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Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story
“Daddy and Roger and ’em shot ’em a nigger.” Those words, whispered to ten-year-old Tim Tyson by a playmate, heralded a ?restorm that would forever transform the tobacco market town of Oxford, North Carolina.
On May 11, 1970, Henry Marrow, a twenty-three-year-old black veteran, walked into a crossroads store owned by Robert Teel and came out running. Teel and two of his sons chased and beat Marrow, then killed him in public as he pleaded for his life.
Like many small Southern towns, Oxford had barely been touched by the civil rights movement. But in the wake of the killing, young African Americans took to the streets. While lawyers battled in the courthouse, the Klan raged in the shadows and black Vietnam veterans torched the town’s tobacco warehouses. Tyson’s father, the pastor of Oxford’s all-white Methodist church, urged the town to come to terms with its bloody racial history. In the end, however, the Tyson family was forced to move away.
Tim Tyson’s riveting narrative of that fiery summer brings gritty blues truth, soaring gospel vision, and down-home humor to a shocking episode of our history. Like To Kill a Mockingbird, Blood Done Sign My Name is a classic portrait of an unforgettable time and place.
On May 11, 1970, Henry Marrow, a twenty-three-year-old black veteran, walked into a crossroads store owned by Robert Teel and came out running. Teel and two of his sons chased and beat Marrow, then killed him in public as he pleaded for his life.
Like many small Southern towns, Oxford had barely been touched by the civil rights movement. But in the wake of the killing, young African Americans took to the streets. While lawyers battled in the courthouse, the Klan raged in the shadows and black Vietnam veterans torched the town’s tobacco warehouses. Tyson’s father, the pastor of Oxford’s all-white Methodist church, urged the town to come to terms with its bloody racial history. In the end, however, the Tyson family was forced to move away.
Tim Tyson’s riveting narrative of that fiery summer brings gritty blues truth, soaring gospel vision, and down-home humor to a shocking episode of our history. Like To Kill a Mockingbird, Blood Done Sign My Name is a classic portrait of an unforgettable time and place.
355 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
About the author
Timothy B. Tyson
10 books191 followersTimothy B. Tyson (born 1959) is an American writer and historian who specializes in the issues of culture, religion, and race associated with the Civil Rights Movement. He is a senior research scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and an adjunct professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina.
His books have won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, the James A. Rawley Prize (OAH), the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion, and the Southern Book Award. In addition, two of his books, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (1998) and Blood Done Sign My Name (2004), have been adapted into films, and the latter was also adapted into a play.
In 2017, Tyson published The Blood of Emmett Till, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and was longlisted for the National Book Award, but which was later subject to controversy regarding a reported confession made by Emmett Till's accuser Carolyn Bryant to Tyson which could not be substantiated.
His books have won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, the James A. Rawley Prize (OAH), the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion, and the Southern Book Award. In addition, two of his books, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (1998) and Blood Done Sign My Name (2004), have been adapted into films, and the latter was also adapted into a play.
In 2017, Tyson published The Blood of Emmett Till, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and was longlisted for the National Book Award, but which was later subject to controversy regarding a reported confession made by Emmett Till's accuser Carolyn Bryant to Tyson which could not be substantiated.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 568 reviews
July 29, 2010
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.
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.
July 28, 2009
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.
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.
February 20, 2016
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.
November 28, 2010
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.
June 9, 2007
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.
May 22, 2012
I really don't know a lot about the civil rights movement. All I know is that some nonviolent black guy named Martin Luther King, Jr. marched around and got attacked by cops. And black people wanted to stop discrimination (i.e. the inability to drink out of whichever water fountain you want), which somehow, someday, just stopped. POOF!
Looking back at my description, though, I can see all the holes in my knowledge. I know that just one guy couldn't have changed the country so drastically. I know that discrimination has to be more than just dividing water fountains, buses, and schools by color or it wouldn't have been such a big problem. I know that we didn't all just decide to hold hands and sing "Kumbaya" one afternoon, and suddenly discrimination disappeared. I have heard obscure names like Malcolm X and the Black Panthers tossed around a few times, but I have no idea what they mean. All I've learned about the civil rights movement is the child's sanitized version of history, just the information that you find in a children's book about MLK and no more.
And chances are, if you're young, like me, and white, like me, that's all you've ever learned, too.
