Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

Blood Done Sign My Name (2004), by Timothy B. Tyson, is a nonfiction work of history centered on the racially motivated 1970 murder of Henry Marrow Jr. in Oxford, North Carolina. The killing occurred after Marrow, a 23-year-old Black Army veteran, husband, and father of two, allegedly made a flirtatious remark in the direction of a 19-year-old married white woman. The woman’s husband, brother-in-law, and father-in-law chased Marrow down the street, shot him from behind, beat and kicked him as he lay wounded, and then shot him to death. When the police failed to make a timely arrest, Oxford’s young Black residents rioted. While city officials tried to maintain order, Black Vietnam veterans conducted military-style firebombing operations against high-value, white-owned economic targets such as tobacco warehouses. For Oxford’s Black community, the Marrow murder unleashed years of pent-up rage in a place where, notwithstanding the 1964 Civil Rights Act, White Supremacy still reigned.

Tyson has a rare perspective on the events of 1970 in Oxford. A professional historian who has held appointments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Tyson has spent his career teaching and writing about race and civil rights in his native South. He also spent part of his childhood in Oxford, so he was an eyewitness to some of the events he describes. The Marrow murder occurred when Tyson was 10 years old. He remembers sirens, buildings engulfed in flames, and shattered glass from storefront windows on the morning walk to school. His father, Reverend Vernon Tyson, served as minister at the Oxford United Methodist Church. Reverend Tyson embraced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Christian appeal for justice and nonviolent direct action.

While noting that King has emerged as the symbol of a morally righteous and triumphant movement, Tyson nonetheless argues that standard histories of the civil rights era have exaggerated the degree of voluntary integration white Southerners undertook in the 1960s. This Sanitized History has downplayed the degree of racial tension and violence that prevailed into the early 1970s. It has also obscured the complex role of Black militancy during the latter years of the civil rights era. Tyson examines all of these issues in the centuries-old context of white supremacy and racial paternalism. He also explains how the events of 1970 influenced the trajectory of his own life.

Blood Done Sign My Name earned numerous regional literary honors and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2010, it was adapted into a film starring Ricky Schroeder.

Content Warning: For the sake of historical authenticity, the book uses unedited racial language, including epithets.

Plot Summary

Blood Done Sign My Name features 12 chapters and an epilogue. Chapter 1 opens with the jarring words Tyson’s childhood friend Gerald Teel spoke to him on the evening of May 12, 1970: “Daddy and Roger and ’em shot ’em a n*****” (1). Tyson explains how these words hit him, how his parents behaved at dinner, and what he observed in Oxford on the night after Henry Marrow’s murder. Looking back, Tyson recognizes that these words and the brutal killing to which they refer set him on a path of trying to discover what happened in his hometown, why it happened, and what it all meant.

Chapters 2-5 build to the events of 1970 by establishing both personal and historical contexts. Tyson explains the pervasiveness of white supremacy in the segregation-era South, the racial paternalism that infected even the most well-meaning white Southerners, and the sexual taboo that prohibited contact between Black men and white women—the taboo that got Marrow killed. Tyson then describes the background of Robert Teel, father-in-law of the white woman with whom Marrow allegedly flirted. Teel’s story parallels that of the Ku Klux Klan, which remained active in the South as of 1970 and had experienced three separate revivals in eastern North Carolina alone after World War II. Two of the central figures in these early chapters, particularly Chapters 4 and 5, are Reverend Vernon Tyson and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In the early 1960s, Reverend Tyson felt electrified by King’s moral appeal for justice. When he tried to make this same appeal to his own congregants, however, Reverend Tyson often encountered resistance. The frustrations of this liberal Methodist minister in particular reflect The Ordeal of the White Liberal in general throughout the segregation-era South. Reverend Tyson, his friend Thad Stem from Oxford, and Tyson himself all personify this ordeal in different ways.

