Emmett Till

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.