That's where this book comes in. Set in Oxford, North Carolina during an especially turbulent period of the civil rights movement, Blood Done Sign My Name recounts the story of a white family killing a black man, and the racial tension that resulted. I never knew that there was rioting and firebombing all over that small country town, or even anywhere in the country, and especially that it was done by the black community. I never really knew what the Black Panthers stood for, or why people were so upset when those two black Olympic medalists gave the "black power" salute during the national anthem. I still don't know what Malcolm X stood for, but now I have to know. This book has opened my eyes on the civil rights issue so much, and I can't hardly believe that our country was once like that. This makes Occupy Wall Street and all the backlash there seem like kindergarten, and Middle Eastern terrorists seem like background noise.
What has our country been hiding from us? Obviously, more than I thought. I knew history textbooks couldn't be entirely trusted, but I didn't know to what extent. Now I feel I have to go researching everything supposedly important in history that I don't know hardly anything about--Vietnam, Nixon, the Persian Gulf, Cuba--and see what exactly was going on, and what we're too ashamed to teach our children. As Tyson explains in the book, we can't move forward until we acknowledge where we've been. And from what I see, we're just trying to hide that information.
Looking back at my description, though, I can see all the holes in my knowledge. I know that just one guy couldn't have changed the country so drastically. I know that discrimination has to be more than just dividing water fountains, buses, and schools by color or it wouldn't have been such a big problem. I know that we didn't all just decide to hold hands and sing "Kumbaya" one afternoon, and suddenly discrimination disappeared. I have heard obscure names like Malcolm X and the Black Panthers tossed around a few times, but I have no idea what they mean. All I've learned about the civil rights movement is the child's sanitized version of history, just the information that you find in a children's book about MLK and no more.
And chances are, if you're young, like me, and white, like me, that's all you've ever learned, too.
That's where this book comes in. Set in Oxford, North Carolina during an especially turbulent period of the civil rights movement, Blood Done Sign My Name recounts the story of a white family killing a black man, and the racial tension that resulted. I never knew that there was rioting and firebombing all over that small country town, or even anywhere in the country, and especially that it was done by the black community. I never really knew what the Black Panthers stood for, or why people were so upset when those two black Olympic medalists gave the "black power" salute during the national anthem. I still don't know what Malcolm X stood for, but now I have to know. This book has opened my eyes on the civil rights issue so much, and I can't hardly believe that our country was once like that. This makes Occupy Wall Street and all the backlash there seem like kindergarten, and Middle Eastern terrorists seem like background noise.
What has our country been hiding from us? Obviously, more than I thought. I knew history textbooks couldn't be entirely trusted, but I didn't know to what extent. Now I feel I have to go researching everything supposedly important in history that I don't know hardly anything about--Vietnam, Nixon, the Persian Gulf, Cuba--and see what exactly was going on, and what we're too ashamed to teach our children. As Tyson explains in the book, we can't move forward until we acknowledge where we've been. And from what I see, we're just trying to hide that information.
January 9, 2009
Tyson's opus is intelligently written and meticulously researched and looks at all characters in a sympathetic light, no matter how evil they appear to be on the surface. Tyson's biggest weakness in his book is his ambivalence of his own identity. He begins the book as an individual proud of his strong father and southern roots as they appear to be a dominant force in who he is today...however he oscillates between pat-on-the-back good-ole southern boy and self loathing southerner, wishing to enlighten these backwards and ignorant people (I'm from Kentucky, tongue was in cheek on that one). While I found this book to be heartwrenching and well-written, his refusal to take a stand on who he is really, really annoyed me.
Favorite quotes:
" 'I really dig sharks,' the poet once said, 'because when they bite your goddamn head off, they never say it was for a good cause' "
"Though people tend to think of poor, rural white Southerners as the worst racists in the country, these were not the people who redlined black folks out of their neighborhoods, the way northern bankers and real estate agents did. They were hardly in a position to keep blacks out of America's most elite schools, the way northeastern academics did. And white country people in the South often lived right alongside blacks, in similar material conditions, which both softened and sharpened racial clashes."
Favorite quotes:
" 'I really dig sharks,' the poet once said, 'because when they bite your goddamn head off, they never say it was for a good cause' "
"Though people tend to think of poor, rural white Southerners as the worst racists in the country, these were not the people who redlined black folks out of their neighborhoods, the way northern bankers and real estate agents did. They were hardly in a position to keep blacks out of America's most elite schools, the way northeastern academics did. And white country people in the South often lived right alongside blacks, in similar material conditions, which both softened and sharpened racial clashes."
December 20, 2008
If there were ten stars, I'd give them...one of the best books I have read about anything, pretty much. Beautifully written and will rewire your understanding of race in the American South and adds needed perspective (especially for white people) about the modern Civil Rights movement. You won't want to put it down.
