The Death of Emmett Till - Witmark Demo - 1962

It was 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 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 were 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 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 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 give all we could give
 We'd make this great land of ours a greater place to live