"Twas down in Mississippi no so long ago,
|
When a young boy from Chicago town stepped through a Southern door.
|
This boy's dreadful tragedy I can still remember well,
|
The color of his skin was black and his name was Emmett Till.
|
|
Some men they dragged him to a barn and there they beat him up.
|
They said they had a reason, but I can't remember what.
|
They tortured him and did some evil things too evil to repeat.
|
There was screaming sounds inside the barn, there was laughing sounds out on the street.
|
|
Then they rolled his body down a gulf amidst a bloody red rain
|
And they threw him in the waters wide to cease his screaming pain.
|
The reason that they killed him there, and I'm sure it ain't no lie,
|
Was just for the fun of killin' him and to watch him slowly die.
|
|
And then to stop the United States of yelling for a trial,
|
Two brothers they confessed that they had killed poor Emmett Till.
|
But on the jury there were men who helped the brothers commit this awful crime,
|
And so this trial was a mockery, but nobody seemed to mind.
|
|
I saw the morning papers but I could not bear to see
|
The smiling brothers walkin' down the courthouse stairs.
|
For the jury found them innocent and the brothers they went free,
|
While Emmett's body floats the foam of a Jim Crow southern sea.
|
|
If you can't speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that's so unjust,
|
Your eyes are filled with dead men's dirt, your mind is filled with dust.
|
Your arms and legs they must be in shackles and chains, and your blood it must refuse to flow,
|
For you let this human race fall down so God-awful low!
|
|
This song is just a reminder to remind your fellow man
|
That this kind of thing still lives today in that ghost-robed Ku Klux Klan.
|
But if all of us folks that thinks alike, if we gave all we could give,
|
We could make this great land of ours a greater place to live.
|
|
-----------------
|
The Death Of Emmett Till
|
Bob Dylan |