Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

By Timothy B. Tyson

Book Overview

The "riveting"* true story of the fiery summer of 1970, which would forever transform the town of Oxford, North Carolina--a classic portrait of the fight for civil rights in the tradition of To Kill a Mockingbird

*Chicago Tribune

On May 11, 1970, Henry Marrow, a twenty-three-year-old black veteran, walked into a crossroads store owned by Robert Teel and came out running. Teel and two of his sons chased and beat Marrow, then killed him in public as he pleaded for his life.

Like many small Southern towns, Oxford had barely been touched by the civil rights movement. But in the wake of the killing, young African Americans took to the streets. While lawyers battled in the courthouse, the Klan raged in the shadows and black Vietnam veterans torched the town's tobacco warehouses. Tyson's father, the pastor of Oxford's all-white Methodist church, urged the town to come to terms with its bloody racial history. In the end, however, the Tyson family was forced to move away.

Tim Tyson's gripping narrative brings gritty blues truth and soaring gospel vision to a shocking episode of our history.

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD

"If you want to read only one book to understand the uniquely American struggle for racial equality and the swirls of emotion around it, this is it."--Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Blood Done Sign My Name is a most important book and one of the most powerful meditations on race in America that I have ever read."--Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Pulses with vital paradox . . . It's a detached dissertation, a damning dark-night-of-the-white-soul, and a ripping yarn, all united by Tyson's powerful voice, a brainy, booming Bubba profundo."--Entertainment Weekly

"Engaging and frequently stunning."--San Diego Union-Tribune

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400083117
• ISBN13: 9781400083114
• Release Date: May 2005
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (NY)
• Length: 355 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Educational read on life for Black Americans!

I bought the is book to read in my AP Language class for school. The authors family grew up in an area that I currently live in. Not only did I learn history that has been covered up where I live, but I learned the harsh reality of racial inequality that happened in my grandparents time. I was not aware just how bad it was in the south not that long ago. This was a very educational read, and deepens the understanding of racial tensions in the south, and segregation in modern day. I think that everyone should give this book a try. It was slow for me to read, and at some points not the most interesting, but the lesson is well worth it.

Great book!!! I recommend this book

I fell like it’s more to the black slave side that’s just how I felt an I loved this book.

News Photographer Assigned To Oxford Murder Trial

I learned about Blood Done Sign My Name in June 2005. I always wondered if anyone had told the story that changed my view of life in just two days. In August 1970, I was a young photographer on the weekend shift at the Raleigh News and Observer. An assignment came in to meet a reporter in a small town north of Raleigh. No details. Just meet the reporter. When I got into Oxford, the reporter told me a man would soon be testifying in a murder trial and that he needed a photo of that man. I parked across from the Courthouse. I put a 200 mm lens on my Nikon motor drive and waited. Soon a police vehicle pulled up with a single man in the back. As the man exited the car, I climbed out and got ready to make the picture. As luck would have it, the man had a newspaper covering his face. He walked a few steps, dropped the paper, and looked straight at me. I took the photo and got out of town. The next morning, I was ordered to return to Oxford. Big mistake. The photo of the third killer appeared on front page on the local newstands, and this did not go well with the locals. The verdict came and the streets emptied. I took a last photograph as a line of police officers passed me on the street. Moments later they were back surrounding me. One pulled a knife and poked me in the stomach. The older man with the knife started to tell me I was at my end. I don't know what made me say I only made $2.00 an hour. The redneck just looked at me and said I was an idiot to risk my life for $2.00 and I agreed. They let me go. Shortly afterward, I got to my car and hit the road south. A group of locals followed me in a truck while I was flat out in my Ford Pinto. I laugh these days when I think about that longhair photographer being chased down the highway at full speed. It was straight from Hollywood but it was very real. I never knew the whole story until I read the book. The paper thought I wanted to file a complaint against the police, but the thought never entered my mind for a moment. To put it bluntly, I had no idea whatsoever how much danger I was in from the moment I set foot in Oxford. And I had no interest in going back to Oxford for any reason. I put the whole story out of my mind except for the photographs that still hang in my home. Then I read the book. If you want to begin to understand America, you need to read the book carefully. The story is real. The story is about America and a past that cannot be forgotten. A few days later, the News and Observer fired me for being too aggressive. I've always thought it was a badge of honor to be fired for becoming part of a story. I never worked as a photographer again. But I remember... Read the book...