January 3, 2010
Wow. Simultaneously personal (because it's a memoir of a horrible event in Oxford, North Carolina, in 1970) and universal (because it's about prejudice and fear and ignorance and hope). Also, I laughed aloud several times.
I read this book on various planes and buses and in various terminals and lounges last month, most of the time with tears running down my face. Which was embarrassing but maybe was good advertising for this author.
Not only is this a memoir and a history, it is also a persuasive argument that the events in the struggle for civil rights have been recast and prettified and sugar-coated beyond all recognition.
Some of my favorite passages:
"Smoking cigarettes, much like the racial slavery that had originally made tobacco profitable, was regarded as sinful by a substantial minority of folks, even though the economy rested on it. Sin or no sin, anybody tall enough to see over the counter at Monk's Grocery could buy a pack for thirty-five cents. Me and my brother, Vern, bought them regularly, though we lived in terror of getting caught. 'I need a pack of Tareyton's for my mama,' I would say to the man at the register, as if my mother would be caught dead sending a child out for cigarettes. The lie was superfluous. Monk probably would have sold me the smokes if I had said they were for the little baby Jesus."
"Then, thrusting the bootlegger away from him, the major exploded: 'But more to the point, what I call Mrs. Shaw is none of your goddamned business, you low-life taxidermist, you two-for-a-nickel jackal, you knee-crawling son of a bitch, net.' Those were the days when people really knew how to cuss."
"'I was doing that stuff back then, sit-ins and marches and all the rest and nowadays nobody even knows what it was like. People right now think that the white man opened up his drugstore and said, Y'all come in now, integration done come. But every time a door opened, somebody was kicked in the butt; somebody was knocked down and refused and spit on before you went in them places. It wasn't no nonviolence in Oxford. Somebody was bruised and kicked and knocked around--you better believe it. You didn't get it for free.'"
"'We knew if we cost 'em enough goddamn money they was gon' start doing something.'"
"'They had to give us some respect. . . . They might not like it but they damn sure had to do that. We was getting ready to tear this motherfucker all to hell, and all of a sudden [white people:] decided to listen.'"
"'When it was quiet, we all heard a baby crying outside the courtroom. The window was open, and you could hear it all through the room. . . . And I just started crying. . . . I was thinking about the little baby, the one whose father had been killed, and the little baby that had just been born in the Teel family, Roger's little girl. And how none of this was their fault, none of it. All of this was our fault, not theirs.'"
About economic boycotts: "This may seem appalling to those who grew up with the story of Rosa Parks and her tired feet, but the same story could be told from Montgomery to Memphis, from the earliest years of the movement; there were always black people too fearful, too attached to 'their' white folks, too pessimistic or too beaten down by white supremacy to stand up for themselves. And black activists dealt with their dissenters emphatically, because freedom was on the line. 'We'd bust a bag of sugar, break a couple of jars of jelly,' [Eddie:] McCoy recounted. 'Didn't nobody try to hurt nobody. They just needed to know we weren't playing that shit. Black people had to work together.'"
"In fact, though none of the white people in the room knew what had happened along the banks of the Cape Fear in 1898, the Wilmington Race Riot was probably the most important political event in the history of the state. Its omission from North Carolina history may have been the biggest of the lies that marked my boyhood."
"'If, in moving through your life, you find yourself lost,' said Bernice Johnson Reagon, the guiding spirit of the SNCC Freedom Singers and now Sweet Honey in the Rock, 'go back to the last place where you knew who you were, and what you were doing, and start from there.' Soon after I took her advice, I found myself with a straight razor at my neck. . . ."
"'For we acknowledge and confess to you that we, too, like the men who once owned Destrehan Plantation, have been tempted to love things and use people, when you have called us to love people and use things.'"
"Someone in Oxford went to the library and tore out the pages where I narrate the killing of Henry Marrow, presumably to prevent other people from reading them. I could have replaced them, of course, but I have chosen not to do so. Those missing pages make my central point more clearly, in some respects, than their contents ever could have. Our hidden history of race has yet to be fully told, and we persist in hiding from much of what we know."
I read this book on various planes and buses and in various terminals and lounges last month, most of the time with tears running down my face. Which was embarrassing but maybe was good advertising for this author.
Not only is this a memoir and a history, it is also a persuasive argument that the events in the struggle for civil rights have been recast and prettified and sugar-coated beyond all recognition.
