Blood Done Sign My Name

Blood Done Sign My Name

File:Blooddonesign.jpg
Author	Timothy Tyson
Language	English
Genre	Autobiography; historical non-fiction
Publisher	Crown
Publication date	May 18, 2004
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (hardcover & paperback)
Pages	368
ISBN	ISBN 0-609-61058-9 (hardcover)

Blood Done Sign My Name is an autobiographical work of history written by Timothy B. Tyson while he was a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has since taken a position as Senior Scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, Visiting Professor of American Christianity and Southern Culture at Duke Divinity School, and also teaches in the American Studies Department at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. The book, published in 2004 and based in part on an M.A. thesis Tyson wrote in 1990 while attending Duke University, deals with the 1970 murder of Henry Marrow, a black man, by a local white man Robert Teel and his sons, prompted by Marrow's alleged suggestive comment to a white woman. Tyson was a childhood friend of Robert Teel's son, Gerald. The Teels were acquitted by an all-white jury in a verdict described by the Raleigh News and Observer as "a sham and a mockery of justice." The riots and arson campaign around the case in Oxford left much of the small town looking, in the words of the News and Observer, "like Berlin following the Allied bombing raids of World War II."

This case helped galvanize the African-American resistance movement in Oxford, North Carolina, where the book takes place, and across the eastern North Carolina black belt. It helped establish local civil rights activist Ben Chavis's leadership in the black civil rights movement, which eventually led to his becoming the executive director of the NAACP and later an organizer of the Million Man March. This episode radicalized the African American freedom struggle in North Carolina, leading up to the turbulence of the Wilmington Ten cases, which grew out of racial conflict in the port city and the trial of Ben Chavis and nine others on charges stemming from the burning of a grocery store. Tyson, whose father was the minister of a prominent local church, explores not only the white supremacy of the South's racial caste system but his own and his family's white supremacy. He interweaves a narrative of the story and its effects on him with discussion of the racial history of the United States, focusing on the persistence of discrimination despite federal law and on the violent realities of that history on both sides of the color line. Tyson challenges the popular memory of the movement as a nonviolent call on America's conscience led by Martin Luther King. The vision of the movement in these pages is local as well as national and international, violent as well as nonviolent, and far more complicated and human than the myth of "pure good versus bare-fanged evil in the streets of Birmingham," as he puts it.

References

National Public Radio "Morning Edition" radio interview with Timothy Tyson about Blood Done Sign My Name

"Timothy Tyson Wins Major Award for Blood Done Sign My Name, " Duke Divinity School, 2006