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Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

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"'Daddy and Roger and 'em shot 'em a nigger.'" These are the initial words in _Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story_ (Crown Publishers) by Timothy Tyson. A shock opening is often to be distrusted, but not here; the words are those of a friend to the ten-year-old Tyson himself, and the book explains his efforts to come to an understanding of the 1970 murder and the subsequent revolution in race politics in his then home of Oxford, North Carolina. It lead him to do his master's thesis in history about the Oxford trials, but in this book he has not only given the history and the aftermath of the event in historical context, but has made it a memoir of his own growing up and his family's involvement in race relations. Parts of the story, including Tyson's relationship with his "Eleanor Roosevelt liberal" parents, are told with the love, humor and detail that many readers will associate with _To Kill a Mockingbird_. The struggle between the races is far from settled, but Tyson insists that this story from his time is an antidote to the "sugar-coated confections that pass for the popular history of the civil rights movement."

Brown vs. Board of Education, The Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act made no dent in Oxford. No black officials had entered into the local government. Blacks were employed in menial labor only. The public pool had been sold to become a private one, so that blacks never swam where whites did. Violence by blacks against whites was ruthlessly pursued, but not vice versa. The motivation for such action by whites, Tyson shows, was the same fear that has worked for centuries, that black men would have sex with white women. The trouble in Oxford was sparked by an allegation that Henry Marrow, a 23-year-old black veteran, had made a flirtatious remark to a white woman. He was in the store of Robert Teel, probably a member of the Klan. Teel and his son Larry ran down Marrow and shot him in the street as he pled for his life. Mobs the night of the murder firebombed buildings, destroyed stores and "...scared the hell out of most of the white people in Oxford, and some of the black ones, too." The violence was worse when the Teels were declared not guilty. White liberals like Tyson's father had Christian faith that white people would share power rather than having to have it seized from them by black people. He was eventually shifted out of Oxford because of his racial moderation. Tyson clearly admires the stance his father took, but concedes that moderate whites who spoke up and tried to be good examples wound up doing little to really improve racial equality.

Tyson quotes a liberal paper of the time that "discussion is a more promising way to racial accommodation than destruction," but says that there is an uncomfortable, indisputable fact: that in Oxford, whites "... did not even consider altering the racial caste system until rocks began to fly and buildings began to burn." Abolition was not accomplished by simple moral persuasion, nor was integration during the twentieth century. When he returned to the town to do his research for his thesis (including interviewing Robert Teel) he found that the local newspapers covering the period were absent from the newspaper's office, and the microfilms of them were gone from the library. The records of the trial from the courthouse, he was told, had similarly disappeared (but he sneaked into the basement of the courthouse and found them). He eventually delivered his own thesis to the library, which by the time he did so was glad to accept it; but he found later that someone had torn out the pages dealing with Henry Marrow's murder. _Blood Done Sign My Name_ may well be a story that some Americans would rather not hear. This eloquent book is not just a bleak assessment of the times. It is full of love for some very odd family members and friends. Tyson is unsparing about his own slow awareness of racial matters, explaining how he didn't want to drink from a playground fountain after a black boy did, finally taking a drink after letting the water rinse everything out first; "I guess that made me a moderate," he winces. The humane touches of memoir by a masterful storyteller lighten the sad history; the characters are good guys and bad guys still, but drawn realistically: "There is no moral place in this story where anyone can sit down and congratulate themselves," he writes. And finally, "We cannot address the place we find ourselves because we will not acknowledge the road that brought us here." Tyson's book is an eloquent invitation to such acknowledgement.

I learned about Blood Done Sign My Name in June 2005. I always wondered if anyone had told the story that changed my view of life in just two days.

In August 1970, I was a young photographer on the weekend shift at the Raleigh News and Observer. An assignment came in to meet a reporter in a small town north of Raleigh. No details. Just meet the reporter.

When I got into Oxford, the reporter told me a man would soon be testifying in a murder trial and that he needed a photo of that man. I parked across from the Courthouse. I put a 200 mm lens on my Nikon motor drive and waited. Soon a police vehicle pulled up with a single man in the back. As the man exited the car, I climbed out and got ready to make the picture.