Some of my favorite passages:
"Smoking cigarettes, much like the racial slavery that had originally made tobacco profitable, was regarded as sinful by a substantial minority of folks, even though the economy rested on it. Sin or no sin, anybody tall enough to see over the counter at Monk's Grocery could buy a pack for thirty-five cents. Me and my brother, Vern, bought them regularly, though we lived in terror of getting caught. 'I need a pack of Tareyton's for my mama,' I would say to the man at the register, as if my mother would be caught dead sending a child out for cigarettes. The lie was superfluous. Monk probably would have sold me the smokes if I had said they were for the little baby Jesus."
"Then, thrusting the bootlegger away from him, the major exploded: 'But more to the point, what I call Mrs. Shaw is none of your goddamned business, you low-life taxidermist, you two-for-a-nickel jackal, you knee-crawling son of a bitch, net.' Those were the days when people really knew how to cuss."
"'I was doing that stuff back then, sit-ins and marches and all the rest and nowadays nobody even knows what it was like. People right now think that the white man opened up his drugstore and said, Y'all come in now, integration done come. But every time a door opened, somebody was kicked in the butt; somebody was knocked down and refused and spit on before you went in them places. It wasn't no nonviolence in Oxford. Somebody was bruised and kicked and knocked around--you better believe it. You didn't get it for free.'"
"'We knew if we cost 'em enough goddamn money they was gon' start doing something.'"
"'They had to give us some respect. . . . They might not like it but they damn sure had to do that. We was getting ready to tear this motherfucker all to hell, and all of a sudden [white people:] decided to listen.'"
"'When it was quiet, we all heard a baby crying outside the courtroom. The window was open, and you could hear it all through the room. . . . And I just started crying. . . . I was thinking about the little baby, the one whose father had been killed, and the little baby that had just been born in the Teel family, Roger's little girl. And how none of this was their fault, none of it. All of this was our fault, not theirs.'"
About economic boycotts: "This may seem appalling to those who grew up with the story of Rosa Parks and her tired feet, but the same story could be told from Montgomery to Memphis, from the earliest years of the movement; there were always black people too fearful, too attached to 'their' white folks, too pessimistic or too beaten down by white supremacy to stand up for themselves. And black activists dealt with their dissenters emphatically, because freedom was on the line. 'We'd bust a bag of sugar, break a couple of jars of jelly,' [Eddie:] McCoy recounted. 'Didn't nobody try to hurt nobody. They just needed to know we weren't playing that shit. Black people had to work together.'"
"In fact, though none of the white people in the room knew what had happened along the banks of the Cape Fear in 1898, the Wilmington Race Riot was probably the most important political event in the history of the state. Its omission from North Carolina history may have been the biggest of the lies that marked my boyhood."
"'If, in moving through your life, you find yourself lost,' said Bernice Johnson Reagon, the guiding spirit of the SNCC Freedom Singers and now Sweet Honey in the Rock, 'go back to the last place where you knew who you were, and what you were doing, and start from there.' Soon after I took her advice, I found myself with a straight razor at my neck. . . ."
"'For we acknowledge and confess to you that we, too, like the men who once owned Destrehan Plantation, have been tempted to love things and use people, when you have called us to love people and use things.'"
"Someone in Oxford went to the library and tore out the pages where I narrate the killing of Henry Marrow, presumably to prevent other people from reading them. I could have replaced them, of course, but I have chosen not to do so. Those missing pages make my central point more clearly, in some respects, than their contents ever could have. Our hidden history of race has yet to be fully told, and we persist in hiding from much of what we know."
February 12, 2008
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!
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!
March 14, 2021
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.
October 5, 2011
Censorship by Goodreads?: I joined Goodreads over two years ago with the purpose of committing to “the cloud” a paper list (along with supplementary Post-It Notes and cocktail napkins) of books, including this one, that I intended to read someday. After doing so, the first comment that I ever received on Goodreads directed me to a web site that denounced this book. The web site is the laughably ineffective work of an angry semi-literate: difficult to navigate, ill-punctuated, logically inconsistent. If you doubted that the race-related unpleasantness related in this book is still alive and kicking today, Tyson's detractors should convince you otherwise.
I saw at the time that all who had listed the book as “to-read” had received the same comment. Later, the comment disappeared from my review. The same seemed to happen to comments by the same poster on other people's reviews. What happened? Assuming that the original poster did not voluntarily withdraw the posting, it seems like censorship. Was it?
