Really good memoir. I'll add more later, but in the meantime, here's a interesting piece of information:

In 1662, the Virginia legislature passed a law that read, "Children got by an Englishman upon a Negro woman shall be bond or free according to the condition of the mother." Seems otherwise innocuous, but this statute reversed English common law under which the status of the child frollowed that of the father.

The implications were huge. It meant that slave owners could impregnate as many slave women as they wanted secure in the knowledge that the children that resulted would become their property, increasing their wealth and slave population. This provided a huge incentive for white men to sleep with their slave women.

This intertwined sex and race and led to the powerful taboo of black men marrying or even looking at a white woman. The long-term result of this taboo was the epidemic of the lynching of black men.

One of the most powerful civil rights books I've read! Excellently written, informative and, at times difficult to read, this is an incredible book!

In the month of May and the year of 1970, Henry Marrow was black, 23, a veteran, and had the misfortune of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Accused of making a comment to a white woman, all too soon, he was face down in the dirt, battered by the butt of a gun while three white men decided his fate was to die.

The author was ten years old when living in a small southern town. The incident haunted him, and years later the result was this book.

Civil rights did not suddenly occur because Martin Luther King and others led the parade. It was a slow, squeeky, violent process in the south. The law was not on the black persons side. Whites could indeed kill and get away with it.

While during the years of slavery, white men often used their black slaves as sex objects, the resulting child born of these assignations, was deemed unfree. Thus, securing a steady population of slaves for the white man. Never, though in deep south was it ok for a black man to have a relationship with a white woman. The result is death, sometimes by lynching.

This is a must read for those interested in American history.

Wow. I can't remember the last time I read a non-fiction book that moved me so much. Tyson tells the story of a murder that happened during his childhood in Oxford, NC and uses it to explore race and religion in 1970s North Carolina. While never discounting the importance of non-violent resistance, he also examines it limitations and suggests that it took the very real threat of violence from African American veterans to bring about meaningful change on a local level. Although the book takes place in North Carolina, it would be a mistake to think of this as a Southern story. It's an American tragedy and, as Tyson points out, one that could and did happen throughout all of the States.

This history on race relations is told from the perspective of a white historian who grew up in Oxford, North Carolina during the 1970s. An African American male killed by a white man touched off the riots and unrest. He discusses the race issues in the next decade after the civil-rights era of the 1960s. I learned some new things. The writing is vibrant and vivid for a history book. It may've been a bit long.

This is the best nonfiction book about civil rights I have ever read. I'm astounded that it isn't required reading in high schools and colleges across America. It's the story of a murder in North Carolina in 1970; it's also the story of author Tim Tyson's family, and of the history of race in the American South.

I thought I knew all this stuff. The Civil Rights Movement gets pounded into most American kids' heads around junior high, depicted as a thrilling time when the country came together in the name of justice. This book makes it clear that this is far from being the whole story.

Tyson talks about how his small town's officials responded to the federal mandate to integrate public parks by shutting down all the parks in town. He tells about how black men _had_ the vote in North Carolina after the Civil War, and about how black and white share-croppers (among others) created a Fusion branch of the Populist party, leading to blacks being elected to many positions of power in the NC state and local governments. And about how the backlash from white conservatives led to black men getting their right to vote revoked: not through voter lists or "hanging chads," but through Klansmen telling fellow white Carolinians that allowing a black man to vote was tantamount to inviting him to rape your wife.

Here's Tyson on Martin Luther King, Jr: "In the years since his murder, we have transformed King into a kind of innocuous black Santa Claus, genial and vacant, a benign vessel that can be filled with whatever generic good wishes the occasion dictates...The radicalism of Dr. King's thought, the militancy of his methods, and the rebuke that he offered to American capitalism have given way to depictions of a man who never existed, caricatures invented after his death."

