I loved this book so much! It’s very rare to hear someone of that generation admit their biases or racists thoughts/actions during that time. I appreciated his candor in detailing how white supremacy influences all of us in how we think and act towards each other. I loved the one line in the book where he says that most people would rather portray themselves as perfect instead of celebrating the journey to getting there. He said it much more eloquently than that, but the truth of that statement really touched me.

Since this book had a lot to do with his family, I wonder how much of his own biases seeped into the story. How much was romanticized? He does point out flaws in his family’s ideology or proposed solutions at times, but they were mostly painted in a very positive light.

I think this author does a great job weaving a powerful and interesting narrative with historical accuracy and information. He also envisions a better future which is refreshing and gives insight into how we can accomplish that.

I got my degree in history and I mainly focused on civil rights, but I still learned a ton from this book. I had no clue of the extent of the civil unrest and violence that occurred in 1970s NC. It also helped me better understand violent protests, their goals, and the reasoning behind their actions.

I would recommend this to anybody and everybody. Everyone has something to learn from reading it, and it’s a great way to gain more knowledge about where we’ve come as a nation, how we got here, and how we can move forward.

This book is very good. Tyson writes clearly about his upbringing in the South and how his family, particularly his father, struggled with issues of racial injustice. There are some harsh moments, but he does a better job than most in showing the hypocrisies of the times and then how our current memories of those times are a little too rosy colored.

The differences between what’s legally right and wrong and what’s morally right and wrong have led us all to a huge gulf of misunderstanding and frustration. On the legal front the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 have established a base for a more just society. Morally, it seems there is still a lot of work to be done. It isn’t possible to legislate feelings, opinions and beliefs. The law codes cannot establish levels of morality, respect, dignity and justice. Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story by Tim Tyson is an exploration of this dilemma. Structurally the book is similar to Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. All three works are novels, but they are not fiction. Blood Done Sign My Name goes a step further in that not only is it a thoroughly researched account, but the author was also a witness to many of the events depicted. The story is an account of the 1970 murder of Henry Marrow in Oxford, North Carolina. Race as a complex national issue is seen through the history of a boy growing to manhood, a family growing toward understanding and a town that couldn’t seem to grow at all.
Tyson emphasizes the subtle, deeply ingrained attitudes we all grow up with. Try as we may it is difficult to shake off the family clutter, the subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, stereotypes, biases and prejudices that we all grow up with. These attitudes are sometimes unconscious and too often unconsidered and never faced up to. Try as we might to go beyond the darkness, there are often leftover shadows and echoes hidden by denial. Bondage is an often repeated metaphor in Blood Done Sign My Name and our mental enslavement is its most insidious manifestation. We are enslaved by tribalism, family and community loyalty, the overwhelming need to belong and concerns about what others may think. “Our hidden history of race has yet to be fully told, and we persist in hiding from much of what we know.”
Blood Done Sign My Name was recommended to me by my dear friend Sally James. Thank you, Sally. This is an important book.

Somehow, I am 15 years late to the party, but this book is as relevant as ever. I have lived in North Carolina my whole life, and I wish I could say that I had never witnessed racism first hand, but I have, and sometimes from surprising sources. I wish that I hadn’t seen or heard it in recent years, but I have. I wish that the Klan’s presence in NC really was just a toothless remnant of its former self, a handful of crazies making the occasional mess, but it isn’t. Growing up in the 80’s and 90’s was quite a bit different from growing up in the 60’s and 70’s, but I recognized echoes my parents’ and grandparents’ stories in these pages — the time my grandmother accidentally walked in on a sit-in in Winston Salem with her toddlers in tow, impressed by the brave young people she saw there, or the time my father’s high school football team stopped for dinner on the way home from an away game, and he ate on the bus with a teammate who wasn’t welcome in the restaurant. Wounds like this do not heal quickly, and my family’s stories are the prettier ones, and come from the vantage point of privilege. Since we are living in a time when the president makes excuses for hate-group rallies that end in murder, this book is as important as it has ever been — even if it, too comes from the self-acknowledged vantage point of privilege.

