The Death Of Mett Till

Was down in Mississippi not so long ago

When a young boy from Chicago town

Walked in a Southern door

This boy's fateful tragedy

You all should 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 disremember what

They tortured him and did some things

Too evil to repeat

There were screaming sounds inside the barn

There was laughing sounds out on the street

Then they rolled his body down a gulf

Amidst a blood 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 a-sure, it ain't no lie

'Cause he was born in black-skin barn

He was born to 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 had 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 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 clay

Your ears must be filled with dust

Your arms and legs

They must be in shackles and chains

And your mind, it must cease to flow

For you to let our 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