Confronting the painful history of race in America

Author Timothy B. Tyson has carved out a rather unique role for himself. Believe it or not, he is a white man from North Carolina teaching Black History in Wisconsin. "Blood Done Sign My Name" is the compelling, personal and brutally honest story of how this all came to be. Tyson was 10 years old back in 1970 and living with his family in the small rural town of Oxford, N.C. His dad was the Methodist minister and his mom a schoolteacher in town. One day in May, his 10 year old playmate Gerald Teel casually remarked that "Daddy and Roger and 'em shot 'em a nigger." Indeed, his daddy and two of this brothers had brutally shot and killed a 23 year old black man, Henry Marrow, for very dubious reasons. This single event would have profound implications for the little town of Oxford and would play a major role in shaping the life of one Tim Tyson. "Blood Done Sign My Name" is a remarkable book on many levels. If you are interested in learning more about the arrest and subsequent trial of Robert Teel then you will certainly find it here. It is not a pretty story. Likewise, if you would like to learn more about the painful history of race relations in this country then this is your book as well. Tyson believes with all his heart that most of us have an extremely distorted and somewhat sugar-coated view of what really went on in this country during the 1960's and 1970's. For example, as a fairly well read white man in his 50's I had never even heard about two incidents that Tyson contends are key to understanding what really happened in those years. When you read about the case of the Wilmington Ten you begin to understand the rage black people felt back in the early 1970's. And when you read the grisly and heartbreaking story of what happened to some slaves who dared to rebel at the Destrehen Plantation in Louisiana way back in 1811, you again begin to appreciate the reasons why blacks in this country feel and react the way they do. The history books that most of us read in school never mention incidents like these. So how are we to know? And if we don't know, how can we possibly understand? And finally, "Blood Done Sign My Name" is an intimate account of one man's personal struggle with the issue of race. Tim Tyson has presented us with an exceptionally well written book that offers the reader an awful lot to chew on. Highly recommended.

The making of a man committed to peace and justice

This extremely well-written memoir/nonfiction book about a horrible, racially motivated killing in N. Carolina illustrates the author's coming of age in the American South. As a professor in African-American history, the book is grounded in thorough research and historical context. I was even impressed by bibliography at the end of the book. This man has done his research and documented it well.Tyson not only writes about the tragic event that changed his life (and the history of his hometown) when he was 10, but he also shares some of the history of the Black Freedom movement and the history of his own family, and the way it has affected him throughout his life.What I thought was particularly interesting was how the U.S. has sanitized the history of the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in particular. When he was killed, Ronald Reagan actually had the gall to imply that he brought it on himself because of his lack of respect for law and order, and he accused the anti-war protestors for the assasination!I was particularly touched by the stories about Tyson's amazing parents and feisty relatives, and others who stood up for justice and compassion. Tyson also writes openly about his angst and struggles to come to grips with his own prejudices.I will recommend this book to everyone I know--I believe that it's a book that every American needs to read, to better understand the history of race relations in this country and how far we have yet to go.

How The Rights Were Won

"'Daddy and Roger and 'em shot 'em a nigger.'" These are the initial words in _Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story_ (Crown Publishers) by Timothy Tyson. A shock opening is often to be distrusted, but not here; the words are those of a friend to the ten-year-old Tyson himself, and the book explains his efforts to come to an understanding of the 1970 murder and the subsequent revolution in race politics in his then home of Oxford, North Carolina. It lead him to do his master's thesis in history about the Oxford trials, but in this book he has not only given the history and the aftermath of the event in historical context, but has made it a memoir of his own growing up and his family's involvement in race relations. Parts of the story, including Tyson's relationship with his "Eleanor Roosevelt liberal" parents, are told with the love, humor and detail that many readers will associate with _To Kill a Mockingbird_. The struggle between the races is far from settled, but Tyson insists that this story from his time is an antidote to the "sugar-coated confections that pass for the popular history of the civil rights movement." Brown vs. Board of Education, The Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act made no dent in Oxford. No black officials had entered into the local government. Blacks were employed in menial labor only. The public pool had been sold to become a private one, so that blacks never swam where whites did. Violence by blacks against whites was ruthlessly pursued, but not vice versa. The motivation for such action by whites, Tyson shows, was the same fear that has worked for centuries, that black men would have sex with white women. The trouble in Oxford was sparked by an allegation that Henry Marrow, a 23-year-old black veteran, had made a flirtatious remark to a white woman. He was in the store of Robert Teel, probably a member of the Klan. Teel and his son Larry ran down Marrow and shot him in the street as he pled for his life. Mobs the night of the murder firebombed buildings, destroyed stores and "...scared the hell out of most of the white people in Oxford, and some of the black ones, too." The violence was worse when the Teels were declared not guilty. White liberals like Tyson's father had Christian faith that white people would share power rather than having to have it seized from them by black people. He was eventually shifted out of Oxford because of his racial moderation. Tyson clearly admires the stance his father took, but concedes that moderate whites who spoke up and tried to be good examples wound up doing little to really improve racial equality. Tyson quotes a liberal paper of the time that "discussion is a more promising way to racial accommodation than destruction," but says that there is an uncomfortable, indisputable fact: that in Oxford, whites "... did not even consider altering the racial caste system until rocks began to fly and buildings began to burn." Abolition was not accomplished by

Freedom is a constant struggle

In BLOOD DONE SIGN MY NAME, Timothy Tyson details the triumph and the shame inherent in American history, with no quarter given to any assumptions or preconcieved notions. Interweaving his stirring personal narrative with an often disturbing, yet ultimately enriching, examination of the freedom struggle in North Carolina and beyond, Tyson spares no one - not even himself or his family - of his hard and direct analysis. Thus, BLOOD acts as a striking blow against our gauzy reminiscing about the Civil Rights Movement, while simultaneously reminding us of the true value of that movement and the people within it (as well as a reminder that the work isn't nearly done). Tyson's urgent tone is consistent with William Faulkner's assertion that the past "isn't even past," nor was it a series of easily achieved inevitabilities. Funny, brash, unflinching, BLOOD DONE SIGN MY NAME is the best kind of American non-fiction, one which travels on both sides of a road that, to quote an old bluegrass song, is often mighty dark to travel. A secular sermon of the highest order, helping us to better understand ourselves and leading us to fellowship.