Blood Done Sign My Name is a superb story by a superb author. I would most definitely recommend it to anyone seeking to further their knowledge of civil rights history; sadly (and as the author points out) just because back in the 50s & 60s Congress passed civil rights bills doesn't mean that these were ever fully implemented or accepted. In Tyson's book, he tells of an incident that took place in North Carolina as late as 1992, and I'm sure that the long-standing prejudices continue to foster ugly incidents into the present. So if you are interested in this topic, pick up this book.

brief synopsis; my impressions

"Blood Done Sign My Name," as the author notes on page 319 of this book, "started out as a slave spiritual. After the fall of the Confederacy it emerged as a paradoxical blues lament..." then "evolved into a gospel song," then in the 1940s sung by a group called The Radio Four, "elevates the transcendent spirit of gospel, but," notes the author, "listen closely and you can hear Chuck Berry down the line." Like the evolution of that song, the author's "hopes for this country have taken a similar trajectory," and his "ascendant spirits, like the future of our country, depend upon an honest confrontation with our own history." (319)

This book is not just another retelling of the stories of the civil rights movement ... it starts in 1970, actually, when two boys (one of them the author) are playing basketball and the other boy says to the author "Daddy and Roger and 'em shot a nigger." (1) Both boys were ten, living in Oxford NC; it was this incident which was the spark that set off the fire of unrest & violence in this small town; the book describes how the acts from both sides of the color line affected him, his family and the other members of this small town. While he keeps this story as the focal point of the book, he goes on to tell of his own roots, and his personal experiences during the volatile 70s -- during the time of Watergate, the Vietnam War -- up through the present when he took a group of students on a tour of the South. His story is fascinating & compelling; I couldn't put it down.

To be truthful, at first I wondered where all of this story about his family was going & why put it alongside a story about a terrible injustice. But eventually, it all ties together; the story could not have been done as well as it was without it.

I totally enjoyed the book and I'm going to get the author's other book now. Please do yourself a favor & read this book!

Read for school! Not a huge fan of memoir-style books but this story was very impactful and I'd say it was definitely worth altering my perspective as someone from North Carolina!

I thought this book was an excellent combination of literary memoire and historical account. Well-written, inspiring,and challenging, it takes on a part of the history of the United States that I know little about: The race riots and the black power movement. I remember a friend in high school once told me that white people love Martin Luther King because his memory doesn´t force us to face some inconvenient truths about white power. It is true that the memory of the Civil Rights movement that I learned in school was by in large hopeful, triumphant,and inspiring.....(with a happy ending!)Black people and white people worked together peacefully to overcome injustice. This book reveals that real change did not come until the threat of violence was great and black people fought back. It also reveals the depth of injustice and frustration of black America in the 1970s after the supposed integration laws were passed. As a PhD student of memory studies this book has challenged me to look at my own country and the wide gaps, injustices, and debts we have in the cultural memory of our past. It also has inspired me to be a braver human being and Christian because many of the characters in this book, though flawed, truly and intentionally sought to do the right thing despite the costs. It also makes me angry and sad about the legacy of slavery and segregation, and the lack of repentance, acceptance, acknowledgment of white supremacy/power that is still embedded in our society (and sadly sometimes in myself).

An amazing book, moving. Of a time in history that I lived through, but only saw from afar. My mother was from Smithfield, NC, which is mentioned in the book, but we never talked about the race relations in her town. We knew there was a sign outside of town, "Home of the KKK" that she was deeply ashamed of, but that was about it.

There's a paragraph near the end of the book, as the author is researching the past:

"Why linger on the past, which we cannot change? We must move on toward a brighter future and leave all that horror behind. It is true that we must make a new world. But we can't make it out of whole cloth. We have to weave the future from, the fabric of the past, from the patters of aspiration and belonging - and broken dreams and anguished rejections - that have made us. What the advocates of our dangerous and deepening social amnesia don't understand is how deeply the past holds the future in its grip - even, and perhaps especially, when it remains unacknowledged. We are runaway slaves from our own past, and only by turning to face the hounds can we find our freedom beyond them."

This book has been on my shelf for a long time. Only now did I take it down to read. Perhaps due to what is happening in the US with the presidential race, with the hatred that has come out in raw public display.

Tim Tyson (author) writes again: "Ralph Ellison expressed the central meaning of the blues better than anyone. "The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically." This book is a kind of blues expression that urges us to confront our rage, contradictions, and failures and the painful history of race in America. As in that history, there is no clean place in this story where anyone can sit down and congratulate themselves."

I recommend this book to everyone I know, to better understand the world we grew up in, to better understand the world today and to think about how to move forward with all the challenges we face.

I apologize in advance if this becomes something other than a book review.

I live about two hours away from Oxford, North Carolina where fourty years ago Henry Marrow was beaten and murdered in the street for no reason other than the fact that he was black man who talked to a white woman. So it is a bit of an understatement to say that this book hit close to home.

Tim Tyson and I grew up in small southern tobacco towns, where friendly folk sitting on their front porches would welcome you with a tall glass of iced tea, sit you down, and tell you with a smile that, well, Segregation never really got a fair shake.


I have never seen a burning cross, but I have seen them charred and smoking in fields, the morning after a rally.

The town in which I live was featured in a History Channel documentary about the Klan. Footage is shown of Klan members in their robes on the steps of our court house, which was just a block away from my church and the house where I grew up. Kids I ended up going to high school with were shown on national television holding ropes that were tied like nooses around the necks of black baby dolls. They shook them around like they were yo-yos or deflated balloons.