In Chapters 6 and 7, Tyson describes the Marrow murder and its immediate aftermath in Oxford. When 18-year-old Larry Teel hears what he thinks is a sexual remark about his 19-year-old wife, Judy, he confronts Marrow. A fight ensues, at which point Larry Teel, his stepbrother, Roger Oakley, and his father, Robert Teel pursue a fleeing Marrow and then shoot him to death in front of multiple witnesses. In the week following the murder, Oxford’s Black residents take to the streets, protesting during the day and rioting at night. Notwithstanding the mayor’s curfew order, Oxford descends into violence and destruction. Marrow’s connection to the Chavis family brings to the forefront 22-year-old Ben Chavis, a teacher at the local Black high school who had been radicalized by the events of the late 1960s. Golden Frinks, a veteran of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), also arrives in town for Marrow’s funeral. After the funeral, Chavis and Frinks lead a march to The Confederate Monument in the middle of downtown. Tyson uses these events to explain that Oxford’s Confederate monument, like similar monuments across the segregation-era South, dates to the early 20th century, when segregationists erected those bronze and granite structures not to honor the Confederacy but as shrines to white supremacy.

Chapter 8 represents a break in the narrative. Here Tyson examines the long-neglected history of dissenting white Southerners, those who rejected both the Confederacy and White Supremacy. Tyson cites several of his direct ancestors, including his paternal grandfather, Jack Tyson—also a Methodist minister—as examples. The book in general highlights the Christian theme of original sin and the short distance between good and evil, so Tyson also introduces one family member, a second cousin nicknamed “the Gator,” who indulged his darker appetites and found himself on the wrong side of the law. Conscious avoidance of anything self-congratulatory constitutes one of the book’s chief characteristics.

In Chapters 9 and 10, Tyson resumes the narrative of events following the Marrow murder. Frinks, Chavis, and Eddie McCoy lead a protest march to the state capitol in Raleigh. Back in Oxford, a group of Black Vietnam veterans (who remained anonymous more than three decades later) conduct military-style operations, firebombing a lumber company building and two huge tobacco warehouses. The trial of Robert and Larry Teel begins in late July; police had inexplicably neglected to arrest Roger Oakley, and this would play a crucial role in the defendants’ acquittal. Tyson reconstructs the courtroom drama, including factors that created enormous odds against conviction: an all-white jury, a judge with political connections to segregationists, and above all a white power structure—in some ways inseparable from the Ku Klux Klan—that did not want the Teels convicted. Prosecutors make their case, but a clever defense attorney’s lawyerly tricks give the jury the excuse they need to acquit. Oxford’s Black residents file out of the courtroom in tears and rage, having learned once again that the system regards them as second-class citizens.

The Oxford-based drama concludes with the end of the trial. Shortly thereafter, Reverend Tyson takes over as minister at a new church in Wilmington, North Carolina, where the Oxford tragedy seems to follow the Tyson family. School integration inflames racial tensions. Ben Chavis also moves to Wilmington, where he is ordained as a minister, establishes a Black Power church, and drifts further toward violent militancy. Chapter 11 explains how Reverend Tyson tries to navigate these familiar challenges in his new city. It also explains how Tyson himself, as a teenager, becomes disillusioned with the world. Tyson runs away from home to live with two older friends in a rural commune, where they act poor and pretend to be above everything. After meandering through his early twenties, Tyson receives a wake-up call and decides to go back to school.

In Chapter 12, Tyson describes how events in Oxford in 1970 shaped his academic journey. In the early 1980s, he returns to Oxford to interview Robert Teel at Teel’s barbershop. Teel agrees to speak with Tyson. After cutting Tyson’s hair, Teel says of his victim Henry Marrow: “That n***** committed suicide, wanting to come in my store and four-letter-word my daughter-in-law,” and that, Tyson recalls, “was the moment I became a historian” (293). Tyson then describes the conspiracy of silence he encountered among Oxford’s white authorities, or at least among those who had occupied positions of authority in 1970. Oxford’s Black residents proved far more willing to talk. Tyson concludes the chapter by relating an incident involving the owner of a private club who told Tyson that his fellow graduate student, a Black man named Herman Bennett, was not welcome in the club. That occurred in 1992.

The Epilogue recalls a 2001 field trip. Tyson takes a group of Wisconsin students to Destrehan Plantation in Louisiana, where the US Army brutally suppressed a rebellion of enslaved individuals in 1811. Reverend Tyson accompanies the group. They are horrified to discover that the tour makes few references to the plantation’s former enslaved population. Instead, Destrehan stands as a monument to the Old South. On the bus, Reverend Tyson consoles the disappointed and angry students with a prayer reminding them that they, like the men who once owned the plantation, are all sinners. Tyson closes with remarks on the importance of remembering history as it actually happened.