|
Editorial Review Product Description
"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.Amazon.com Review
When he was but 10 years old, Tim Tyson heard one of his boyhood friends in Oxford, N.C. excitedly blurt the words that were to forever change his life: "Daddy and Roger and 'em shot 'em a nigger!" The cold-blooded street murder of young Henry Marrow by an ambitious, hot-tempered local businessman and his kin in the Spring of 1970 would quickly fan the long-flickering flames of racial discord in the proud, insular tobacco town into explosions of rage and street violence. It would also turn the white Tyson down a long, troubled reconciliation with his Southern roots that eventually led to a professorship in African-American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison--and this profoundly moving, if deeply troubling personal meditation on the true costs of America's historical racial divide. Taking its title from a traditional African-American spiritual, Tyson skillfully interweaves insightful autobiography (his father was the town's anti-segregationist Methodist minister, and a man whose conscience and human decency greatly informs the son) with a painstakingly nuanced historical analysis that underscores how little really changed in the years and decades after the Civil Rights Act of 1965 supposedly ended racial segregation. The details are often chilling: Oxford simply closed its public recreation facilities rather than integrate them; Marrow's accused murderers were publicly condemned, yet acquitted; the very town's newspaper records of the events--and indeed the author's later account for his graduate thesis--mysteriously removed from local public records. But Tyson's own impassioned personal history lessons here won't be denied; they're painful, yet necessary reminders of a poisonous American racial legacy that's so often been casually rewritten--and too easily carried forward into yet another century by politicians eagerly employing the cynical, so-called "Southern Strategy." --Jerry McCulley ... Read more Customer Reviews (58) 
The myths Americans tell themselves
Americans love their sanitized, After-School Special version of the civil rights movement, in which we've progressed inevitably from the bad old days of slavery to the modern day where racism is just the occasional gaffe that gets a news commentator fired or a few hicks wearing sheets way off in the boonies. Tim Tyson strips away this mythology in his story of a black man who was murdered in 1970 by a violent, mean-tempered white business owner, allegedly for flirting with his daughter-in-law. Six years after the Civil Rights Act, Oxford, North Carolina was still a segregated town where white supremacy ruled, unapologetically. But when the all-white jury acquitted Robert Teal even of any lesser charge like manslaughter, the town's African American population rose up in outrage, and Oxford's businesses burned.
Decades later, Tyson, who was eleven years old at the time, and whose father was a liberal white desegregationist minister who was subsequently driven out of town, came back to interview everyone involved, including the murderer, Robert Teal. Blood Done Sign My Name is the result of that project, but it's also a look at how Americans have always lied to themselves about our country's race relations, and continue to do so to this day. Slave owners said, "Our slaves are like part of the family." In the 1990s, Tyson took a group of students to a Southern plantation that had been the site of a bloody slave uprising, and found it turned into an antebellum theme park with hardly any mention of slavery. The murder of Henry Marrow is really just a small part of this story.
This book was what became Tyson's Master's thesis, and it's powerful and engaging and contains many truths that still bear repeating, over and over. I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 because while Tyson is quite honest about his own white liberal guilt and how he and his family were complicit in the very system they opposed, the fact remains that in places the book still ends up being more about him and his own family's history. Fair enough, as it's his book to write and it's his own history, in part, that he wanted to confront, but as he shows us, the stories white people tell are not the stories black people tell about the same events. He does his best to get the whole story from all sides, but inevitably, one senses that there are pieces a white dude just isn't going to be able to dig up, no matter how earnest and well-intentioned.
Extremely pleased
I received the item promptly and was in excellent condition. I would definitely use the seller in the future and recommend to others.
Compelling true story plus commentary on U.S. race relations
The author, who is white, reflects on the history of race relations in the United States, drawing upon his own experience as the son of a United Methodist minister in the 1960s. The story centers on the killing of an unarmed black man by several white men in a small Southern town and the following murder trial. The author returned to the area as a college student to interview the participants in the incident on both sides of the color line.Those interviews, and his personal remembrances, are the basis of the story, which was written later in his life.
The most compelling parts of the book relate to the author's own experience and his interviews. However, he is a college professor who feels compelled to lecture the reader on race relations. Although some of this information is probably informative to younger people who did not live through this part of history, the writing tends to be preachy and judgmental in places. The author could have been more effective in expressing his views with a more restrained approach.