Opinion about book: I enjoyed this book and recommend it, but my comment here will not be completely complimentary. It seems like the author wants to have it both ways about the role of story-telling in history. I mean to say: he wants to tell a story of a single incident here and have us believe that it stands, at least in part, for a larger struggle and a larger problem. He makes his case convincingly. Why does he need to do this? Because history, in the raw, is a confusing, often contradictory, series of events, with seeming dead ends, inexplicable mysteries, misleading contemporary accounts, and inconclusive data. Historians and fiction writers often arrive on the scene afterward and shape a narrative that they hope will be clear, accurate, and useful for the rest of us. When done well, it helps us to remember things we might otherwise wish to forget, like lynchings, and motivate us to be better than we might be otherwise.
So, while telling his own story, Tyson objects to what he sees as the “Disneyfied” story of the life and works of Dr. Martin Luther King, and, by extension, the entire African-American experience. There can be no arguing with the fact that King is now viewed differently in popular culture. Further evidence of this was provided by the recent release of decades-old interviews with the recently-widowed Jacqueline Kennedy denouncing Dr. King, which hit the mainstream press like the voice of a ghost from the past, reminding us of how Dr. King appeared to many contemporaries.
As Tyson accurately summarizes it, the current popular myth is that King came along with a philosophy of non-violence, and, as an almost immediate result, opposition to racism in the U.S. suddenly melted away, except for a few cardboard villains. While this is clearly not true, I'd like to take the morally wicked position that such lies should at least be tolerated, if not encouraged.
Where I live now (Bulgaria), the popular narrative (or “myth”, if you wish to be uncharitable) is that this country is a tolerant one. As evidence, Bulgarians can point out that the country managed to save most of its indigenous Jews from extinction during WWII without any apparently self-interested motive. Of course, there are other moments in local history when toleration was not in evidence, but the popular narrative remains a useful one. In this case, there were recently anti-Roma (a.k.a. Gypsy) violence sparked by the killing of an ethnic Bulgarian by an ethnic Roma crime lord. Leading political figures from both the left and the right appeared together in public and declared that toleration was a national characteristic and to be intolerant was to be unpatriotic. Since a sense of patriotism is often a more effective motivator than a sense of righting a past wrong, this was a wise rhetorical move and helped to partially dampen inflamed spirits, probably saving property and lives.
Similarly, in the U.S.A., thanks to the posthumous conversion of Dr. King from dangerous radical to great American, it is possible to publicly invoke him when wishing to maintain that toleration and non-violence are the traditional qualities of patriotic citizens. While it is reasonable to question whether such a tradition exists, it seems inarguable that things would be better if such a tradition existed. Its widespread acceptance in the national mythology makes it more difficult to claim that the inherent superiority of one group is actually what the country is all about.
Certain lies, like certain idiots, can be useful. This contention rests on the unprovable assertion that, while most people will not respond to a call to remedy wrongs they perceive as done long ago by strangers long dead, many will respond to a call to behave in the perceived great traditions of their nation, wherever the nation is. People who are ready for the more complicated truth can go to writers like Tyson. In this case, they will discover a truth that is deeper, sadder, more enraging, more complex, usually more tragic, occasionally more heroic.
I saw at the time that all who had listed the book as “to-read” had received the same comment. Later, the comment disappeared from my review. The same seemed to happen to comments by the same poster on other people's reviews. What happened? Assuming that the original poster did not voluntarily withdraw the posting, it seems like censorship. Was it?
Opinion about book: I enjoyed this book and recommend it, but my comment here will not be completely complimentary. It seems like the author wants to have it both ways about the role of story-telling in history. I mean to say: he wants to tell a story of a single incident here and have us believe that it stands, at least in part, for a larger struggle and a larger problem. He makes his case convincingly. Why does he need to do this? Because history, in the raw, is a confusing, often contradictory, series of events, with seeming dead ends, inexplicable mysteries, misleading contemporary accounts, and inconclusive data. Historians and fiction writers often arrive on the scene afterward and shape a narrative that they hope will be clear, accurate, and useful for the rest of us. When done well, it helps us to remember things we might otherwise wish to forget, like lynchings, and motivate us to be better than we might be otherwise.
So, while telling his own story, Tyson objects to what he sees as the “Disneyfied” story of the life and works of Dr. Martin Luther King, and, by extension, the entire African-American experience. There can be no arguing with the fact that King is now viewed differently in popular culture. Further evidence of this was provided by the recent release of decades-old interviews with the recently-widowed Jacqueline Kennedy denouncing Dr. King, which hit the mainstream press like the voice of a ghost from the past, reminding us of how Dr. King appeared to many contemporaries.
As Tyson accurately summarizes it, the current popular myth is that King came along with a philosophy of non-violence, and, as an almost immediate result, opposition to racism in the U.S. suddenly melted away, except for a few cardboard villains. While this is clearly not true, I'd like to take the morally wicked position that such lies should at least be tolerated, if not encouraged.
