[00:20.48]Was down in Mississippi not so long ago
[00:29.98]When a young boy from Chicago town
[00:34.56]Walked in a Southern door
[00:39.91]This boy's fateful tragedy
[00:43.51]You all should remember well
[00:48.40]The color of his skin was black
[00:53.04]And his name was Emmett Till
[01:00.13]Some men, they dragged him to a barn
[01:06.01]And there they beat him up
[01:09.30]They said they had a reason
[01:13.94]But I just can't remember what
[01:18.38]They tortured him and did some things
[01:23.66]Too evil to repeat
[01:27.65]There were screaming sounds inside the barn
[01:32.32]There was laughing sounds out on the street
[01:38.16]Then they rolled his body down a gulf
[01:42.69]Amidst a blood red rain
[01:47.13]And they threw him in the waters wide
[01:51.90]To cease his screaming pain
[01:56.34]The reason that they killed him there
[02:00.93]And I'm a-sure, it was no lie
[02:05.37]Was just for they found them killing him
[02:10.22]And to watch him slowly die
[02:15.35]And then to stop the United States
[02:19.15]Of yelling for a trial
[02:23.53]Two brothers, they confessed
[02:26.69]That they had killed poor Emmett Till
[02:32.32]But on the jury there were men
[02:36.90]Who had helped the brothers commit this awful crime
[02:41.49]And so this trial was a mockery
[02:46.13]But nobody there seemed to mind
[02:51.67]I saw the morning papers
[02:57.50]But I could not bear
[03:01.00]To see the smiling brothers
[03:05.38]Walkin' down the courthouse stairs
[03:09.97]For the jury found them innocent
[03:14.49]And the brothers, they went free
[03:18.93]While Emmett's body floats the foam
[03:23.51]Of a Jim Crow southern sea
[03:30.19]If you can't speak out against this kind of thing
[03:34.98]A crime that's so unjust
[03:39.73]Your eyes are filled with dead men's dirt
[03:44.11]Your ears must be filled with dust
[03:48.90]Your arms and legs
[03:50.50]They must be in shackles and chains
[03:53.13]And your blood, it must cease to flow
[03:57.64]For you to let this human race
[04:02.59]Fall down so God-awful low
[04:07.33]This song is just a reminder
[04:11.82]To remind your fellow man
[04:16.26]That this kind of thing still lives today
[04:20.90]In that ghost-robed Ku Klux Klan
[04:25.24]But if all of us folks that thinks alike
[04:29.72]If we give all we could give
[04:34.51]We could make this great land of ours
[04:38.95]A greater place to live