As luck would have it, the man had a newspaper covering his face. He walked a few steps, dropped the paper, and looked straight at me. I took the photo and got out of town.

The next morning, I was ordered to return to Oxford. Big mistake. The photo of the third killer appeared on front page on the local newstands, and this did not go well with the locals. The verdict came and the streets emptied. I took a last photograph as a line of police officers passed me on the street. Moments later they were back surrounding me. One pulled a knife and poked me in the stomach. The older man with the knife started to tell me I was at my end. I don't know what made me say I only made $2.00 an hour. The redneck just looked at me and said I was an idiot to risk my life for $2.00 and I agreed. They let me go.

Shortly afterward, I got to my car and hit the road south. A group of locals followed me in a truck while I was flat out in my Ford Pinto. I laugh these days when I think about that longhair photographer being chased down the highway at full speed. It was straight from Hollywood but it was very real.

I never knew the whole story until I read the book. The paper thought I wanted to file a complaint against the police, but the thought never entered my mind for a moment. To put it bluntly, I had no idea whatsoever how much danger I was in from the moment I set foot in Oxford. And I had no interest in going back to Oxford for any reason.

I put the whole story out of my mind except for the photographs that still hang in my home. Then I read the book. If you want to begin to understand America, you need to read the book carefully. The story is real. The story is about America and a past that cannot be forgotten.

A few days later, the News and Observer fired me for being too aggressive. I've always thought it was a badge of honor to be fired for becoming part of a story. I never worked as a photographer again. But I remember... Read the book...

When Robert Teel shot Henry Marrow I was one month short of high school graduation. I worked at Buy Rite, a small grocery store about a mile from where the shooting took place. Just before dark, the police came in and told us to close up - that a curfew was going into effect at dusk. We shut down the store and I drove the few blocks down Broad Street to Main Street, past the home of Robert Teel. True to Timothy Tyson's reporting, Teel's house was surrounded by sheeted Klansmen carrying shotguns and pistols. Every light was on and no one was going to attack him or his mansion while they stood guard. My father reported the next evening that the only police officer with the courage to come out of the police station during the rioting that took place right after the shooting was the city's lone black officer.

Robert Teel gave me my first haircut as a child. I still remember sitting in his chair in the Basement Barber Shop, screaming because of the noise of the clippers next to my ears. Teels' barber shop is where my father got his hair cut. It's where town leaders, businessmen, and rural farmers hung out and talked about the events of their day and how the world was changing for the worse. I grew up in Oxford and Tyson has done an admirable job recounting his memories and the mood of the South and especially Granville County during that period.

Tyson's account is spot on. Some of the people he interviewed certainly tried to present themselves in the best light possible during an awful period in Oxford's history. Although I consider myself a bigot now, back then I was a product of the hippie generation and depending upon who you're talking to, the events and viewpoints differ widely. I lost my job at the Buy Rite when the black bag boy was told he could not sit on the checkout counter even though I was sitting there too. He was fired; I quit. My dad, and brother who also worked at the store were embarrassed by my actions. They were even more shocked when I returned home from my first tour in the Army with an Ethiopian wife. Only two years after the shooting in Grab-all, I returned to Granville County with a black wife and a son of mixed race.

Most of the people who remember that period are either dead or retired now. Yet I suspect that the attitudes have not changed that much. We don't know why we believe the way we do or have the prejudices we have, but they've been passed on to us by preceeding generations. I live in Granville County today, and not much has changed. The same families still run the county and Robert Teel still lives there; the stores he built are still there, and probably the same prejudices are still there too.

This extremely well-written memoir/nonfiction book about a horrible, racially motivated killing in N. Carolina illustrates the author's coming of age in the American South. As a professor in African-American history, the book is grounded in thorough research and historical context. I was even impressed by bibliography at the end of the book. This man has done his research and documented it well.

Tyson not only writes about the tragic event that changed his life (and the history of his hometown) when he was 10, but he also shares some of the history of the Black Freedom movement and the history of his own family, and the way it has affected him throughout his life.