Where I live now (Bulgaria), the popular narrative (or “myth”, if you wish to be uncharitable) is that this country is a tolerant one. As evidence, Bulgarians can point out that the country managed to save most of its indigenous Jews from extinction during WWII without any apparently self-interested motive. Of course, there are other moments in local history when toleration was not in evidence, but the popular narrative remains a useful one. In this case, there were recently anti-Roma (a.k.a. Gypsy) violence sparked by the killing of an ethnic Bulgarian by an ethnic Roma crime lord. Leading political figures from both the left and the right appeared together in public and declared that toleration was a national characteristic and to be intolerant was to be unpatriotic. Since a sense of patriotism is often a more effective motivator than a sense of righting a past wrong, this was a wise rhetorical move and helped to partially dampen inflamed spirits, probably saving property and lives.
Similarly, in the U.S.A., thanks to the posthumous conversion of Dr. King from dangerous radical to great American, it is possible to publicly invoke him when wishing to maintain that toleration and non-violence are the traditional qualities of patriotic citizens. While it is reasonable to question whether such a tradition exists, it seems inarguable that things would be better if such a tradition existed. Its widespread acceptance in the national mythology makes it more difficult to claim that the inherent superiority of one group is actually what the country is all about.
Certain lies, like certain idiots, can be useful. This contention rests on the unprovable assertion that, while most people will not respond to a call to remedy wrongs they perceive as done long ago by strangers long dead, many will respond to a call to behave in the perceived great traditions of their nation, wherever the nation is. People who are ready for the more complicated truth can go to writers like Tyson. In this case, they will discover a truth that is deeper, sadder, more enraging, more complex, usually more tragic, occasionally more heroic.
November 16, 2020
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.
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.
February 22, 2018
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.
July 4, 2017
In the epilogue Tyson quotes Faulkner, "The past is not dead. It's not even past." The quote sums up the importance of reading this book for me. It was devastating to read about the unjust and horrific treatment of human beings in our country, but as the author points out--we have to face our past if we want to move forward. In this historical account there were people who stood up for the rights of others. In this there is hope.
February 23, 2017
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.
The audiobook is superb, for those who enjoy that sort of thing.
November 11, 2014
This powerful insight to the civil rights movement. It made me realize even more about the ugliness of discrimination.
April 4, 2012
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.
_____
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.
_____
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.
April 17, 2021
This book is very interesting in what it is. I can’t say that it is… or will...or ever would be one of my favorites…or that I would want to read it again...but it IS honest and brutal about the nature of the historical interactions between black and white races. I grew up in the deep south in the 50’s and 60’s and can sadly say that it is indeed honest in the author’s assessment of the racial situation. Be aware that some of the content is extremely graphic and the story will not be suitable for everyone by any stretch of the imagination. The story is Tim Tyson’s account of going back and confronting many of his memories of this event and looking at them through the eyes of an adult instead of those of a child. It's a well written account and good as far as the writing is concerned but sad and tragic beyond measure in the reality. As I said it will NOT be for everyone.
June 18, 2020
The author of this book was associate professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison at the time this book was published. I had started reading this book over a year ago. I recently decided to pick it back up; the events and the subsequent riots described in this book are eerily similar to current events; I highly recommend this book.
May 3, 2023
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.
February 26, 2017
This is a beautifully written and powerful (if a bit meandering) book. Read it for the story - it's both important and instructive - and for the interwoven family biography and especially for the routinely lyrical, uplifting writing.
Here's how wonderful the writing is: I was ordering the author's new book and just happened to see the strong reviews for this one and responded to the prompt to read a bit and see what it's like. I couldn't stop reading, so moved was I by the beautiful, soaring prose. I ordered it and paid extra to have it delivered the next day and managed to finish it four nights later during a week in nwhich I worked over 60 hours: it was so enthralling that, tired though I was, I read voraciously each night to finish it.
Now, it's not perfect: For example, some of the historical, contextual jaunts seem superfluous and/or too long, but all are informative. Further, I can't help but think that the author is quite(/overly?) charitable with respect to his family members who're also profiled in this book: it's not that he excuses their foibles, necessarily, just that sometimes he seems overly surprised and/or understanding of behaviors of which he may not be as forgiving with others (or would seek more proof and take less on faith with respect to others).
This being said, I was often amazed by the lyrical turns of phrase that are ubiquitous in this book, reflecting both the unique cadence of the South and the author's prodigious gifts. I want to share a few, but, honestly, there are so many, it's (too) hard to choose (so I'll just grab the book and open it to a random page).
