This was a hard book to read. Not because the author is a well-educated historian and uses elegant words, but because of the pain he shows of the racial inequities we live in. On top of that, his story is from my home town of Oxford, NC. I know many of the places he describes and several of the people he discusses, but I never heard of this murder. I suppose this happened about 8 years before we moved back to Granville County when I turned 15 years old. Amazing how things can be hidden or forgotten.

This book was very ambitious. To be honest it was almost too ambitious. I feel like it was three different narratives complied into one story. It could have been easily made into several different full length novels. It served as a chronological account of the civil rights movement in the south, an autobiography of the authors family and the murder of Henry Marrow. I would have read all 3 books if it had been sectioned up like that. I felt like I was misled by the way this book was advertised. I had assumed it would center around the life and murder of Henry Marrow but that was only a small focus in this book. The book was more or less how the murder affected the life of the author. Which is fine I just didn’t expect that. There was a lot of information packed into this short book which is why I would have preferred it be spaced out into separate books. A lot of the stories were told in a couple of pages and I would have liked to hear more about them. It was also hard to keep up with dates and names since Tyson would jump from subject to subject so frequently.
I feel like it was important for me to read this. I am eastern North Carolina born and raised. I’m a 26 year old white female. While I have never believed the glossy history of the south that I was fed my whole life I was also unaware just how horrific my home state was. It was jarring to read these first hand accounts. It’s eye opening to see what the people who are still memorialized in everyday life really did. I didn’t know much about Gov. Aycock. I knew that one of the middle schools in my hometown was named after him but not much else. It appalls me to know what he stood for. I’ve been to Hugh McRae Park. I never gave the name or person much thought. Now that I know who he was the idea of patronizing that park again makes my stomach turn.
Growing up in Greenville I wasn’t exposed to a lot of everyday racism. I’d hear a few hushed comments and argued with some proud confederate descendants but it wasn’t until moving to a small coastal county that I saw how held back NC really was. I heard awful remarks in open spaces that I had never heard a person utter before. Over the years I have been slowly exposed to how present racism still is to this day. Between police brutality, ignorant people and the monuments that still stand and are defended. Racism is still everywhere you turn.
I learned a lot and my eyes have been opened more than before. So for that I am grateful for this book. I can’t change history but going forward I can change the future and how my fellow NC natives view their past.

"We are all the captives of our origins, especially when we do not fully know and understand them."
This is the best book about race in America I've ever read-- it's a kind of reverse To Kill a Mockingbird, where, instead of black man being guilty for a crime that never happened, here a white society is studiously innocent of a crime that happens in broad daylight
in public
in 1970 North Carolina.
It is able to give an account of how Dr King's message was both wholly needed and useful and also not quite enough; there's a frightening realpolitik in here that we can take only because the author is clear that it is very close to unendurable. And the Black Power movement and the white backlash that confronted it don't seem so very distant after you read this book.
It also, somehow, manages to be actually guffaw-level funny, which gives a harder edge to the race violence, and the hard core of hope that there might be something redemptive hovering over all of this somewhere.

"And we ask your help, Lord," Daddy continued, lifting his thick hands, "that we not become prejudiced against those who are prejudiced, or whose prejudices may not be our own."

Having grown up around Tim, I absorbed many of the stories in this throughout my childhood, but that doesn't make reading them any less powerful. Tim's writing is excellent and gives both a clear sense of him as a person, Henry Marrow's death and its aftermath, and the connections to its place in American culture and the development of the civil rights and black power movements, which is fitting for a book that is equal parts memoir and history. So much of what Americans (and white Americans in particular) believe about our racial history is just flat wrong, and reading this book is one way of dispelling the erroneous soothing idea that the movement for civil rights in America was ever anything but brutal.

A friend who grew up and still lives in Oxford, NC, where the central event of this book took place in 1970, gave me this book years ago. Like so many, it sat on the to-be-read shelves until some random impulse brought it to hand a few days ago. But just how random? For in the light of events since the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, how could the topics of racism and race relations not be far from anyone's mind?

Author Timothy B. Tyson is a couple of years older than me and grew up in eastern and central North Carolina, whereas I grew up in the state's western foothills. There are significant cultural and historical differences between the two regions. Much of the eastern part of the state -- or "the flatlands" as my family called it -- had been plantation and, post-Civil War, sharecropper country, with relatively large Black populations ruled by white "elites" and despised by most all the poor whites. The western part of the state, due to its more rugged geography, didn't have as many huge slave-holding farms and plantations as developed down east, and consequently there were, to my knowledge, no majority Black counties west of Winston-Salem. Blacks in the west tended to be found in the town and cities, drawn there, I suppose, by the textile mills and other industries.