Wow. In addition to extensive and mid-blowing research, Tyson deploys a charming narrative voice, both playful and intense. He's just a great storyteller--his legacy from his preacher father, perhaps. He speaks from a position of great emotional involvement, and also impeccable scholarship. I took this out of the library, but I also want to own it and to give it to all the thinking people I know.

The events in this book took place in the town where I now live, so I was eager to dive in, and the book did not disappoint! The author went well beyond relaying the facts of the case, truly engaging the reader in the emotional and social upheaval of the entire Jim Crow era. The book was engaging and thought-provoking, despite occasional rambling, and left me with a deep sense of the struggles of the African-American experience at that time. In addition, it provided a solid glimpse into the social, religious, political, economic, and industrial history of the town and its county. I don't read a lot of works of non-fiction, but I appreciated this one.

I found this book at a Juneteenth book giveaway hosted by Quakers, which offered books that have been pulled from K-12, universities and some libraries in Florida, among others. The pushback against teaching the true history of this country is taking hold, not just here but in many states and jurisdictions around the country. In Florida, the so-called justification is so that no one should be made to feel "uncomfortable" about themselves when learning these subjects. The whitewashing of history here is so blatant as to have removed from some history books why Rosa Parks refused to sit at the back of the bus and why she was legally required to-no mention of her race is allowed. Such sport greats as Jackie Robinson, Roberto Clemente and Hank Aaron have had the history of their experiences removed as well.

As I read this book, I couldn't help but reflect on the fact that it represented one town in one state out of the 50, each of which has participated to some degree in similar discrimination and atrocities. People must realize or at least suspect that after nearly 200 years of slavery and white supremacism, the country did not just wake up one day and decide that the people they had dehumanized and enslaved were human beings that deserved a place at the communal table. The Civil Right Act of 1964 did not erase multi-generational trauma nor prepare either race for what was to come. Pushback came in every form of underhanded obstruction imaginable and continues today in less blatant ways.

Tyson is an charismatic storyteller and does an excellent, if often long-winded at times, job of presenting the views of bystanders and those involved, including himself and providing context for the collective mindset of the town, surrounding counties on up to the statehouse. His perspective as a white Southerner and the son of a Methodist minister is extremely valuable. It begs the question of why more people of faith were willing to stand by and uphold the laws, conventions and violence that gave them their place at the top of society. He is to be commended for maintaining his convictions and for creating this in depth study of the ongoing fight for civil rights and bringing it to a general American public that desperately needs to learn and understand this history before the race issue can rest.

This may very well be the best book I'll read in 2009. Reading Blood Done Sign My Name was vital for me in understanding recent North Carolina history - from the murder of Henry Marrow to a more general exploration of race relations in the South. Tim Tyson gave North Carolina a great gift writing this novel that only he could write. Not only did he expose historical omissions, such as the Wilmington Race Riots of 1898 (which Governor Aycock was complicit in, yet we honor him oblivious of this), he explored the less appreciable hallmarks of racism like paternalism and self-congratulatory radical politics. His closing should be mine also: "The past is never dead, it isn't even past" - William Faulkner.

Please read this book.

I gave it three stars because this book was not what I expected from the title and descriptions on the cover. I thought it was going to be the story of this one incident, but instead it was a widespread and thorough analysis of race relations and inequality at the time, with the story thrown in near the end. In fact, by the time he finally got around to telling the story, I ended up running out of time and returning the library book unfinished. I did want to know how it ended, but just was tired of reading the book. It was rather slow paced.

That said, it was an incredible eye opener. I had to re-evaluate my assumptions about race and realize that truly the problems faced by the African American community are a direct result of the terrible circumstances and limitations placed on them even into the 1970's! I had always thought, "Slavery ended over a hundred years ago, how could it be to blame?" This book opened my eyes to the fact that although slavery ended so long ago, African Americans were far, VERY far, from being equal citizens even well into the '70s (and it could be argued creditably that they are still not equal citizens even today). I am grateful to have had my eyes opened. In that way, this was a life changing read, even though I didn't finish it. I am ashamed of what our nation allowed to go on during the time period covered by this book.

