‘Twas down in Mississippi not 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 colour 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 disremember 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.- Bob Dylan.
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this is bull,the supreme court lets them free thats ashame letting 2 men murder a child wow and they call this the promise land
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LIke his Mom said, Emmett was the sacrificial lamb a lightening rod. I hope those bastards and the jury and all the white folks that supported them in that town burn in hell.
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What happened with Emmett Till happened many other times in similar ways all over the south. There was no criminal justice system for American blacks for a long time. The two men that murdered Emmett Till admitted a year after there acquittal that they had murdered them. But now in 2015 things are far from perfect but they are a lot better and this needs to be acknowledged. The killing of Michael Brown was nothing like the murder of Emmett Till. After an intense investigation ordered by Holder it was established that Michael Brown’s hands were never in the air, that he attacked and tried to wrestle with Darrel Wilson to get his gun from him and that it was rightfully a justifiable homicide. Why won’t people accept the truth…..Now in New York city the cops were at fault for Eric Garner’s death. The man’s death WAS a murder. However, each situation is different and people should care enough about the truth to admit that Michael Brown’s death was a justifiable homicide. Just because there is still racism doesn’t mean than in every case when a black man is shot that he was innocent. Are some people always going to scream racism even when it isn’t there because of what happened to Emmet Till.?
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http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/till/tillSONG.html
only joan baez put her name to it on her own record apparently, ’63
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