One of the most telling parts of the book is the reflection that, as a young white boy, he was taught that all are equal in the sight of God, but that living in an area where racism was everywhere was like a fish living in water. He absorbed the racism without really understanding it.
long way still to go
Before I get to the book, a bit of background: To me (now 69), going up in Davidson North Carolina (1945-54), where my father was a minister and Professor?. I led a sheltered life.
The civil rights movement shaped my generation, shaped the peace movement and the feminist movement and the "green" movement. All these movements seemed to die away in the 80's and 90's and with the next generations....what went wrong? Was our struggle a century occurrence, a blip, a fluke, a cyclical thing? No, it was the shoulders on which the next "revolutionaries" (which we were not) could stand, it had not been in vain, despite the Republican and retrograde, capitalist,years to come. Marge Piercy has described the "standing on the shoulders" well in her novel on the French revolution- City of Light.
In his masterful book Blood Done Signed My Name (all book titles should be underlined), Tim Tyson states: "Most of the white people who appear in film footage of civil rights marches were brave followers of Leon Trotsky or radical Catholic sisters, saintly kooks of one description or another"- and these were exactly the directions my life would take, saintly or not. When I consider the happenings in Tim's North Carolina town of Oxford, as described in this book- along with Taylor Branch's 3 books on M L King, I believe Tim's to be the most important civil rights account since To Kill a Mockingbird. If my childhood was sheltered in Davidson, it is true that Tim only realized what really happened researching his book- not at the time it had happened.
But in the book he tells it like it is.
Tim on Eddie McCoy: one of the black leaders in Oxford at the time and after- McCoy ia dismissive of "outside agitators" when it comes to civil rights advances. He claims, "I didn't need that." (meaning the persons who came down from the north to help start a movement). No? Did blacks fight back as hard before the Freedom Riders? Why diss allies?Sounds like swagger to me- boastful, unneeded comments. Sure, it's foolish to extol the successes of the movement as only due to non violent civil disobediance when it was such events as the torching of tocacco and lumber warehouses in Oxford and the boycotts of white owned businesses that moved the whites along- yet and still.........as in the labor movement, militant destruction of property contributed a lot to the movement.
As Tim points out- a 38 special can also carry a lot of weight- not just the tactics of "non violent civil disobediance".
One of the black Viet vets that Tyson quotes says of Ben Chavis- a militant black organizer) that he "didn't know sh t! We didn't give a damn about his Martin Luther King bullsh t," and apparently it was the black Viet vets who burned down the big warehouses of tobacco and lumber in Oxford, after Marrow's murder and the aquittal of the murderers by an all white jury (are they still alive?)
Tyson writes, "the nation has comforted itself by sanitizing the civil rights movement, commemorating it as a civic celebration that no one ever opposed."
Note that Robert Teel's son (son of the acquitted murderer)has a web site trying to "set the record straight" and calling Tim a "race hustler". Tell me issues don't still exist in the Carolinas and the rest of the right wing south- land of the Repubublican's "southern strategy". America has yet to come to grips with the race issue. It occurs to me that Oxford, NC owes reparations- that this case should be re opened- as should many in the south. White racists who have gotten away w stuff whould be brought to justice- white jurors, white murderers.
I note that Tim was arrested protesting Wake Co school policies in 2010.
See the documentary on the Freedom Riders that came out in 2010.
To me the reviewer/critics of this book might acquit the murderers again- they still go free never forget. Defenders of the ole south ride the night in several of these reviews. As they nitpick thru the details, I challenge them- who did kill Marrow and why did they go unpunished and where are they now? Do they care about justice? Have they done anything for it or civil rights?
There are retrograde, armchair warriors with us still- right wingers mostly, or, just willing to overlook the facts and how progress is made in struggle. They oppose it still.
Can we just get over the whole "black" thing
How many years are we going to beat this dead horse.Everyone acknowledges that black's were discriminated against, changes were made, and now we have a Black Village Idiot for president.What more can be done to appease black people.I for one don't plan to cut any slack for any race.This is America, you don't like it, leave it.If you can't write about uplifting, good, kind and generous black people who made a difference in someone's life, then don't write.Read the book "The Blind Side".Learn how black and white people have made a difference in each others lives in a good way.
... Read more
|