In this Black History Month, I'll share one example from the author's description of the reaction of many Americans to the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He suggests that we were "mourning a loss so deep as to defy easy assessment, even at a distance of decades." As I read this, I realized that it perfectly described my still-conflicted feelings about this hero's demise.
OK, one more: in describing the country's experience at war, he notes "In the late 1960s ... the Vietnam War made more and more corpses and less and less sense...."
Alright, the final one: in describing the world of White Supremacy in which he grew up, the author notes that it was "a society where white men made decisions and black women made dinners...."
His turns of phrase can at times be as haunting as they are beautiful, which makes the meandering not only tolerable but often a gift of indelibly memorable imagery and prose. In sum, you learn a lot about the tragedy of Henry Marrow's death, about the segregated society that produced and condoned it and about the coming of age of a family whose worldview rubbed against this uncomfortably ... all told vividly and beautifully. In a weird way, the elegance of the narrative obscures the horror of the central tragedy in this work, though it also exposes and indicts the White Supremacy of the time all too powerfully and horribly.
Read this book if you are interested in modern American History, Sociology and/or Biography. If you are a student of the South and its folkways, grab a copy and devour it like the rich treat that it is. And read it if you just flat out enjoy beautiful, lyrical writing. I cannot a recall a book that tells such a heinous story so incredibly as to make it such an enjoyable experience (while not diminishing the tragedy that is its genesis and the lessons that we should learn therefrom).
Here's how wonderful the writing is: I was ordering the author's new book and just happened to see the strong reviews for this one and responded to the prompt to read a bit and see what it's like. I couldn't stop reading, so moved was I by the beautiful, soaring prose. I ordered it and paid extra to have it delivered the next day and managed to finish it four nights later during a week in nwhich I worked over 60 hours: it was so enthralling that, tired though I was, I read voraciously each night to finish it.
Now, it's not perfect: For example, some of the historical, contextual jaunts seem superfluous and/or too long, but all are informative. Further, I can't help but think that the author is quite(/overly?) charitable with respect to his family members who're also profiled in this book: it's not that he excuses their foibles, necessarily, just that sometimes he seems overly surprised and/or understanding of behaviors of which he may not be as forgiving with others (or would seek more proof and take less on faith with respect to others).
This being said, I was often amazed by the lyrical turns of phrase that are ubiquitous in this book, reflecting both the unique cadence of the South and the author's prodigious gifts. I want to share a few, but, honestly, there are so many, it's (too) hard to choose (so I'll just grab the book and open it to a random page).
In this Black History Month, I'll share one example from the author's description of the reaction of many Americans to the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He suggests that we were "mourning a loss so deep as to defy easy assessment, even at a distance of decades." As I read this, I realized that it perfectly described my still-conflicted feelings about this hero's demise.
OK, one more: in describing the country's experience at war, he notes "In the late 1960s ... the Vietnam War made more and more corpses and less and less sense...."
Alright, the final one: in describing the world of White Supremacy in which he grew up, the author notes that it was "a society where white men made decisions and black women made dinners...."
His turns of phrase can at times be as haunting as they are beautiful, which makes the meandering not only tolerable but often a gift of indelibly memorable imagery and prose. In sum, you learn a lot about the tragedy of Henry Marrow's death, about the segregated society that produced and condoned it and about the coming of age of a family whose worldview rubbed against this uncomfortably ... all told vividly and beautifully. In a weird way, the elegance of the narrative obscures the horror of the central tragedy in this work, though it also exposes and indicts the White Supremacy of the time all too powerfully and horribly.
Read this book if you are interested in modern American History, Sociology and/or Biography. If you are a student of the South and its folkways, grab a copy and devour it like the rich treat that it is. And read it if you just flat out enjoy beautiful, lyrical writing. I cannot a recall a book that tells such a heinous story so incredibly as to make it such an enjoyable experience (while not diminishing the tragedy that is its genesis and the lessons that we should learn therefrom).
May 23, 2016
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.
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.
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.
October 25, 2016
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.
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.
April 2, 2010
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.
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.
February 7, 2011
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?").
January 30, 2018
“Daddy and Roger and ‘em shot ‘em a n***.” That’s what 10-year-old Timothy B. Tyson’s friend Gerald told him as they were bouncing a basketball in the driveway in Oxford, North Carolina in 1970. That murder and the events that unfolded afterward would haunt Tyson in the years that followed.
