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Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story
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Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story
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Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story
Audiobook (abridged)5 hours

Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

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"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, led by 22-year-old Ben Chavis, a future president of the NAACP. As mass protests crowded the town square, a cluster of returning Vietnam veterans organized what one termed "a military operation." While lawyers battled in the courthouse that summer in a drama that one termed "a Perry Mason kind of thing," the Ku Klux Klan raged in the shadows and black veterans torched the town's tobacco warehouses.

With large sections of the town in flames, Tyson's father, the pastor of Oxford's all-white Methodist church, pressed his congregation to widen their vision of humanity and pushed the town to come to terms with its bloody racial history. In the end, however, the Tyson family was forced to move away.

Years later, historian Tim Tyson returned to Oxford to ask Robert Teel why he and his sons had killed Henry Marrow. "That nigger committed suicide, coming in here wanting to four-letter-word my daughter-in-law," Teel explained.

The black radicals who burned much of Oxford also told Tim their stories. "It was like we had a cash register up there at the pool hall, just ringing up how much money we done cost these white people," one of them explained. "We knew if we cost 'em enough goddamn money they was gonna start changing some things."

In the tradition of To Kill a Mockingbird, Blood Done Sign My Name is a classic work of conscience, a defining portrait of a time and place that we will never forget. Tim Tyson's riveting narrative of that fiery summer and one family's struggle to build bridges in a time of destruction brings gritty blues truth, soaring gospel vision, and down-home humor to our complex history, where violence and faith, courage and evil, despair and hope all mingle to illuminate America's enduring chasm of race.


From the Hardcover edition.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 18, 2004
ISBN9780739311783
Unavailable
Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

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Rating: 4.307407511111111 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    "Daddy and Roger and 'em shot 'em a nigger" With that announcement from a childhood friend, a white preacher's son begins recounting that moment in 1970 (he was 10) and all that followed from the murder of Henry Morrow in Oxford, North Carolina. This is a startling, sad, and passionate book on American racism, and a warning to heed the events of history and remember. When the author presented his library with a copy of his dissertation on the subject, the pages recounting the killing were torn out, and the state archives & local archives are missing the newspapers that recounted events during that time. Essential reading. You will learn.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The spirit of which the writer tells the story, takes you to that era and allows you to feel the hopelessness of apast culture.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book doesn't hide the truth about what happened after integration in North Carolina and around the south, it shares the actual truth with the world, something that desperately needs doing in a time when people have forgotten just how long it takes to make changes to the background of hate. I got this book because it is local history for me, I couldn't put it down because it was so captivating and honest. I found the historical slavery connection to the more recent racism a fascinating insight to exactly why it was that so many people I have known in my life had been unable to let go of their various prejudices in the past. It has made me a little more forgiving of their situation, if not their reasoning and has helped me to see so much of history in a totally different light. Connecting the past to the future isn't new, but hearing it here made it seem remarkable.The author's writing style is captivating and has found a way to bring such deep emotion into history that it would seem a miracle itself. So often we read about what was and nod our heads, file the information away as sad and move on, but rarely do we find ourselves experiencing the anguish that happened in another time right where we were sitting, reading about it. Even the most logical notion hits home in the heart when reading Tyson's account of what went on around him when he was young and how it created what he is today. People of every color are tied together in this earth and in this story, which is equally about freedom and the unjust death of a local man as it is about the author's life and family history. I simply can't say enough about this book or how it is written. If I were able, I would pass out copies to everyone I know.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    One of the most powerful civil rights books I've read! Excellently written, informative and, at times difficult to read, this is an incredible book!In the month of May and the year of 1970, Henry Marrow was black, 23, a veteran, and had the misfortune of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Accused of making a comment to a white woman, all too soon, he was face down in the dirt, battered by the butt of a gun while three white men decided his fate was to die.The author was ten years old when living in a small southern town. The incident haunted him, and years later the result was this book.Civil rights did not suddenly occur because Martin Luther King and others led the parade. It was a slow, squeeky, violent process in the south. The law was not on the black persons side. Whites could indeed kill and get away with it.While during the years of slavery, white men often used their black slaves as sex objects, the resulting child born of these assignations, was deemed unfree. Thus, securing a steady population of slaves for the white man. Never, though in deep south was it ok for a black man to have a relationship with a white woman. The result is death, sometimes by lynching.This is a must read for those interested in American history.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Really good memoir. I'll add more later, but in the meantime, here's a interesting piece of information:

