Wayne County Reads 2008
From Wikipedia
Blood Done Sign My Name is an autobiographical work of history written by Timothy B. Tyson. ... The book deals with the 1970 murder of Henry Marrow, a black man, by a local white man Robert Teel and his sons, prompted by Marrow's alleged suggestive comment to a white woman. Tyson was a childhood friend of Robert Teel's son, Gerald. The Teels were acquitted by an all-white jury in a verdict described by the Raleigh News & Observer as "a sham and a mockery of justice." The riots and arson campaign around the case in Oxford left much of the small town looking, in the words of the News & Observer, "like Berlin following the Allied bombing raids of World War II."
This case helped galvanize the African-American resistance movement in Oxford, N.C, where the book takes place, and across the eastern North Carolina black belt. It helped establish local civil rights activist Ben Chavis's leadership in the black civil rights movement, which eventually led to his becoming the executive director of the NAACP and later an organizer of the Million Man March. This episode radicalized the African American freedom struggle in North Carolina, leading up to the turbulence of the Wilmington Ten cases, which grew out of racial conflict in the port city and the trial of Ben Chavis and nine others on charges stemming from the burning of a grocery store.
Tyson, whose father was the minister of a prominent local church, explores not only the white supremacy of the South's racial caste system but his own and his family's white supremacy. He interweaves a narrative of the story and its effects on him with discussion of the racial history of the United States, focusing on the persistence of discrimination despite federal law and on the violent realities of that history on both sides of the color line. Tyson challenges the popular memory of the movement as a nonviolent call on America's conscience led by Martin Luther King. The vision of the movement in these pages is local as well as national and international, violent as well as nonviolent, and far more complicated and human than the myth of "pure good versus bare-fanged evil in the streets of Birmingham," as he puts it.
From Amazon.com
When he was but 10 years old, Tim Tyson heard one of his boyhood friends in Oxford, N.C. excitedly blurt the words that were to forever change his life: "Daddy and Roger and 'em shot 'em a nigger!" The cold-blooded street murder of young Henry Marrow by an ambitious, hot-tempered local businessman and his kin in the Spring of 1970 would quickly fan the long-flickering flames of racial discord in the proud, insular tobacco town into explosions of rage and street violence.
It would also turn the white Tyson down a long, troubled reconciliation with his Southern roots that eventually led to a professorship in African-American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison -- and this profoundly moving, if deeply troubling personal meditation on the true costs of America's historical racial divide. Taking its title from a traditional African-American spiritual, Tyson skillfully interweaves insightful autobiography (his father was the town's anti-segregationist Methodist minister, and a man whose conscience and human decency greatly informs the son) with a painstakingly nuanced historical analysis that underscores how little really changed in the years and decades after the Civil Rights Act of 1965 supposedly ended racial segregation. The details are often chilling: Oxford simply closed its public recreation facilities rather than integrate them; Marrow's accused murderers were publicly condemned, yet acquitted; the very town's newspaper records of the events--and indeed the author's later account for his graduate thesis--mysteriously removed from local public records. But Tyson's own impassioned personal history lessons here won't be denied; they're painful, yet necessary reminders of a poisonous American racial legacy that's so often been casually rewritten--and too easily carried forward into yet another century by politicians eagerly employing the cynical, so-called "Southern Strategy." -- Jerry McCulley
OUR AUTHOR:
Timothy B. Tyson, author of Blood Done Sign My Name and other award-winning books, is Senior Scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and Visiting Professor of American Christianity and Southern Culture in the Duke Divinity School. He has an appointment in Duke’s history department and is adjunct professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina. He previously was a John Hope Franklin Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2004-05 and a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Tyson earned a bachelor of arts in political science and religious studies from Emory University and a master of arts and doctorate in history from Duke University.