What I thought was particularly interesting was how the U.S. has sanitized the history of the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in particular. When he was killed, Ronald Reagan actually had the gall to imply that he brought it on himself because of his lack of respect for law and order, and he accused the anti-war protestors for the assasination!

I was particularly touched by the stories about Tyson's amazing parents and feisty relatives, and others who stood up for justice and compassion. Tyson also writes openly about his angst and struggles to come to grips with his own prejudices.

I will recommend this book to everyone I know--I believe that it's a book that every American needs to read, to better understand the history of race relations in this country and how far we have yet to go.

Author Timothy B. Tyson has carved out a rather unique role for himself. Believe it or not, he is a white man from North Carolina teaching Black History in Wisconsin. "Blood Done Sign My Name" is the compelling, personal and brutally honest story of how this all came to be.
Tyson was 10 years old back in 1970 and living with his family in the small rural town of Oxford, N.C. His dad was the Methodist minister and his mom a schoolteacher in town. One day in May, his 10 year old playmate Gerald Teel casually remarked that "Daddy and Roger and 'em shot 'em a nigger." Indeed, his daddy and two of this brothers had brutally shot and killed a 23 year old black man, Henry Marrow, for very dubious reasons. This single event would have profound implications for the little town of Oxford and would play a major role in shaping the life of one Tim Tyson.
"Blood Done Sign My Name" is a remarkable book on many levels. If you are interested in learning more about the arrest and subsequent trial of Robert Teel then you will certainly find it here. It is not a pretty story.
Likewise, if you would like to learn more about the painful history of race relations in this country then this is your book as well. Tyson believes with all his heart that most of us have an extremely distorted and somewhat sugar-coated view of what really went on in this country during the 1960's and 1970's. For example, as a fairly well read white man in his 50's I had never even heard about two incidents that Tyson contends are key to understanding what really happened in those years. When you read about the case of the Wilmington Ten you begin to understand the rage black people felt back in the early 1970's. And when you read the grisly and heartbreaking story of what happened to some slaves who dared to rebel at the Destrehen Plantation in Louisiana way back in 1811, you again begin to appreciate the reasons why blacks in this country feel and react the way they do. The history books that most of us read in school never mention incidents like these. So how are we to know? And if we don't know, how can we possibly understand?
And finally, "Blood Done Sign My Name" is an intimate account of one man's personal struggle with the issue of race. Tim Tyson has presented us with an exceptionally well written book that offers the reader an awful lot to chew on. Highly recommended.

At first glance, this is a historical account of the racial tumult unleashed by the 1970 killing of a black man in Oxford, North Carolina. The author, 11 years old at the time, was profoundly affected. Not only did he witness the burning of the town's infrastructure of tobacco warehouses, but his Methodist minister father was drummed out of town for preaching against racial segregation. But this story is about more than one town, or one event and its aftermath. Tyson uses Oxford as a microcosm to examine the complex history of race relations in the South. As the narrative meanders along in the circuitous and philosophical style of the Southern storyteller, Tyson proceeds to ever-deeper levels of meaning and buried history.

As someone who shares Tyson's roots in rural North Carolina, I find it particularly important to rediscover "the other South" - the South that has been systematically expunged from history. Tyson discusses the banished history of white resistance to slavery and racial segregation during the Civil War and Reconstruction. How many of us know about the "Red Strings," a secret society of anti-Confederate guerrillas and saboteurs in North Carolina? Tyson briefly recounts perhaps the most important historical event in North Carolina, the 1898 massacre of African Americans in Wilmington that overthrew Reconstruction there (and about which Tyson has also written a separate book). As Tyson lucidly explains, white supremacists and neo-Confederates have ignored all evidence to the contrary to make "enthusiasm for the Confederacy posthumously unanimous." This rewriting of history is profoundly personal for Tyson. When he visited the grave of his great-great-grandfather, who opposed slavery and hid out to avoid conscription into the Confederate army, he found that a "Sons of Confederate Veterans" marker had been placed on the grave!

