I read this wonderful book my first year at Sarah Lawrence in my "Introduction to African American History" seminar. This book is an intricate mix of memoir and historical non-fiction. Tim Tyson tells the story of the events surrounding the murder of a young black man in his hometown in Oxford, NC. What makes this book special from civil rights narratives is that it powerfully, yet humbly, attempts to explain the local politics of the Civil Rights Movement. Too often, we think of the movement in national terms yet we don't consider how political decisions affected families and individuals at a local level. This book is also spectacular in that you will get a new narrative of the movement. Our national narrative has long been: "black people were slaves, then Honest Abe freed them, then they couldn't vote, then MLK Jr. came, gave a speech and now they're free." Blood Done Sign my Name paints a new portrait on civil rights politics. It explains the delicate interaction between Christianity, politics, race, gender, class and history. It is a must read.

This book was absolutely engrossing, and a fantastically detailed, intimate look at civil rights in this country. I can't recommend this one highly enough. I hung on his every word.

The audiobook is superb, for those who enjoy that sort of thing.

This book did a great job of making the horrors of the racial struggles in the state real. I have a much better understanding now of what life was like and how very truly awful people have the capacity to be.

That said, it was just too long. I think the work could have been tightened up considerably. I see no reason why he couldn't have done in 150-200 pages what he did in 310. He often gives too many examples. I can see he's doing this to give a richer context, but still. Enough is enough.

There's a kind of writing that makes me want to unburden the contents of my stomach, and unfortunately, that's about all this book is for about thirty pages. Once Tyson finally gets into things, it isn't quite so nauseating. Here are a coupe of examples, the recalling of which is no more pleasant than the first encounter.

 p. 4, "The attic fan in the top of the house pulled the gauzy white curtains inward on a cooling breeze..." 

p. 21, "If Mama's mind was flint and steel, her hands were soap and sympathy." 

One of the most insightful parts of the book is in Chapter 2, "Original Sins" in which Tyson writes, "Sex was sinful. And sin was sexual. Both of them were inextricably bound up with race..." He spends the next several pages writing about that inextricable bind.

An interesting thing: On p. 53, Tyson writes, "Five thousand atteded a 1965 Klan wedding in a cornfield near Farmville." Farmville in 2010, according to the census, didn't even have a population of five thousand.

There's a sort of who's who of the despicable North Carolinians. Helms and Charles B. Aycock, both gung-ho white supremacists, Aycock even getting dubbed the "Education Governor" for putting injecting his white supremacist views into the fabric of the educational system. Not a politician, but something timely in political relevance since the Supreme Court recently overturned it, there was mention (I didn't mark the page, alas) of the Voting Rights Act.

I look forward to the book group's discussion.

I'm adding a star after the discussion, which was very informative. Many of the women in the group were able to recount direct experience with the civil rights movement and had an overall favorable attitude toward the book.

I failed to mention my favorite part of the book: The author's father took him and his brother to a KKK rally. They watched a cross burn. The father told his sons, asking why they had gone, that he wanted them to see what hate looks like.

A must read on the struggle of the civil rights of black people it's hard to believe how some simple minded people can think that because they are white that are superior church going people praying to God and saying we all gods children but hating on blacks and wanting to keep segregation unbelievable and only 48 years ago I am mixed race and love white and black people all people and I was so upset for the marrow family not getting justice for the murder of Henry but what do you expect with an all white jury in kkk territory anyone related to the teels should hang there heads in shame. Rip Henry marrow

This powerful insight to the civil rights movement. It made me realize even more about the ugliness of discrimination.

I didn't enjoy the writing style and hated the first part of the book. I also met the author when he came to speak at our school, he was crude and I wanted to walk out while he was talking.

If you are from NC, read this book. If you are not from NC, you should still read this book.

After growing up roughly 70 miles west of Oxford, North Carolina, I understand many of the customs and attitudes Timothy B. Tyson refers to in Blood Done Sign My Name. He is only a couple of years older than I am and our socio-economic backgrounds are fairly similar. It was surprising that Tyson provided so much insight into my childhood background static of racism.

He explains the insidiousness of paternalism, for example, and how people are dehumanized by it. Being nice to people does not make up for treating them as second-class citizens and denying them equal treatment.

Tyson does a great job of interweaving the events of this shocking, largely overlooked story with his own family and how it affected them. When a 23-year-old Black Vietnam veteran walked into a store in Oxford, North Carolina, on a May evening in 1970, he was quickly chased out by the store’s owner and two of his sons and was beaten and then shot to death in plain view on the street. Tyson was friends with the youngest son of the store’s owner.