    In 1662, the Virginia legislature passed a law that read, "Children got by an Englishman upon a Negro woman shall be bond or free according to the condition of the mother." Seems otherwise innocuous, but this statute reversed English common law under which the status of the child frollowed that of the father.

    The implications were huge. It meant that slave owners could impregnate as many slave women as they wanted secure in the knowledge that the children that resulted would become their property, increasing their wealth and slave population. This provided a huge incentive for white men to sleep with their slave women.

    This intertwined sex and race and led to the powerful taboo of black men marrying or even looking at a white woman. The long-term result of this taboo was the epidemic of the lynching of black men.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is one of my absolute favorite books. It is gripping and informative. One of the few novels I require my history students to read (they usually get a choice of novels). They invariably read ahead and then thank me for making them read it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    In Blood Done Sign My Name, Timothy B. Tyson examines the murder of Henry Marrow, a twenty-three year old black man, in Oxford, South Carolina, on 11 May 1970. The book combines both historical research about race relations during the late 1960s, in which Tyson attempts to dispel popular myths of civil rights, with Tyson’s own memory of growing up in Oxford and the racial caste system in the town. Tyson concludes of the period and its legacy, “Everyone in this struggle, adversaries and advocates alike, grew up steeped in a poisonous white supremacy that distorted their understandings of history and one another. That history is not distant” (pg. 320). He argues that Americans cannot gloss over the more complex parts of this history in favor of a simplified narrative as this does an injustice to history and those who lived it.Marrow, a veteran, demonstrated the betrayal that veterans felt after fighting on behalf of the United States’ ideals. Tyson writes, “Like generations of black veterans before them, who had come home from France or the Philippines insisting that their sacrifices had bought them full citizenship, the Vietnam generation demanded justice. Though they had paid the price, more would be required” (pg. 9). Like Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll, Tyson uses paternalism to explain the race relations of the mid-twentieth century. He writes, “Paternalism was like a dance whose steps required my grandmother to provide charity to black people, as long as they followed the prescribed routine – that is, coming to the back door, hat in hand; accepting whatever largesse was offered; furnishing effusive expressions of gratitude; and at least pretending to accept their subordinate position in the social hierarchy” (pg. 25). While whites that subscribed to this system believed it represented harmony, it prevented any real connections from forming between Oxford’s white and black residents.Like Gail Bederman and others, Tyson links race with gender, writing, “Segregation…existed to protect white womanhood from the abomination of contact with uncontrollable black men. Whites who questioned segregation confronted the inevitable and, for most people, conclusive cross-examination: Would you want your daughter to marry one?” (pg. 37). This played a key role in Marrow’s death as his murderers accused him of saying something flirtatious to a white woman. In grounding the civil rights struggle in the backdrop of the Cold War, Tyson writes, “The Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union offered African Americans the unique leverage to redeem or repudiate American democracy in the eyes of the world. The demonstrations in the streets of the civil rights-era South were carefully staged dramas that forced the contradictions of American democracy to the surface” (pg. 67). This forced this issue to a head since it embarrassed the American government on the international stage.In contradicting the traditional narrative of civil rights, Tyson writes, “Polling data revealed that the majority of white Americans in 1963, prior to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, believed that the movement for racial equality had already proceeded ‘too far and too fast’” (pg. 106). Rather than accept change, white Americans were compelled by the federal government in 1964 and even then still attempted to avoid government coercion. To this end, Tyson writes, “Those who tell themselves that white people of goodwill voluntarily handed over first-class citizenship to their fellow citizens of color find comfort in selective memory and wishful thinking” (pg. 249). In addition to overturning the popular narrative of civil rights, Tyson works to combat the popular narrative of the Civil War in the South. He writes, “White supremacists and neo-Confederates have made enthusiasm for the Confederacy posthumously unanimous. Some of them will even try to tell you that the slaves loyally supported the Confederacy, which is just a damn lie” (pg. 172). Despite this lie, it demonstrates the lingering need in the South to justify the racial hierarchy established after Reconstruction.