Tyson similarly deconstructs the more recent, sanitized version of the Civil Rights movement. The Civil Rights struggle "was far more violent, perilous, and critical than American is willing to remember," he writes. And Martin Luther King has been transformed into an "innocuous black Santa Claus ... a benign vessel that can be filled with whatever generic good wishes the occasion dictates. Politicians who oppose everything King worked for now jostle their way onto podiums to honor his memory.... 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."

The history that Tyson reveals was not easy to unearth. When he went back to Tyson in search of information on the 1970 killing of Henry Marrow by a group of white men, he found that the Oxford newspaper archives for this entire historical era had vanished - from the newspaper's offices, from the local library, and even from the state repository. The court records were also partially missing, and the local police attempted to intimidate him into not revisiting the story. It is a good thing that Tyson did not submit to this intimidation, because this not-so-distant history needs to be remembered.

In BLOOD DONE SIGN MY NAME, Timothy Tyson details the triumph and the shame inherent in American history, with no quarter given to any assumptions or preconcieved notions. Interweaving his stirring personal narrative with an often disturbing, yet ultimately enriching, examination of the freedom struggle in North Carolina and beyond, Tyson spares no one - not even himself or his family - of his hard and direct analysis. Thus, BLOOD acts as a striking blow against our gauzy reminiscing about the Civil Rights Movement, while simultaneously reminding us of the true value of that movement and the people within it (as well as a reminder that the work isn't nearly done). Tyson's urgent tone is consistent with William Faulkner's assertion that the past "isn't even past," nor was it a series of easily achieved inevitabilities. Funny, brash, unflinching, BLOOD DONE SIGN MY NAME is the best kind of American non-fiction, one which travels on both sides of a road that, to quote an old bluegrass song, is often mighty dark to travel. A secular sermon of the highest order, helping us to better understand ourselves and leading us to fellowship.

This was both an exhilarating and painful book to read -- exhilarating in that Timothy Tyson is a fine writer with a gripping story to relate, and painful in that the story he tells resounds with scathing truths that all Southerners who lived through the era of civil rights activism in the 1960s and 1970s will recognize and feel.

Many North Carolinians like to think of their state as a relatively progressive place in racial matters, at least compared to states of the Deep South. And much racial progress has been made there, as it has throughout the United States, since the 1960s. Perhaps I am a dishonest white man, but I don't believe any thinking person can dwell on this country's past injustices without conceding that many Americans have recognized the existence of civic wrongs and continue working to eradicate them. Much progress, of course, is hardly enough progress. There's more to do, more minds to be educated and changed, more healing time to pass. And no state, no nation, no species that hopes to maintain progress can lose sight of its past sins or cease to wonder how they came about. (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recently chose "Blood Done Sign My Name" for its 2005 Summer Reading Program, meaning that all of this fall's incoming freshmen are being asked to read it and discuss it.)

Southern literary historian Fred Hobson has developed the term "racial conversion narrative" to describe accounts by white Southerners who came to realize the evils of the racist beliefs on which they were raised. In a review of Tyson's book in the journal "Southern Cultures," Hobson stated that "Blood Done Sign My Name" was not a racial conversion narrative, save in the broadest sense. I would disagree, for the transformation of racial attitudes among the Tyson family, father and son, and the impact of that transformation, is the heart of this book. The killing of Henry Marrow in Oxford, North Carolina, on May 11, 1970, was a galvanizing incident in Timothy Tyson's life, but it was just part of a childhood into which North Carolina's traditions of racial discrimination and segregation intruded. For Tyson, these traditions presented much more conflict than for most white kids of that era. Tyson's father, Vernon, was a Methodist minister, whom the son portrays as a man who gradually defied the racial traditions of his family and culture to arrive at a simple conclusion: that his Christian faith demanded from him a love for all people and a condemnation of racial injustice. Tyson's mother, also Southern-born, strongly supported her husband's views, but it was his father's actions - especially in inviting black preachers and worshippers to the all-white churches he pastored - that drew fire from his church members and the North Carolina communities he served (not just Oxford). Tyson effectively relates the impact of these events on his own maturing, from boyhood to a chaotic adolescence to a budding historian determined to understand his past and willing to confront it head on.

