Customer Reviews
Be the first to review this book!
Bibliographic Details
Publisher: Random House Inc
Published date: 2004
Edition: 1th edition
Size: 6.25 x 9.75 inches
Weight: 1.35 pounds
Publisher's Notes
"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.
Similar books
Coming of Age in Mississippi
by Anne Moody
Written without a trace of sentimentality or apology, this is an unforgettable personal story -- the truth as a remarkable young woman named Anne Moody lived it. To read her book is to know what it is to have grown up black in Mississippi in the forties an fifties -- and to have survived with pride and courage intact.In this now classic autobiography, she details the sights, smells, and suffering of growing up in a racist society and candidily reveals the soul of a black girl who had the courage to challenge it. The result is a touchstone work: an accurate, authoritative portrait of black family life in the rural South and a moving account of a woman's indomitable heart.
Shades of Difference
by Padraig O'Malley
The inside story of South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement, told through the experiences of one of its unsung heroes, with an introduction by Nelson Mandela
A Life in Pieces
by Blake Eskin
A searing account of the rise and fall of the author of Fragments , told by a descendant of the Wilkomirskis of Riga. In 1997, Binjamin Wilkomirski came to New York to read from his prize-winning Holocaust memoir Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood , raise money for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and meet his perhaps-relatives, the Wilburs (once Wilkomirskis). The Wilburs—and the world—embraced Binjamin as a humanitarian whose eloquent and haunting tale of childhood stood for untold others. A year later, however, Binjamin was publicly accused of being a gentile impostor. He insisted his memories outweighed the documents against him but proclaimed, "Nobody has to believe me." Journalist and presumed cousin Blake Eskin recounts the dispute through riveting reportage and memoir, interviewing Binjamin's acquaintances and visiting Riga in search of actual Wilkomirskis. The reactions of the media, the child-survivor community, and the Wilburs themselves shed light on debates about the reliability of memory, the nature of identity, and the uses and misuses of history. 7 b/w photographs.
Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr
by Martin Luther King
Destined to become a classic, this powerful and inspirational autobiography of America's greatest civil rights leader calls upon Stanford University's voluminous collection of archival material, including Dr. King's previously unpublished writings, public and private interviews, audio and video recordings, and personal correspondence.
Reconstructing the Dreamland
by Alfred L. Brophy
|
0 items in cart
Muze Inc. For personal non-commercial use only. All rights reserved. Some content for books is owned by Baker & Taylor, Inc. or its licensors and is subject to copyright and all other protections provided by applicable law.
