This was the Freshman Summer Reading assignment at the UNC-Asheville in the Summer of 2006. I worked there and my daughter was an incoming Freshman in the Fall of 2006. I joined a Faculty-Staff Reading Group for the book as well. This book really hit home for me. I attended Druid Hills Elementary School in Martinsville, VA from 1962-1966. Martinsville, VA is 50 miles from Oxford, NC. All of our television came from "The Piedmont Golden Triangle" -- Greensboro, High Point, Winston-Salem. The final chapters, including the story of Senator Jesse Helms's racist broadcasts on the radio in Raleigh beginning in 1990 served to cement my opposition to the Republican Party. Also see the film "Dear Jesse" by Tim Kirkman.

Americans love their sanitized, After-School Special version of the civil rights movement, in which we've progressed inevitably from the bad old days of slavery to the modern day where racism is just the occasional gaffe that gets a news commentator fired or a few hicks wearing sheets way off in the boonies. Tim Tyson strips away this mythology in his story of a black man who was murdered in 1970 by a violent, mean-tempered white business owner, allegedly for flirting with his daughter-in-law. Six years after the Civil Rights Act, Oxford, North Carolina was still a segregated town where white supremacy ruled, unapologetically. But when the all-white jury acquitted Robert Teal even of any lesser charge like manslaughter, the town's African American population rose up in outrage, and Oxford's businesses burned.

Decades later, Tyson, who was eleven years old at the time, and whose father was a liberal white desegregationist minister who was subsequently driven out of town, came back to interview everyone involved, including the murderer, Robert Teal. Blood Done Sign My Name is the result of that project, but it's also a look at how Americans have always lied to themselves about our country's race relations, and continue to do so to this day. Slave owners said, "Our slaves are like part of the family." In the 1990s, Tyson took a group of students to a Southern plantation that had been the site of a bloody slave uprising, and found it turned into an antebellum theme park with hardly any mention of slavery. The murder of Henry Marrow is really just a small part of this story.

This book was what became Tyson's Master's thesis, and it's powerful and engaging and contains many truths that still bear repeating, over and over. I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 because while Tyson is quite honest about his own white liberal guilt and how he and his family were complicit in the very system they opposed, the fact remains that in places the book still ends up being more about him and his own family's history. Fair enough, as it's his book to write and it's his own history, in part, that he wanted to confront, but as he shows us, the stories white people tell are not the stories black people tell about the same events. He does his best to get the whole story from all sides, but inevitably, one senses that there are pieces a white dude just isn't going to be able to dig up, no matter how earnest and well-intentioned.

A powerful story of a racial killing without justice, the struggle for not just civil rights, but civility itself, wrapped in a journey to understand both what drove his father to be an agent of change, as well as to decipher the ugliness that reared its terrible head far too often while growing up.

An interesting history/memoir. I have lived in SE North Carolina for 35 years, including during the riots of the early 70's in Wilmington. Tyson's book was very disturbing; I keep hoping that we have moved beyond our racist past and no longer need reminding of those horrors. o When I heard Tyson speak at UNC-Wilmington, he seemed arrogant and aloof... not really interested in engaging with the locals unless they had purchased one of his books to sign. I would recommend this book to anyone not familiar with our regional racial history.

Censorship by Goodreads?: I joined Goodreads over two years ago with the purpose of committing to “the cloud” a paper list (along with supplementary Post-It Notes and cocktail napkins) of books, including this one, that I intended to read someday. After doing so, the first comment that I ever received on Goodreads directed me to a web site that denounced this book. The web site is the laughably ineffective work of an angry semi-literate: difficult to navigate, ill-punctuated, logically inconsistent. If you doubted that the race-related unpleasantness related in this book is still alive and kicking today, Tyson's detractors should convince you otherwise.

I saw at the time that all who had listed the book as “to-read” had received the same comment. Later, the comment disappeared from my review. The same seemed to happen to comments by the same poster on other people's reviews. What happened? Assuming that the original poster did not voluntarily withdraw the posting, it seems like censorship. Was it?