This is the third time that I've read this book and each time I come away with a new understanding. Everyone who lived through the civil rights period in America, or who has studied that period needs to read this book. Especially people, like myself, who live in southern Virginia or northern North Carolina because the book is rooted in that soil. Timothy Tyson is a professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He is also white. When he was ten years old, he was living in Oxford, North Carolina where his father was the pastor of the all-white Methodist Church. On May 11, 1970, Robert Teel and two of his sons, in public, killed Henry Marrow. Marrow was a 23 year old Vietnam veteran. Teel and his sons beat Marrow and then shot him as he pleaded for his life. The town of Oxford was ripped apart by this incident. The Klan rallied and moved in the shadows and young black men who had been drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight for "freedom" burned the town's tobacco warehouses. Tyson's father pleaded for calm and racial harmony. That stance cost him his job and the family had to move out of town. Tyson went back to Oxford as an undergraduate student and then again as a graduate student to try to understand what had happened in both the black and white communities during that horrible summer. Ultimately he confronts Robert Teel and asks him why he murdered Henry Marrow. While the book gets a little preachy toward the end, I can certainly understand that. This book is a classic study of race relations and a case study of how social change affects the residents of one small town in the south and should be read by a wide audience.

This is a great book, and a real eye-opener to what the civil rights era was really like, at a local level. The main point Tyson is trying to make here is that we all collectively think of the civil rights movement as a simple process: things were bad for black people, Martin Luther King and others led marches and boycotts, he gave the 'Dream' speech, they passed the Civil Rights Act, done deal. But in Tyson's hometown, as in many many towns all across the south (and the country), nothing really changed. Tyson grew up in Oxford, North Carolina, he is white and his dad was a preacher. In 1970, a black man was murdered in his town, and it ignited a battle between black and white as black citizens attempted to force the town to change its ways. This book is partly a history of the murder and trial and battle in the town, and partly a memoir about growing up in North Carolina in a white family whose members were trying very hard to be good Christian liberals and reach out to the African-American population and who met a lot of resistance from other white people who wanted things to stay exactly as they were.
It's an excellent read, well-written, funny in parts, outrage-inducing in parts, with a lot of attention paid to the people that Tyson has interviewed over the years about his town. I think he goes on a little too long towards the end, once he was pretty much grown and in grad school, but I see why he did it, he wanted to illustrate the ways that things hadn't really changed even by the 90s. It isn't a perfect book, but it really is very very good. Highly recommended.

This book is based on a racially-motivated murder in Oxford, NC in May of 1970. A white man and his two sons beat and shot a black man because they claimed he talked disrespectfully to the white wife of one of the sons. Despite eye-witnesses, the men were not convicted.

Timothy Tyson was a friend of the younger brother of the murderers and the 10-year old son of a liberal white Oxford Methodist minister at the time of the shooting. He is now a professor in African-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. He first told this story in his Duke University master's thesis: Burning for Freedom: White Terror and Black Power in Oxford, North Carolina.

This book is much more than the facts behind a murder. It lays out the events of the murder in two settings. The first is his one life as a son of a liberal minister growing up in North Carolina. The second is the context of race relations in the South since the beginning of slavery. White authors can only dimly understand the effects of racial prejudice on Black Southerners, but Dr. Tyson does a good job of laying out some of the events that created the segregated North Carolina that existed at the time of the Oxford murder. I found it a most profound statement of the effects of racism in North Carolina.

One small incident stands out to me as a librarian in North Carolina. In researching his thesis and this book, Dr. Tyson sought out copies of the Oxford Public Ledger only to find the Oxford Public Library's microfilm copies for the era had mysteriously disappeared. The newspaper's own copies were also missing. He even claims that the North Carolina State Archives copies are missing and says: "Someone had gone to considerable lengths to destroy the paper trail" (Page 295).