Book It - Blood Done Sign My Name

This week�s featured book:

Blood Done Sign My Name
Author: Timothy B. Tyson

Overview:

"Daddy and Roger and 'em shot 'em a nigger."

Those words, whispered to ten-year-old Tim Tyson by one of his playmates in the late spring of 1970, heralded a firestorm that would forever transform the small tobacco market town of Oxford, North Carolina.

On May 11, 1970, Henry Marrow, a 23-year-old black veteran, walked into a crossroads store owned by Robert Teel, a rough man with a criminal record and ties to the Ku Klux Klan, and came out running. Teel and two of his sons chased Marrow, beat him unmercifully, and killed him in public as he pleaded for his life. In the words of a local prosecutor: "They shot him like you or I would kill a snake."

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.

My Comments:

Written by a professor of African-American studies, this is a candid and engaging autobiographical story about the racial struggles, which often prompted vileness and violence on all sides, in a segregated southern town where white supremacy ruled, unapologetically, after the Civil Rights Act.

This book, which goes far beyond being a story about a racist murder, is an amazing journey through racial attitudes and beliefs. You will laugh and you will cry, but most of all, you be haunted by the view of race in the 1960s and 70s that is not commonly portrayed. This powerful book includes historical truths that we�d rather forget, truths that still bear repeating, over and over again, so we may learn from them.