Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“Above all, perhaps, I had to listen carefully to the stories of black men who had referred to one another fondly as ‘bloods’ in Vietnam and ponder why they had returned to Oxford ready to burn it down, if that was what it took to end the racial caste system.”

Tyson describes the process by which, as a grown man and budding historian, he came to understand what happened in Oxford in the spring and summer of 1970. As a young boy, Tyson heard the sirens and saw Oxford burning on many nights after Henry Marrow’s murder. Only in later years, when he returned to Oxford to conduct research for the project that became this book, did he learn how and especially why the military-style firebombings of high-value economic targets took place. With introductions from Eddie McCoy, a local businessman and political figure who had been a Black Power militant in 1970, Tyson spoke to the Black Vietnam veterans who carried out the operations. More than 30 years later—the book was published in 2004—those veterans remained unnamed.

“I suppose they never stopped to consider that black people might be Southerners, too, or that people like my parents might love the South and hate segregation.”

“They” are the segregationists who spent nearly a century insisting that “the South” was united in its determination to preserve its way of life, by which they meant white supremacy. Tyson notes the exclusion of Black people from segregationists’ conception of a united “South,” which likely does not surprise the reader. More surprising, perhaps, is Tyson’s description of a white South that dissented, at least in sentiment, from segregation.

“It was that sin—or the faint hint of it—that got Dickie Marrow murdered.”

The “sin” was Marrow’s apparent flirtatious comment in the direction of Judy Teel, wife of Robert Teel’s son Larry. Only Larry and Judy Teel know what Marrow actually said—or what they heard him say. A Black man making a sexually suggestive comment to a white woman—if that is in fact what Marrow did—triggered centuries-old fears of “miscegenation” or “race mixing” buried deep in the white Southern consciousness. These fears, however, worked in only one direction. Powerful white men regularly took sexual liberties with Black women, but Black men and white women were kept separate at all costs. In fact, in addition to preventing Black men from voting Republican, the Ku Klux Klan’s original purpose was to keep Black men away from white women.

“Birmingham was a decisive triumph for nonviolent direct action, but violence and nonviolence were both more ethically complicated and more tightly intertwined than they appeared in most media accounts and history books.”

Before describing the murder of Henry Marrow, which he does in Chapter 6, Tyson offers extensive historical background on the civil rights movement and its effect on his family, particularly on his father’s Methodist ministry. In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. led nonviolent protests against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. King’s April 16 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” a paean to nonviolent direct action and an anguished appeal for justice, remains one of his most celebrated writings. Reverend Tyson called it “the best thing outside Scripture that I had ever found” (69). Tyson notes, however, that King’s subsequent popularity, coupled with the moral force of his argument, has allowed future generations to sanitize the history of the civil rights movement by suggesting that white Southerners answered King’s call and voluntarily desegregated. The truth is that both violence and nonviolence played a role in desegregation. 

“Black women were ