Blood Done Sign My Name

Rating:
Summary: Setting Our Memories Straight
Review: 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.


Rating:
Summary: How The Rights Were Won
Review: "'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.

Rating:
Summary: A reminder to remember
Review: "Blood" is a story that doesn't tell us to be pristine in our attitudes about race. In fact, the book reminds us actions speak a whole lot louder than words. Nevertheless, I was thankful that the author has a gift for the written word.

The author's father, a minister and a race liberal, was not typical of his time or place with respect to his racial attitudes. Yet his attitudes were obviously born of his religion and region just as much as the Klan's. Likewise the black community is portrayed as heterogeneous even in the small town South, a fact which is highlighted by the militancy of Vietnam veterans whose path to equality was informed by their military service.

This book impressed on me the importance of being honest about our past. Murders, kidnappings, beatings, riots, and rebellions are not just "excesses" committed by evil and emotional people, sometimes they are tactical. Violence and the destruction of property communicate as powerfully as as sermons or stump speeches. And the because memory of violence survives, reconciliation can only be based on acknowledgement and investigation. Especially in the context of the re-opening of the Emmett Till investigation (not to mention events in Iraq), this book will hopefully inspire fresh local investigations of the violence (South, North, East and West) that fueled the acommplishment of formal legal equality.

Rating:
Summary: fiction reported as non fiction
Review: As opposed to Tim Tyson, I have lived in Oxford most of my life and therefore truely know of the people, events, locations he supposedly researched extensively to write this book. This is a fictionalized account of an event. A black man was killed by a white man, but Tim Tyson doesn't know the truth as to what led up to it, nor the subsequent events. . I find it interested that the whites are depicted as "terrorists" and the blacks as "military operators".

As I know that many so called "facts" are not so, (names, events, locations, etc.) I have to suspect the remainder of the book. The sad result is to question all books written by him and ALL graduates of the Duke PHD program. Tyson should advertise his future writings as fiction as he would make a good writer of the southern genre.

Rating:
Summary: Confronting the painful history of race in America
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The Gospel According to Timohy Tyson!!!
Review: For any one interested in the question of race in America, "Blood Done Signed My Name" should be required reading. So often, the historical and sociological discussions of the race problem in America are sanitized and politically correct. Tyson's discussion is a no-holds-barred discussion, immensly readable, told from the perspective of a white man who lived in an "enlightened" North Carolina town and observed, first hand, the evolution of the town during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s and 1970s. In telling his story, he illuminates the operant attitudes, the unspeakable cruelty, and the economic exploitation, which underlie the institution of segregation, and their tragic consequence in the lives of black and white Americans. As a black, native North Crolinian, who lived through that and earlier periods, I bear personal witness to the accuracy of his portrayals. After reading his book, I could only say, "Thank God for one honest white man in America." If you can stand the truth.....read it!!!

Dr. Eugene Thamon Simpson
Sicklerville, NJ 08081

Rating:
Summary: Indictment of America
Review: I just finished reading Blood Done Sign My Name. I found it to be a very powerful indictment of America. I have basically shunned my German heritage based upon their complicity in Hitler's genocide of the Jews and other "misfits." This book made me re-think my own prejudices. Especially where the author's African-American friend, whose parents were a mixed-race couple, found it safer to live in Germany than in the U.S. It hit me like a 2x4 to realize that America has treated not just one or two groups this way but many. To name a few: African-Americans, American Indians, Japanese Americans, Chinese-Americans and most recently Arab-Americans. Just when I was despairing of our country and it's people who are leaning ever to the right, just as I was contemplating moving to Canada, I turned the page and Tyson began writing about hope and redemption. He wrote about facing the past and teaching it to our children. Teaching the truth, not the sanitized, re-written version.

I have felt that as individuals, we have to face our individual pasts or we will repeat the past and visit it upon our children. It is clear from reading Tyson's book that we must do so as a people/country as well. We have a long way to go considering that people don't even want to face violence and abuse that happens in our own homes. Until women and children are safe in their homes and we face these issues, I don't have a lot of hope that our treatment of groups of people will change.

I will pass this book around and recommend it to my friends and acquaintances not just because of the wonderful writing style but because this is a very important work that hopefully will hasten this country facing it's past and moving toward a better future. I am also very impressed that Tyson took a tragedy that impacted his life and turned it into a positive, not only for himself but others as well.

Thank you Timothy Tyson for writing such a powerful important book.



Rating:
Summary: An important book, well written, researched and documented
Review: If only all history could be told by the voices of those who lived it, maybe those voices could tell truth to power. Except on sources like "Democracy Now", those authentic voices seem to be missing in the media's telling of the stories of today. I think therefore this book is important for what it tells us about the history of race relations in this country but also for what it can tell us about our decisions and view of present reality.

I live in Madison, Wisconsin and this quote from "Blood done Sign My Name" is sometimes pretty applicable today in my town. "Black Southerners forcibly altered that narrative in the 1950's and 1960's by stepping outside their assigned roles - and compelling a reluctant federal government to intercede on their behalf. As often as not, they had to be prepared to defend themselves physically from terrorism by white reactionaries. White liberals, with their hesitancy and quibbling, were sometimes very little help. In North Carolina, white liberal paternalists did not stand in the schoolhouse door as George Wallace had in Alabama. Instead, journalist Osha Gray Davidson observes,they 'would quietly appoint a committee to deliberate for eternity over exactly which door, and of what dimensions, would best facilitate the ingress and egress of all students. The style of a Wallace was different, but the result was the same.' And so sometimes it was necessary to escape from an endless and pointless conversation with white paternalism by striking hard and sometimes violently against the architecture of their oppression-Oxford's tobacco warehouses being only the local example."

Timothy Tyson delves into his personal history with an open mind and eye to find the truth about his family and his town during a difficult time and era. But he is also making the point that times are still difficult and the way to work on problems is to face them head on with a knowledge of what came before.

"There it should stay, many people seem to think - why dredge this stuff up? Why linger on the past, which we cannot change? We must move toward a brighter future and leave all that horror behind. It's 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 patterns of aspiration and belonging - 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."





Rating:
Summary: Freedom is a constant struggle
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Easily One of the Best Books I've Read
Review: Part civil rights history and part autobiography, this book deals with a little known 1970 lynching in Oxford, NC, its root causes and aftermath. I will allow the other reviewers and amazon.com to detail the story, but suffice it to say that it reads like a novel and is both heartbreaking and uplifting. A very personal and spiritual look at race relations and the impact it had on the author's life. A truly great book.