Not surprisingly, "Blood Done Sign My Name" also addresses Tyson's professional interest in civil rights history - the conflict between the popular memory of the Civil Rights movement and the reality of the black struggle for political and social equality. The movement is most frequently personified in Dr. Martin Luther King, whose Gandhian strategy of non-violence supposedly shamed white America into ending legal racial discrimination. As I understand him, Tyson the historian believes that more aggressive black leaders, including many willing to use or at least threaten violence, played as much a role in the movement as King. Years before King's assassination in 1968, black men and women were arming themselves and preaching black "self-defense" against white oppressors. (Tyson profiled one such black leader in "Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power," published in 2001). By the time Henry Marrow was killed in 1970, the patience of many black Americans, especially the young, had worn painfully thin. Marrow's death, and the subsequent acquittal of the white men who killed him, inspired both nonviolent protests and incidents of violence (mainly against property) from black North Carolinians that made the state's white establishment sit up and take some notice of continuing black discontent. Tyson's family later moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, another hotbed of racial strife in the early `70s. A leader of the Oxford protests, Ben Chavis, would be convicted for allegedly leading a violent conspiracy in Wilmington in 1971 that resulted in arson, shootings, and deaths. (Chavis's conviction, along with those of the others of the "Wilmington Ten," was overturned by a federal appeals court in 1980.) Tyson tells of his family's involvement in these events, and he delves much farther back into North Carolina's racist past in relating the brutal riot by whites against black citizens of Wilmington in 1898, an episode that largely destroyed a budding bi-racial political movement in the state.

No doubt it was the black men and women of the United States who bore the largest burden and paid the greatest price to bring about the civil rights advances of the 20th century. But their sacrifices would not have accomplished nearly so much had not many white Americans like Vernon Tyson had the courage to "convert" and defy, often at the risk of their lives and livelihoods, the racial conventions of the time. One can argue that such people were, finally, only doing the right thing, but their actions, and the examples and standards they set for other white Americans, should never be disregarded, much less trashed. Timothy Tyson's memoir of his father and mother, and of their impact on his own "conversion," is what makes this book so readable and so memorable - particularly for we white Southern Boomers who underwent similar transformations. More importantly, "Blood Done Sign My Name" is a call to continue confronting, and questioning, our racial past as a nation, and our racial beliefs as individuals.

When author and historian Tim Tyson learned in 1970 at the age of 10 that his friend's father and older brothers had just "shot 'em a nigger," I was just about to turn 18 and was getting ready to graduate from high school in Evanston, Illinois. During my reading of this profound book, I kept reverting back to that time, asking myself, was I aware that blacks were still being murdered due to white fears and white racism? Though I went to an integrated high school and had one close relationship with a black friend, I think I, like many other whites, believed that straight out lynchings of blacks by murderous whites were from a pre-civil rights era. However, as the "Blood Done Sign My Name" shows us, such white beliefs were naive and ill informed.
Tyson's book is important for helping us set our memories of the past straight, and for its insistence that we understand that white supremacy is like a stubborn root, one that keeps reasserting itself again and again. This knowledge is crucial as we look at the racial landscape today because it can help us refrain from making a similar mistake all over again. Although present day polls repeatedly show that most whites think racism is over, Tyson's book may be a catalyst for whites to rethink that oft repeated perspective. This book written with such soul and heart is an important book for any person who wants to understand why issues of race are unlikely to recede anytime soon. Even though I am a fairly informed person about past and present white supremacy and racism, Tyson's book taught me more. By revisiting a tragic memory from one of his boyhood towns, Tyson keeps alive in our national consciousness the recognition that white racism and its legacy did not end in America's distant or recent past. Denise Rose, Oak Park, IL.

Living near the setting for the book puts a whole new spin on things. It almost makes you want to drive up the road to see with your own eyes the Oxford courthouse, library, store, etc. There's alot of North Carolina racial history in this book that they don't teach you in school. If not mentioned already, this book was chosen by UNC-Chapel Hill as the 2005 freshman summer reading book.