blacks in the south. Even though The Hurricane gets more press time, I think I like this Dylan song more.