Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

At a roadblock outside of Oxford, police find rifles and dynamite in the trunk of a car driven by a Black man named Walter David Washington. Years later, documents and courtroom testimony reveal that Washington and one of his associates were police informants with connections to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). On Thursday night—three nights after the murder—a series of firebombings rock the town. Dozens of young Black men are arrested at roadblocks or for curfew violations. By Friday, residents are stocking up on guns and ammunition. Golden Frinks, a North Carolina native and veteran of King’s SCLC, arrives in town just in time for Marrow’s funeral on Saturday. Frinks represents a blend of King’s nonviolence and the militancy of the younger Black Power generation. Reverend Tyson and Thad Stem are the only white people in attendance at the funeral. The two white men secure police permission for a march to the cemetery. Frinks’s oratory stirs the mourners into a mood of protest. Reverend Tyson and Stem join the march to the cemetery, but when they find themselves marching “in a sea of black fists bristling upward in the Black Power salute, neither the white man of letters nor the white man of the cloth [know] quite what to do” (158).