Opinion about book: I enjoyed this book and recommend it, but my comment here will not be completely complimentary. It seems like the author wants to have it both ways about the role of story-telling in history. I mean to say: he wants to tell a story of a single incident here and have us believe that it stands, at least in part, for a larger struggle and a larger problem. He makes his case convincingly. Why does he need to do this? Because history, in the raw, is a confusing, often contradictory, series of events, with seeming dead ends, inexplicable mysteries, misleading contemporary accounts, and inconclusive data. Historians and fiction writers often arrive on the scene afterward and shape a narrative that they hope will be clear, accurate, and useful for the rest of us. When done well, it helps us to remember things we might otherwise wish to forget, like lynchings, and motivate us to be better than we might be otherwise.

So, while telling his own story, Tyson objects to what he sees as the “Disneyfied” story of the life and works of Dr. Martin Luther King, and, by extension, the entire African-American experience. There can be no arguing with the fact that King is now viewed differently in popular culture. Further evidence of this was provided by the recent release of decades-old interviews with the recently-widowed Jacqueline Kennedy denouncing Dr. King, which hit the mainstream press like the voice of a ghost from the past, reminding us of how Dr. King appeared to many contemporaries.

As Tyson accurately summarizes it, the current popular myth is that King came along with a philosophy of non-violence, and, as an almost immediate result, opposition to racism in the U.S. suddenly melted away, except for a few cardboard villains. While this is clearly not true, I'd like to take the morally wicked position that such lies should at least be tolerated, if not encouraged.

Where I live now (Bulgaria), the popular narrative (or “myth”, if you wish to be uncharitable) is that this country is a tolerant one. As evidence, Bulgarians can point out that the country managed to save most of its indigenous Jews from extinction during WWII without any apparently self-interested motive. Of course, there are other moments in local history when toleration was not in evidence, but the popular narrative remains a useful one. In this case, there were recently anti-Roma (a.k.a. Gypsy) violence sparked by the killing of an ethnic Bulgarian by an ethnic Roma crime lord. Leading political figures from both the left and the right appeared together in public and declared that toleration was a national characteristic and to be intolerant was to be unpatriotic. Since a sense of patriotism is often a more effective motivator than a sense of righting a past wrong, this was a wise rhetorical move and helped to partially dampen inflamed spirits, probably saving property and lives.

Similarly, in the U.S.A., thanks to the posthumous conversion of Dr. King from dangerous radical to great American, it is possible to publicly invoke him when wishing to maintain that toleration and non-violence are the traditional qualities of patriotic citizens. While it is reasonable to question whether such a tradition exists, it seems inarguable that things would be better if such a tradition existed. Its widespread acceptance in the national mythology makes it more difficult to claim that the inherent superiority of one group is actually what the country is all about.

Certain lies, like certain idiots, can be useful. This contention rests on the unprovable assertion that, while most people will not respond to a call to remedy wrongs they perceive as done long ago by strangers long dead, many will respond to a call to behave in the perceived great traditions of their nation, wherever the nation is. People who are ready for the more complicated truth can go to writers like Tyson. In this case, they will discover a truth that is deeper, sadder, more enraging, more complex, usually more tragic, occasionally more heroic.

In 2000, my family and I moved to Oxford , from East Durham. At first the country life style was great and still. Over the years, I had heard stories about the killing of Henry Marrow. At the time, I said to myself, where have I moved? These days I love in Stem, and frequent a Brewery in Oxford. A fellow Beer drinker, let me borrow the book. At first it was a difficult read, but worth plodding through. Many of the locations in the boom,are very familiar to me. The insight , research and passion of this group is fantastic...Anyone who lives in the rural South and is a transplant should read this account of a tragedy that is all too common our past!

did not finish book

I really don't know a lot about the civil rights movement. All I know is that some nonviolent black guy named Martin Luther King, Jr. marched around and got attacked by cops. And black people wanted to stop discrimination (i.e. the inability to drink out of whichever water fountain you want), which somehow, someday, just stopped. POOF!

