Emmett Till Was Murdered Fifty Years Ago Today -- Songs by Bob Dylan & Phil Ochs

Fifty years ago, on Aug. 28, 1955, Emmett Till, an African-American teenager from Chicago was abducted from his uncle's home in Money, Mississippi, by two white men.

He had allegedly whistled at a white woman. He was found in a river, brutally murdered three days later.

The men charged with Till's murder—Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam—were acquitted at trial.

They later confessed in a magazine article to beating and shooting Till .

Emmett Till's body was displayed in an open casket; it had been monstrously brutalized. The contrast with the handsome kid was appalling. Songs (like the two below, written a few years later, in the early 60's), and plays and articles focused on the death of Till and what it symbolized about Missisippi, the south, and America in general... This had to be one of the early moments that crystalized the civil rights movement.

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Too Many Martyrs
by Phil Ochs

In the state of Mississippi many years ago
A boy of 14 years got a taste of southern law
He saw his friend a hanging and his color was his crime
And the blood upon his jacket left a brand upon his mind


CHORUS:
Too many martyrs and too many dead
Too many lies too many empty words were said
Too many times for too many angry men
Oh let it never be again

His name was Medgar Evers and he walked his road alone
Like Emmett Till and thousands more whose names we'll never know
They tried to burn his home and they beat him to the ground
But deep inside they both knew what it took to bring him down

Chorus

The killer waited by his home hidden by the night
As Evers stepped out from his car into the rifle sight
he slowly squeezed the trigger, the bullet left his side
It struck the heart of every man when Evers fell and died.

Chorus

And they laid him in his grave while the bugle sounded clear
laid him in his grave when the victory was near
While we waited for the future for freedom through the land (*)
The country gained a killer and the country lost a man

Chorus
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan

'Twas down in Mississippi not so long ago,
When a young boy from Chicago walked through a Southern door.
This boy's fateful tragedy you should all 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 disremember what.
They tortured him and did some things too evil to repeat.
There was screamin' sounds inside the barn, there was laughin' sounds out
on the street.

Then they rolled his body down a gulf amidst a blood red rain
And they threw him in the waters wide to cease his screamin' pain.
The reason that they killed him there, and I'm sure it was 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 seemed to mind.

I saw the mornin' papers but I could not bear
To see the smiling brothers walking 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'd 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 give all we could give,
We'd make this great land of ours a greater place to live.
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