There is a well-known restaurant nearby that people come from miles away to eat at that does not serve anyone who isn't white. A Jordanian acquaintance was turned away because of "inappropriate attire" although the establishment has no dress code. A Mexican friend worked there as a dish washer. When I asked him how the job was he said, "Its fine, as long as I don't try to walk in through the front door."

This is still going on in 2010, and I've been around it all my life, and now I teach students who say these gut-churningly awful things about race and I work to repair something that gets broken again as soon as they go home to their families that are fueling these prejudices.

I didn't really want to read this book. My father was crazy about it and basically told me I had to read it or he would disown me. I'm glad I caved, because Blood Done Sign My Name is amazing. It is both historically informative and a brutally open way for Tyson to work through issues that have defined his life.

Though he recounts torturous circumstances, Tyson writes like a southern-fried Garrison Keillor. His charming tone allows him to cut deep, and while he examines himself the reader can't help but put their own thoughts under the microscope.

If you haven't yet, you should read this book and then give it to other people to read.

How far have we come from the civil rights movement in the 60's? I was born in the early 60's, and I remember the tension while I lived in Denver and the segration of schools. The fights and the anger. However, Tyson's account was in the heart of it all. The book was written for us to ask questions on what we have learned, what we know, and what are the motivations of our heart. I liked the ending, in that White Supremacy is the root of the civil rights movement. His account shows the ugly and the forgotten and how our country has not and still has not dealt with it. I would agree but I also think both sides need to come together, if not, we will continue to pay a higher cost of our depraved hearts.

this book starts out as a true life faulkner story, and ends up taking you through a history of civil rights in the american south, a history of oxford nc, and a history of the tyson family. you eventually do get back to the story that sucked you in to begin with, but not after becoming a student for a few hundred pages. i have heard some say that they wished that tyson had self-edited his text here. i might have felt that immediately, but in hindsight, i applaud his efforts to put forth a timeline of civil rights and enlighten the reader with regards to post-slavery paternalism, southern racial attitudes (it's not as obvious as people think), and various perspectives on the white supremacy movements of the 60s and 70s in the rural south.

it's a powerful book. one can't help but feel ashamed that these events took place in recent history. but tyson's object here is to shine a light on the ugly truths of these events, to expose the truths, expel the myths, and provide us with the wisdom and insight to further his message of tolerance and equality.

Historian Timothy B. Tyson has written a blended history and memoir, that traces the history of white supremacy in the United States through the lens of the murder of Henry Marrow in 1970, and Tyson's own developing understanding of the history of race in America.

Tyson was 10 and living in Oxford, North Carolina in 1970, where Marrow, who was black and only 19, was killed. Tyson was friends with the son and brother of the three killers, who beat and shot Marrow. Henry Marrow was attacked because he spoke to a white woman in front of her husband, who fetched his father and brother and then attacked Marrow.

Tyson's ancestors are from the South, and as he tells us about preachers and Ku Klux Klan members in his family, he shows us how he came to understand white supremacy and the lies that American tell themselves about race relations. His depictions are honest, nuanced and historicized, and I especially appreciated his descriptions of the racial paternalism of his grandparents. Even though they allowed their black hired domestic and agricultural help to eat at the same table as them and gave away shoes and food to the poor blacks in their community, Tyson explains how their behaviour was motivated, partly unconsciously, by an underlying sense that black and white people were inherently different. It's a caring and loving explanation that doesn't let them off the hook (and to be honest, they sound like they were pretty excellent for the time). Tyson shows us how we can love and admire flawed people, and understand abhorrent beliefs without excusing or minimizing them. He also shows us how racism is systemic and pervasive, and it's effects on communities.

Though he discusses the Reconstruction and the Civil Rights activists of the 2oth century, most of his historical narrative focuses on the murder of Marrow and the aftermath of the trial. Tyson spoke to many people in the black community and the father in the murderous trio. He spoke with town leaders, the police department and many others. It's an oral history, and Tyson is inextricably part of the story. His father was a Methodist preacher in the town, and worked to improve race relations at the time. Tyson attended a segregated elementary school, in spite of Brown v. Board of Education ordering the desegregation of schools in 1954, and grew up soaked in the ambience of a racist society.

Even though this was written almost 20 years ago, it's (sadly) relevant. This is a solid book, but I would especially recommend it to people who don't understand the history of white supremacy in the United States. Too often, racism in the US is bookended with Abraham Lincoln Martin Luther King Jr., and Tyson leads his readers through a detailed, yet approachable, journey through American white supremacy. If you're looking to understand the two centuries of history that led to the Black Lives Matter movement and the current racial tensions in America, Tyson can teach you a lot.