The first line of the book is chilling enough. But the events that followed the murder affected the town and Tyson’s family make for riveting reading. His father was the minister of the town’s all-White Methodist church, and the family was forced to move by his father’s congregation. Many members, wanting to maintain the status quo, were simply unwilling to listen to a minister who believed in equal rights.

The author’s mother was a teacher and in the end, he realizes that by becoming a historian who covers the struggle for civil rights, he has followed in her footsteps as a teacher. But he also comes to embrace the evangelism he shares with his father. He, too, is on a mission to help us all understand the complicated and tragic events in America’s racial history and the fact that there is still a lot to be reckoned with.

This was a very informative history/memoir of the civil rights struggle in North Carolina in the 1970's centering on the murder of Henry Marrow a young black Vietnam veteran in Oxford, North Carolina by a white store owner with alleged KKK ties. I thought I knew a fair amount about the civil rights movement of the 1960's having grown up as a white boy in Louisiana in the late 1940's through the 1960's. I grew up with the same mistaken idea of many white people of my generation that we had a good relationship with the black people that we were familiar with, that is our maid/cook/housekeeper who we thought of as "family". I know now how one-sided this point of view was on my part because of my having the luxury of being a privileged middle class Caucasian in a segregated society. Like many of my peers I started out as a Southern Democrat who eventually became a conservative Republican in the Reagan era. Over the years I have become decidedly more liberal in my thinking and my voting, particularly with disgrace of the Trump administration. This book opened up a lot of new information about race relations to me. My impression of the civil rights movement was focused on the 1960's in the deep South of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee. I had the false impression that North Carolina was more progressive and that the 1970's was a time when segregation was becoming a thing of the past. The recent efforts to restrict voting rights in some states has shown how naive my viewpoint was. Thank you Timothy Tyson for telling your story and educating me further. I'm still learning in spite of my age!

This is a book that everyone should read. It is a rare work that is both historically rich with detail and context but also self reflective and honest. That self reflection narrative is one that could actually cause others to stop and think more about their own ignorance. A number of times I had to pause to think about my own thoughts and actions. Beautifully written, easy to read, but often difficult to stomach.

Though I know black voices are most important in understanding this era, this is an important addition. A recent resident of Oxford, it was surreal to hear all the streets and places mentioned. I didn't know the history before moving here, everyone should read it and get to know the real history of the US.

Blood Done Sign My Name is well-written and vastly researched. It includes first-hand knowledge from the author who was a child at the time the events in the book occurred. His father is a white Methodist minister who tried to resolve the racial tension in the town. The author could never forget the senseless murder and the ensuing violence, and in graduate school, he returned to Oxford to find answers for himself. This book is easy to read and I learned a lot from it. I recommend it to those who are studying white supremacy.

This book is about the tragic murder of Henry Marrow by three white men in 1970 in Oxford, North Carolina. Two of the white men were tried and found not guilty. Henry Marrow was a twenty-three-year-old black Vietnam veteran. A white man thought he was flirting with his daughter-in-law, ran for his gun, and instructed his son to get a gun as well. A second son grabbed a stick to beat him with. The courts and various police officers were corrupt.

This case is unfortunately relevant to events fifty years later. The following are some notes that I made while reading the book: Genuine healing requires a candid confrontation with our past. If there is to be reconciliation, first there must be truth (p 10). Dr. King said that the “biggest obstacle … was the sympathetic white liberal who wanted to preserve peace and civility” (p 69). Dr. King also referred to “tragic inequalities of an economic system which takes necessities from the many in order to give luxuries to the few. … We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power” (p. 107).

Even white people of modest means employed black household help in the south … This reflected a racial and gender caste system that denied most other opportunities to African American women. That system was designed to ensure a ready supply of cheap black labor (p 112). The Social Security Act of 1935 excluded domestic workers and farm workers from all of its employment provisions. That shielded [whites] from having to pay retirement or unemployment insurance for the people who scrubbed the toilets and tended the tobacco (p. 113).

It had taken widespread violence and boycotting white-owned businesses to bring about an uneasy racial truce. It took a murderous and avoidable tragedy to summon the political will to change things a little (p 252).

White supremacy went to the very root of the social order (p 267). The past holds the future in its grip (p 307). “Unjust social orders do not fall merely by appeals to the consciences of the oppressor … They fall because a large enough number of people organize a movement powerful enough to push them down” (p 317). “What grabbed white America’s attention was the chaos in those streets and the threat of race war” (p 318). “Everyone in this struggle … grew up steeped in a poisonous white supremacy that distorted their understandings of history and one another. That history is not distant” (p 320).