Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan (1962)

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Death of Emmett Till

The Death of Emmett Till is a song by American musician and Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan, telling about the murder and trial of a 14-year-old African-American young man. Emmett Till was killed by two white men, reportedly after flirting with a white woman on August 28, 1955. In 1962, Dylan first performed the song [1] and apparently the song which is also known as The Ballad of Emmett Till never appeared on Dylan’s studio albums. [2]

Bob Dylan

Key Lyrics

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 gave all we could give

We could make this great land of ours a greater place to live [3]

Black Empowerment

"They murdered that boy, and to hide their dastardly act, they tied barbed wire to his neck and to a heavy gin fan and dumped him into the river for the turtles and the fish." --Prosecutor Gerald Chatham

Two months earlier in summer before Rosa Parks’ incident when she refused to obey an order to give her seat on a white person on a Montgomery bus on December 1, 1955, an African-American boy, Emmett Till (14) found dead as he had been brutally murdered and his body thrown in the Tallahatchie River. However, despite the clear evidence that two white men had committed the crime, the two were found innocent as the all white jury returned a “Not Guilty” verdict. Parks wrote, "the news of Emmett's death caused me...to participate in the cry for justice and equal rights." Parks, in an interview, described herself as "very upset, very devastated" by the Till murder. The trial of two white men, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam shook the conscience of a nation and became one of the pioneers of the movement for civil rights for black Americans. [4]

Seven years after the incident, Bob Dylan wrote the song as a tribute to Emmett Till and reminder that injustice still happened around.

Dylan recorded it for Marcus Witmark & Sons, one of his first two publishing companies. The version appeared on various Bootlegs, yet the song was not released officially as he recorded until 2010. [5]

References