This is a powerful true story. I just read the epilogue through a second time and will probably read it again. In a sense, the author says this book is a story of the blues and a story of the gospel, both of which started as southern things but speak to the whole human dilemma. “The blues are about looking a painful history straight in the eye; the gospel is about coming together as a community of faith in order to rise beyond that anguish. If anyone wonders why a white boy from eastern North Carolina teaches black history in Wisconsin, the timeless wisdom of the blues has one answer….”
Tyson says that as a nation and as individual human beings, we would rather hear gospel stories. We cherish those stories because we want to transcend our history without actually confronting it. But the future of our country depends upon an honest confrontation with our own history. The murder of Henry Marrow in Oxford, NC, the assassination of Dr. King and the loss of those whom the slave poets called “the many thousands gone” cannot be erased, and they must not be forgotten. But, Tyson says, that blood has the power to redeem our history if we name it and heed the call of justice that still waits for an answer.
This is a powerful true story. I just read the epilogue through a second time and will probably read it again. In a sense, the author says this book is a story of the blues and a story of the gospel, both of which started as southern things but speak to the whole human dilemma. “The blues are about looking a painful history straight in the eye; the gospel is about coming together as a community of faith in order to rise beyond that anguish. If anyone wonders why a white boy from eastern North Carolina teaches black history in Wisconsin, the timeless wisdom of the blues has one answer….”
Tyson says that as a nation and as individual human beings, we would rather hear gospel stories. We cherish those stories because we want to transcend our history without actually confronting it. But the future of our country depends upon an honest confrontation with our own history. The murder of Henry Marrow in Oxford, NC, the assassination of Dr. King and the loss of those whom the slave poets called “the many thousands gone” cannot be erased, and they must not be forgotten. But, Tyson says, that blood has the power to redeem our history if we name it and heed the call of justice that still waits for an answer.
June 17, 2020
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).
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).
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 26, 2020
This part memoir/part history lesson was a tough read at times, partially for the subject matter as just showing not that long ago how little was thought about the life of a person of color in this country. However, the other issue I had reading it was it felt very choppy in terms of being a memoir, then being almost a text book on civil rights, then flipping to somewhat of a moral and faith based discussion. Keeping all that in one place is fine if the writing style is consistent, but it wasn't so there were times it really did draw away from the book as a whole.
In the author notes at the end, you find out that this started as a pure history thesis for Tyson in college - just a factual 200 page writing of what happened in this part of North Carolina in the late 60's. He then turned it into a much more personal story of how he and his family were part of it, how it impacted his thinking while growing up and how he now (2003ish) looks at things. The issue was it wasn't done all that smoothly - just seemed he'd take 20 pages of his thesis and that was a chapter, then 10 pages of thought, then a little family history....a bit jarring of a read.
However, with that, still well worth the read, particularly the last 75 or so pages where we see how the crime and trial played out and how Tyson then went back over it with people in the area. That final part really elevated the rest.
Definitely worth a read, particularly in these times of race based killings - does put some historical context to both how it's been much worse, but also that you'd think it would be much better by now.....except realizing that time was only 50 or so years ago - teens at that time are 60 now - and in charge. Some have used the horrifying experiences of that time to try to do better....while others think those horrifying experiences were the better times. One of them resides in the White House which makes this book a particular interesting read in 2020.
Know going in that the first 150 or so pages may take some "stick to it" as some reads like a text book, but definitely worth it, and you do learn quite a bit.
In the author notes at the end, you find out that this started as a pure history thesis for Tyson in college - just a factual 200 page writing of what happened in this part of North Carolina in the late 60's. He then turned it into a much more personal story of how he and his family were part of it, how it impacted his thinking while growing up and how he now (2003ish) looks at things. The issue was it wasn't done all that smoothly - just seemed he'd take 20 pages of his thesis and that was a chapter, then 10 pages of thought, then a little family history....a bit jarring of a read.
However, with that, still well worth the read, particularly the last 75 or so pages where we see how the crime and trial played out and how Tyson then went back over it with people in the area. That final part really elevated the rest.
Definitely worth a read, particularly in these times of race based killings - does put some historical context to both how it's been much worse, but also that you'd think it would be much better by now.....except realizing that time was only 50 or so years ago - teens at that time are 60 now - and in charge. Some have used the horrifying experiences of that time to try to do better....while others think those horrifying experiences were the better times. One of them resides in the White House which makes this book a particular interesting read in 2020.
Know going in that the first 150 or so pages may take some "stick to it" as some reads like a text book, but definitely worth it, and you do learn quite a bit.
November 1, 2024
"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."
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."
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