This is a powerful story of a racial killing during the author’s childhood growing up in North Carolina.


Tyson (African-American Studies/University of Wisconsin–Madison) was only ten in 1970, when a young black husband and father was savagely beaten and then shot to death in Oxford, North Carolina, by some white men who claimed he had insulted one of their women. They were then acquitted by an all-white jury. The author Highlights a number of stories in this account. We hear about his own family, going back several generations but with major attention devoted to Tyson’s father, a liberal white preacher in Oxford who had an admirable record of working to improve race relations. He writes about the civil-rights movement’s high and low points (the 1970 shootings at Jackson State included among the latter). And he chronicles his tumultuous coming of age. Tyson ran away from home at 17, but a lovely passage describes his father finding him walking along a rural road, holding him tight, and praying for him. After several years of indulgence in drugs and general dissipation, the author decided to enroll in college: “And the first thing I did as a twenty-four-year-old freshman was to drive to Oxford, North Carolina, to ask Robert Teel why he’d killed Henry Marrow.” Tyson returned again as a graduate student and then as a historian to research the story that inhabits the heart of this remarkable work: a reminder that the struggle for racial equality prompted vileness and violence on all sides.

Well written, but the writing became tedious for this reader.

This was nonfiction and I enjoyed this book. It is an in depth look at segregation, integration and the fight for civil rights. Timothy Tyson did a fantastic job with his research, assembling the info, and also I enjoyed his own personal experiences as well those of this family. I actually liked that part the most because it felt more personal and gave this book that overall feel. So 4 stars.

Extremely well-written memoir/nonfiction book about a horrible racially motivated killing in N. Carolina, the history of the Black Freedom movement, and the way it has affected the author.

Haunting, engaging, heartbreaking. Should be required reading for all U.S. high school students.

A shocking account of a racially motivated 1970 murder in eastern North Carolina. The author elucidates his faith by telling about his Methodist minister father's confrontation with racism and support for civil rights. I also received an education about the ugly motive behind much of white supremacism. And to think we once believed those days were in the past. Sad.

Blood Done Sign My Name is primarily a story of the author growing up in rural North Carolina. As is the case in most parts of this country and especially the South, his childhood was deeply impacted by race and race relations. This book is his story of going back and confronting many of those memories and looking at them through the eyes of an adult. The main event of the book is the murder of a young veteran by a family of one of his friends growing up. What follows is a too often told story of Southern justice. But unlike a countless number of other books that follow this pattern the author used the event as a jumping-off point to explore his childhood and his experience growing up in a liberal white family in South where Jim Crow did not magically end and we all lived happily ever after as some history books would have us believe. The fact that most of the events that happened in the story took place in the early 70's but could have taken place in the 1950's with very few changes is very telling. The book is not primarily about the crime that occurred but instead explores how the author and the people he knew dealt with and even remembered the event. For me, this was the book's primary strength. It does a good job of examining how our shared history is remembered or purposely forgotten. For example, he highlights how those who supported the killers at the time were reluctant to even talk about it 2 decades later. This purposeful forgetting does not get rid of the event but rather causes it to fester like a wound that does not heal right and can rupture again at any time. The author does a good job of pointing this out without getting polemical about it. The reader is guided to this conclusion as the author challenges his own memory in the story. In this way, the book manages to be simultaneously entertaining and informative.

If you are looking for a true-crime story, this is not the book for you. The actual crime only takes up a third of the book at best. If you are looking for a personal history of the South and an exploration of how a small community deals with ( or fails ) to deal with a horrible injustice within a larger system that is itself horribly unfair this book is a must-read.

I love books like this - instead of trying to tackle the entire Civil Rights movement, it provided in-depth coverage from the perspective of one small town in North Carolina, where a single event spoke volumes about race relations in the "new South." It gave me a rare insight into the not-so-distant past of the area I now call home.

A blend of memoir and history and an in-depth delving into white supremacy. Tyson focuses on the murder of a black man by a white family in 1970 Oxford, North Carolina. He also includes background about his family and on institutional racism in the South that sometimes felt disjointed to me. Overall, an informative read. I am now interested in reading James Baldwin, who is frequently quoted by Tyson.

I haven't read a lot about the fight for civil rights, partly because I don't read a lot of nonfiction and partly because I haven't heard about the books that are available on the subject. This one was really good. Mr Tyson discussed the issues with personal insights and good research. He showed respect and heart in his writing. I found the book to be smart, complex and relatable. I found it to be emotionally challenging. I am a white American who has lived most of my life in Colorado, and I have never been the subject of racial prejudice. I am lucky. This book gave me a glimpse into those struggles. I wish more people would read it.

Summary: Timothy B. Tyson's consideration of how a racial murder in 1970 affected his North Carolina hometown, his family and himself is masterful. Its title comes from a spiritual.

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Nogger.

That I can write, but I don't think anyone should use the most racial epithet in the United States that comes of changing just one lettter. And yet, not using the word hampers efforts to discuss Timothy B. Tyson's riveting Blood Done Sign My Name. The word is an unavoidable element of the powerful work of history and autobiography. It is in the first sentence. It casts its shadow over every one of the other words Tyson uses gracefully in his 322 pages.

