The Death of Emmette Till - Bob Dylan, Cynthia Gooding

'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 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 killing' 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 there seemed to mind

I saw the morning papers but I could not bear, to see

The smiling brothers walking' 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 to let this human race fall down so God-awful low!

This song’s 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