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Emmett Till Emmett Till
Why was it you they had to kill
Why did they drag you from your bed
Why did they pistol whip your head

What exactly did you do
To make them do this thing to you
Just fourteen years old from Chicago town
To stay with you uncle you came down

That day you went into Bryant's store
No harm you meant as you walked through the door
Just a stick of gum you bought that day
The white woman served you in the usual way

The mistake you made was to touch her hand
How could you know in the south it was banned
Some said you flirted a bit 
But you didn't mean anything bad by it

The last thing you did as you left the store
Was to turn and whistle, that was the last straw
Mrs Bryant picked up her gun
That was when you started to run

You thought it was over, no more to be said
That night you peacefully slept in your bed
But they came for you at 2 am
These angry brutal racist men

They beat your face black and blue
Then into a truck they bundled you
They drove you to a riverside
You could not run you could not hide

There they shot you in the head
But even then you just weren't dead
So around your neck barbed wire they wound
Then an old cotton fan they found

This they wanted as a weight 
This it was that sealed your fate
Into the water you were cast
They laughed as they watched you sink at last


The weight of the fan dragged you down
They hoped that your body would never be found
But it surely was and they arrested the two
But they denied killing you

They were tried but they didn't care
In the Mississippi delta it would never be fair
They were found not guilty and set free
A miscarriage of justice for all to see

Your mother was called to identify
What she saw made her cry
A face so battered by the butt of a gun
She could not recognise her own son

Then these men boasted of their crime
Double jeopardy  was the law at the time
So they could not be tried again
No relief for your mothers pain

Yes you were silly to flirt with the wife
But why did that mean you should lose your life
Did that mean you should suffer so
The answer to that is surely no

Emmett Till Emmett Till 
Why was it you they had to kill
But out of your death one good thing came
The spark of civil rights that became a flame












Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was a young African-American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 at the age of 14, after being accused of offending a white woman in her family's grocery store. The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acquitted drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. Till posthumously became an icon of the Civil Rights Movement.
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