Looking back at my description, though, I can see all the holes in my knowledge. I know that just one guy couldn't have changed the country so drastically. I know that discrimination has to be more than just dividing water fountains, buses, and schools by color or it wouldn't have been such a big problem. I know that we didn't all just decide to hold hands and sing "Kumbaya" one afternoon, and suddenly discrimination disappeared. I have heard obscure names like Malcolm X and the Black Panthers tossed around a few times, but I have no idea what they mean. All I've learned about the civil rights movement is the child's sanitized version of history, just the information that you find in a children's book about MLK and no more.

And chances are, if you're young, like me, and white, like me, that's all you've ever learned, too.

That's where this book comes in. Set in Oxford, North Carolina during an especially turbulent period of the civil rights movement, Blood Done Sign My Name recounts the story of a white family killing a black man, and the racial tension that resulted. I never knew that there was rioting and firebombing all over that small country town, or even anywhere in the country, and especially that it was done by the black community. I never really knew what the Black Panthers stood for, or why people were so upset when those two black Olympic medalists gave the "black power" salute during the national anthem. I still don't know what Malcolm X stood for, but now I have to know. This book has opened my eyes on the civil rights issue so much, and I can't hardly believe that our country was once like that. This makes Occupy Wall Street and all the backlash there seem like kindergarten, and Middle Eastern terrorists seem like background noise.

What has our country been hiding from us? Obviously, more than I thought. I knew history textbooks couldn't be entirely trusted, but I didn't know to what extent. Now I feel I have to go researching everything supposedly important in history that I don't know hardly anything about--Vietnam, Nixon, the Persian Gulf, Cuba--and see what exactly was going on, and what we're too ashamed to teach our children. As Tyson explains in the book, we can't move forward until we acknowledge where we've been. And from what I see, we're just trying to hide that information.

This book is a perfect balance between a memoir of someone who grew up during a period of serious racial turmoil in North Carolina, and a history of/commentary on that racial turmoil. The author tells this obviously complicated story with one murder as the focal point, which centers everything really nicely. (p.s. The murder in question took place in 1970! I mean seriously, 1970?!) Tyson is white, and belonged to a family of Methodist preachers who historically worked against racial oppression. He talks about their positive work and attitudes, but he doesn't let them off the hook for their paternalism and participation in white supremacy. He doesn't let himself off the hook either.

I think one of the strongest things about this book is that Tyson talks about a part of this country's racial history that is rarely discussed, especially in school. It's like people, (read: especially white people), want to think about the Civil Rights movement as this thing that happened only in the 60's, was all thanks to MLK and acts of non-violent protest, and solved everything. Basically, none of that is true, and this book examines another side of the movement in a very specific and compelling way. Couldn't put it down.

It's always a shock to be reminded how recently the ugly racist past of America roamed unfettered over much of our landscape -- Tyson's memoir makes it clear that it still might not be entirely domesticated, although the progress is worth noting. This book does a great job of telling the horrifying history of a murder and a whole series of miscarriages of justice in eastern North Carolina, centered on 1970 but extending back to 1898 and forward into the 1990s.

Tyson's narration occasionally drops into the smarmily self-flagellating, and he really needs a tough editor (it's clear that this book was made of segments of other texts, including [as he shares with us] his dissertation, because there's clumsy repetition in a handful of unnecessary spots. That doesn't detract from the power of the story, however. Tyson recounts his family's own history unstintingly, clearly, vibrantly, and with both sensitivity and humor. His pastor father, Vernon Tyson, comes off as the unquestioned moral hero.

A must-read for any student of the modern civil rights era.

Part memoir and part history lesson this book looks at race relations in a small North Carolina town through the eyes of Timothy Tyson a white preachers son. He writes about the murder of a black man and the rage in the African American community that came with the aquital of the white men on trial for that murder. In a way, this book and The Tortilla Curtain try to get us to look at how we see people outside of our race, their struggles and our presuppositions.

Really interesting reading my grandfather’s annotated version of this book about where he grew up