In my home county, like many others, I suppose -- and I'm talking about when I was growing up there in the 1960s and 1970s -- most Blacks lived in one community in each town. You can imagine what we whites called the Black communities. They all had the same name to us. My community, out in the county, and most if not all of the crossroads communities and townships around it, had no black residents. None. My elementary school had no Black students. My high school, in town, did have some Black students, one of whom was in the "gifted and talented" classes with me and 30 other white kids. So I don't remember as much institutionalized racism and semi-official segregation as Tyson grew up with, partly because I simply wasn't around Black people as much as he was in Oxford and, later, Wilmington, and partly, maybe, because of my being younger and the changes brought about by the 1964 Civil Rights Act having more time to propagate by the time I was old enough to start noticing and trying to understand such things.

Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered about five weeks after my nineteen year old brother was killed in action in South Vietnam. My family, in its grief, wasn't paying much attention to the civil rights struggle. I recall thinking that it was a big-city thing, since that's where all the news stories about riots and shootings and burnings and marches tended to come from. And this is where now I find BLOOD DONE SIGHT MY NAME most fascinating, in its emphasis on Black struggles in small towns and rural communities. Tyson takes a terrible incident in a small North Carolina town and goes from there to discuss what it was like for him and his parents and grandparents to grow up in various small towns and rural communities throughout eastern North Carolina. There, the poison of white supremacy was so ubiquitous that even many of those who knew intuitively that it was wrong had trouble understanding exactly what it was, where it came from, all the many ways in which it ruined lives and souls, and, most regrettably, how to best oppose it. Tyson's honest, painful, even sometimes humorous reporting of historical events and of his own internal struggle to understand the many whats and whys of his world and himself have helped to shine light back on my own past history, both internal and external. And isn't that what a great story or book or work of art should do? Remember Faulkner, whom Tyson quotes in the book's epilogue -- "The past is never dead, it isn't even past" -- and Santayana, whom he doesn't quote but who today is even more apt -- "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Both should be tattooed on the foreheads of anyone so ignorant and soul-dead that they would reply in these days to "Black lives matter" with "All lives matter."

I loved this book. It moved me as a North Carolinian, as a Southerner, as an American, as a human being. I wonder how Tyson, as all of those and as a professional historian as well, is dealing with what's going on now. Does he look back at the past and draw comfort from how far we've come, or does he look at the present and ache because of how so very far we still have to go? I suspect that for him as well as myself, it's not really an either-or question. It's both-and, and if we're lucky and work hard, always will be.

I found this book to be a valiant yet failed attempt to deal with a very difficult historical topic in memoir form. Structurally, it was very obviously the product of a historian trying to write a literary narrative, which left the characters nebulous, the narrator ungrounded, and the "story-line" generally detached. Throughout the book I struggled with, and never really got over, the problems inherent in a white man's attempt to write another culture's history through the lens of experiences he barely understood during his childhood and adolescence. While the history is sensitive, it is also often appropriative; I was particularly disturbed with the use of a line from an African American spiritual, "Blood Done Sign My Name" as the title, especially because the "MY" implies that the narrator/author actually DID something other than spectate. While Tyson is indeed courageous to have attempted to put this history down on paper, particularly in the form of a "memoir," it was more problematic than self-aware. Perhaps this just wasn't his story to write (though I'm sure it will be argued, "Who will write it?").

Timothy Tyson grew up in North Carolina in the 60s and 70s, and this book is essentially his confrontation with and understanding of the inequities of racial prejudice and segregation. Tyson walks a fine line in this book, as he is a white, liberal professor of Afro-American Studies (in Wisconsin), and he must somehow account for his (and his family’s and his white community’s) participation in the culture of Oxford, NC, that led almost inexorably to Henry Marrow’s horrific street-side execution and the subsequent social unrest, violence, and eventual gradual shifting of values and laws. From his perspective, Tyson could have portrayed his family and himself with mordant guilt or prescient virtue, but he neither beats his breast nor lays claim to any sort of moral superiority.

What Tyson does well is show how the system of patriarchial segregation was like the air he breathed, unquestioned, just the way it was. However, as the laws changed (the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and Brown v. Board of Education in 1954), there was a slow dawning even as the white power elite in the community doubled down on its “traditional” values. Throughout the South, and not just in Oxford, NC, evasive laws were implemented to steer clear of integration in public places: parks were closed, swimming pools made private, schools became Christian academies. Divisions prevailed, and even if the law said one thing, the white man’s heart continued to say another thing.

Tyson amply defines the historical and social forces that followed the Civil War and Reconstruction, how gains made in those times were wiped out/canceled by Ku-Kluxers wanting to make their country great again. Tyson recounts the history of Wilmington’s white supremacist uprising in 1895, how the intent had been to fill the harbor with Black bodies. It’s a brutal story, but only one of many. History was manufactured at that time, and supremacists had their version and Blacks another; one was forged in rancor and hate and greed, the other in the brutal facts of victimization and suffering. The victors write the history, however, and truth is suppressed.

This book is an excellent unfolding of a personal quest to understand as well as a description of the obstacles that continue to make a color-free society a still distant dream. The great irony is that both sides cite history and tradition. Counterfactual history fills whites with purpose, but Blacks have refused to buy into the myth of white righteousness. Too long have fearful and disillusioned whites lived in and with this artificial history, and too long have better educated white liberals allowed the blinkered myths to run alongside the Blacks’ more objective historical truth of hypocrisy, hate, and violence. While I may have begun to preach, Tyson does not. As I say, he walks a very fine line, and his account of race relations is well-balanced, humane and hesitant, but ultimately hopeful.