As boys, Tyson and Gerald Teel played together in Oxford, North Carolina but they grew up in different worlds. Their use, as 10-year-old white boys, of what we euphemistically call the n-word reflects this. Tyson knew from his parents, his Methodist preacher father and school teacher mother, not to use the word that Teel's KKK-connected family used casually. "It was evil," Tyson writes, "like taking the Lord's name in vain, maybe even worse."

On May 12, 1970, Teel told his friend Tyson that "Daddy and Roger and 'em shot 'em a nigger." It was the most direct thing anyone at the time told Tyson, who grew up to be a professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He had to piece together years later through interviews and research everything else about the racially motivated murder of Henry Marrow, a 23-year-old Vietnam veteran. Tyson tried to make sense of the event in a college research project and then in his master's thesis and finally in this book.

Tyson's Blood Done Sign My Name is a penetrating, engrossing account of what the historian learned about Marrow's murder and what it reveals about the knotty racial histories of the United States, at least one of its small town and some of the people who were raised there. Among those people are Robert Teel, a murderous racist, and Ben Chavis, a president of the NAACP. Tyson weaves together memoir with a larger history and bits of a detective story in a compelling attempt to bring some important truth into our understanding of a vital topic:

The sacrifice has already been made, in the bottoms of slave ships, in the portals of Ellis Island, in the tobacco fields of North Carolina and the sweatshops of New York City. The question remains whether or not we can transfigure our broken pasts into a future filled with common possibility.

The murder of Marrow echoed an earlier racial crime. When 14-year-old Emmitt Till was beaten savagely for daring to whistle at a white woman in Money, Mississippi in 1955, his murder shocked much of the country. It helped to energize the movement that led in 1965 to what was intended to be the final dismantling of segregation. Five years after that landmark, Robert Teel and some of his sons still felt the color of their skin entitled them to kill to preserve their racial privileges. Many white people in Oxford agreed with them.

After Gerald told him about the murder, Tyson learned about it at first only through what he could see of its effects. Without explanation, Gerald stopped coming to school. Armed men protected the killers' house. Tyson's parents were uncharacteristically silent at the dinner table.

It was years later that Tyson learned that the murder sparked an uprising in which dozens of young black men smashed the windows and destroyed other parts of more than a dozen white-owned businesses. The town's small police force was outnumbered and the chief and mayor, fearful of provoking further violence, let the rioters run that night. Many of those in uprising were, like Marrow, veterans of the war in Vietnam. They'd come home disappointed and angry that their sacrifices for their country hadn't earned them the full citizenship they'd have enjoyed automatically if they'd been white. Years later, one of them told Tyson, "We knew if we cost 'em enough goddamn money they was gonna start changing some things."

Things did change in Oxford as in the United States, slowly and not yet completely. Tyson's efforts to chart that progress and to foster more took him on a decades-long quest. In his book, he describes tracking down documents about Marrow's murder, many of which had been taken from courthouses and libraries and hidden away from public view, apparently by white politicians fearful that their early support for bigoted thugs might be discovered by newly-empowered black voters. He interviews a wide range of those involved in the aftermaths of Marrow's killing, including the murderer. Tyson walks a tightrope while trying to capitalize on his friendship with the man's son while trying not to remind him of Tyson's father, whom Teel and others view as a "traitor" to his race.

And Tyson takes side-trips down several paths that seem to lead away from the murder but perhaps to understanding of the larger issues involved. He guides his students, who are studying African-American history at a northern college, on a visit to a southern plantation. Slaves had once protested there and had been slaughtered by their masters, but now the place is a tourist attraction. It idealizes antebellum life while denying the slavery on which that life was founded.

When Tyson and two of his friends, a white woman and a black man, are surprised to encounter a threatening remnant of Jim Crow in the 1990s, it elicits from the man a painful memory. Herman's parents met in Germany when his father was stationed in the U.S. Army. Years later, their daughter, Henry's sister, was killed in a firebombing evidently intended to drive them out of their white neighborhood in the northern United States.

Exiled from the country whose uniform he continued to wear, Herman's brokenhearted father moved the family back to Germany. The land that had produced Hitler seemed safer for a mixed-race American family than the nation that had lifted up Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Tyson pulls together these diverse threads into a coherent narrative leading to his suggestion that America needs something like South Africa's reconciliation commission to heal its racial wounds. That's not likely any time soon. In the meantime, such beacons as Blood Done Sign My Name can help light the way to our personal reconciliations.

Listened to this on audiobook. Really truly this story and the thousands like it should be standard issue American history, not immense and tragic surprises in my late 20s. Part of the blame belongs to me, which I will take and try to do better for myself and my daughter. Part of the blame belongs on the horrendous systematic racism and whitewashing of history. Gorgeously written and recorded, truly required reading.

Incredible book on integration, civil rights, and the struggle of racism in America. The author draws you into the story and has an incredible way of describing events. A must read if you like books on integration and civil rights.