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is a must-read book; one of those books that will leave you feeling raw and bruised, but also touched and inspired. In May, 1970, Henry Marrow, a twenty-three-year-old black veteran living in Oxford , North Carolina, was beaten and killed by three white men after he allegedly said something provocative to a white woman. Timothy Tyson, now a white professor of Afro-American studies but then a ten-year-old boy in Oxford, was profoundly affected by this and other racist incidents of his youth. His memoir gets its name from an old Afro-American gospel song avowing that God’s Lamb had died for blacks too, to write their name in the Book of Life: “Ain’t you glad, ain’t you glad, that the blood done sign my name.”Tyson drew his intellectual and emotional inspiration from his father Vernon, one of a long line of Methodist ministers, who had the audacity to claim that all people were God’s children, and that there was no formula for racism in the Bible. The Tysons were kicked out of quite a few parishes for their non-conformity to racist mores. Tyson makes a number of interesting observations about Southern racism. He contends that the sexual obsessions of white supremacy originated with the practice of white men siring offspring from black female slaves. White men could increase their material worth by this practice. But if white women had offspring from black men, the whole system of bondage would have been threatened. Thus white men played up the sexual threat of black men in order to keep the property system intact. In addition, job scarcity during the Great Depression added another incentive for white males to bruit the threat of black males being around white females. Tyson’s experiences in the South convinced him that whites would not give up their power and privilege unless forced to do so. He points out many examples of how the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not mean anything on the local level until the advent of widespread violence. White community leaders thought that endless biracial committee meetings and a few basketball nets would appease blacks who still, in the eighties, could still not patronize the same establishments as did whites. But Tyson avers, “the indisputable fact was that whites in Oxford did not even consider altering the racial caste system until rocks began to fly and buildings began to burn.” He challenges “the self-congratulatory popular account” that holds that “Dr. King called on the nation to fully accept its own creed, and the walls came a-tumbling down.” The only disadvantage to this story, he claims, is that it bears no resemblance to what actually happened.Tyson charges that the legacy of white supremacy remains lethal, from the poverty and deficiencies of infrastructure, education, and health care received by blacks to the images of blacks in the media that negatively affect perceptions of both blacks and whites. With so much history of atrocity simply erased in the south (Tyson found that even his own story of Henry Marrow’s murder had pages torn out from it in the public library), the result is that blacks live with the memories, but whites don’t even know about them. And this history is not distant, he reminds us. The boyhood friend who told him “Daddy and Roger and ‘em shot ‘em a nigger” is barely middle-aged. Tyson feels it is impossible to transcend that history without confronting it. Blacks need to create a new sense of self, and whites need to recognize that, as Dr. King wrote, we are “caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Tyson’s history of vicious white racism in the South, from beheading blacks who tried to escape slavery, to the killing of a terrified, pleading boy who had the temerity to look at a white woman, will make you weep. And yet, if we are ever to walk a mile in a black man’s shoes, as Tim’s father used to advocate as a mind exercise, we must read such histories, and share them, and struggle to overcome their perfidious repercussions. Or as Robert Kennedy asked, "suppose God is black? What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?"
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A very goodbut difficult read. Similar to the Tulsa race riot, mysteriously removed from local public records.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    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!