Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“Daddy and Roger and ’em shot ’em a nigger.” Those words, whispered to ten-year-old Tim Tyson by a playmate, heralded a firestorm that would forever transform the tobacco market town of Oxford, North Carolina.

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 riveting narrative of that fiery summer brings gritty blues truth, soaring gospel vision, and down-home humor to a shocking episode of our history. Like To Kill a Mockingbird, Blood Done Sign My Name is a classic portrait of an unforgettable time and place.

The battle for civil rights was not won in the sixties - certainly not in many parts of the country. It never touched Oxford, North Carolina, where young Tim Tyson was growing up. In 1970, when a black man was killed in the town square by a Klansman and his sons, and an all-white jury acquitted the murderers, both blacks and whites were swept into a firestorm. Amid the violence and fear that enveloped the town, Tim's father attempted to bring the two sides together, only to be reviled as a traitor to both sides. Tim - now a professor of African-American studies at the University of Wisconsin - has written a memoir of that turbulent summer, and has gone back, thirty years later, to find a remnant of scorched justice

The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley

… on balance Tyson has written an honest book, far more so than most explorations of race in America. He understands that the true past -- to the extent we can ever know the "truth" about the past -- was vastly more complicated and bloody than the gussied-up past in which we so desperately want to believe, and that until we understand this, we will be incapable of redeeming ourselves and our country.

Timothy B. Tyson is a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison