‘Blood Done Sign My Name’: Tim Tyson’s Riveting Account of NC Racial Struggles in 1970
Tim Tyson, PhD, a professor of American History at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, produced a lyrical account of racial strife in small-town North Carolina in the late 1960s and early 1970s, “Blood Done Sign My Name,” (Goodreads link) (Amazon.com link), published in 2005. It has been compared to the fictional classic, “To Kill A Mockingbird,” by Harper Lee, set in small-town Alabama in the 1930s. The two books taken together reveal how slowly racial justice has come to the small-town South, and how difficult it is to break economic and cultural caste systems, even in America.
I resonated greatly with this book because I too grew up in small-town North Carolina during the same period when racial issues were fraught. Tyson was six years younger than me, but observed abject racism that was rawer than what I observed, but that I suspected was just beneath the surface. His father, Vernon Tyson (1930-2019), was an outspoken Methodist minister in Granville County (Oxford, NC), Lee County (Sanford, NC) where the main events of the story occurred; and in Wilmington, which had a long history of racial strife going back to the 19th century.
“Blood Done Sign My Name” was made into a movie in 2010, and was well-reviewed. It remains available on streaming services.
Excerpts from Tyson’s book:
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