Timothy Tyson, author of Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story, (2004) was born in Oxford, North Carolina, where

“The power of white skin in the South of my childhood was both stark and subtle. White supremacy permeated daily life so deeply that most people could no more ponder it than a fish might discuss the wetness of water.”

When he was ten years old, in the week between the shootings of students at Kent State (May 4, 1970 ) and Jackson State (May 16), a twenty-three year old Black man, Henry Marrow, was beaten and shot in the face because he “said something” to a white store clerk, the daughter-in-law of the shooter. Tyson’s friend, Gerald Teel, came running over with the excited report that ” “Daddy and Roger and ’em shot ’em a nigger.”

Shielded by his parents Tyson did not know until years later that the night of the murder, two to three hundred young African Americans surged through the streets of Oxford, North Carolina, breaking into white-owned stores, looting, pelting passing cars with stones and bottles. Tyson’s twenty year quest to de-code that phrase led him to a professorship in history, and this book, together with several others, disinterring the covert history of the South

Starting with the murder, Tyson interweaves warm stories of his mother and father, and their own family trees, with the events in town, the opinions of others, his later interviews of participants and his own self-discovery, along with thoughts on the continuing American racial divide. Even in his love for his family, he is able to see the self-congratulatory paternalism of his grandparents in the work and help they provided local Negroes. In a section about the gratitude expressed by a Black worker for Tyson’s grandfather’s help, he finishes with

“I have never doubted the sincerity of Joe Dunlap’s gratitude to my grandfather, and I am proud of [my mother’s family] and of course I love them. But the hierarchy of white supremacy, at its heart, was as rotten as that pile of old shoes, and the generations that follow will be many years cleaning it up.

Nor, does he let himself off the hook. As he says at one point:

“I don’t know when or how I first became infected with white supremacy. But when I was no more than six years old, I discovered within myself both that monstrous lie and the moral cowardice necessary to its preservation.”

For complete review see https://www.allinoneboat.org/blood-do...

This is an odd mix of history and autobiography, with cultural commentary to spare, but it works. The murder of Henry Marrow changed author Timothy Tyson's life, serving as a prism through which he viewed the civil rights movement, sometimes from a front-row seat. It focuses on the North Carolina town of Oxford, but also looks at race relations in Raleigh and the state and Wilmington. Interestingly, civil rights leader Benjamin Chavis figures in the story Tyson tells. It's an ugly story, but one that needs to be remembered. The books will ensure that; efforts were made to sanitize public records -- including court records and newspaper archives -- when Tyson started asking questions.

Tyson's father figures in the story. He writes about being afraid of his father but never connects that to storytelling about his father, who comes across as a Gandhi-like figure. That's one weakness of the book. Another is Tyson's eagerness to include stories/research (a class visit he arranged to a former slave plantation in Louisiana) that have little to do with his subject. It takes away from the drama of his subject.

Tyson has a gift for words:
"The power of white skin in the South of my childhood was both stark and subtle. White supremacy permeated daily life so deeply that most people could no more ponder it than a fish might discuss the wetness of water. Our racial etiquette was at once bizarre and arbitrary, seemingly natural and utterly confusing."

"Vernon Tyson's rich baritone was the voice of God. The only problem was that you never knew if you were going to get the Old or the New Testament."

Worth reading, especially for those who didn't experience desegregation in the South. It provides context for some dynamics still in evidence

I was pretty surprised how disappointed I was with this book. It came to me very highly recommended, and it contains all of the tropes I typically fall (hard) for, in setting, style and substance. But as I slogged through it--and it was a slog--I was continually frustrated by how much the author was trying to do. He was taking one compelling, horrific incident and using it as a framework for telling the entire racial history of the South from 1865 to the present. An admirable goal, but I kept thinking he failed. The narrative is completely disjointed, as his story leaps by decades in a single page, making it ultimately impossible to follow the storyline or tell a comprehensive tale of the South's ugly history. He needed a better editor to remove those characters who, while they may have been important in the overall racial struggle of the South, weren't important to this story. If this had been a 120-page telling of the story of Henry Marrow's murder (and how Tyson got that story), I think it would have been much more successful. He tried to do too much, and ended up telling an inch-deep story as wide as the Mason-Dixon Line.

My second try at this book, and I'm really into it this time. . . The first time, I expected more of a story. This time, I knew what I was getting.

Now finished: I read it for my neighborhood book club. Living in NC, not far from where the events in the book happened, drove the story home for me, but because Tyson explores racial relations throughout the south over the last century, the book is an important read for anyone interested in that part of our history. I grew up in New Jersey, and I jotted this down in the margin: "I expected this book to help me better understand the south. Instead, it helped me better understand myself."

He was a great professor and this book was riveting. Gave so much insight into his life and reason for doing what he does. It was a good read.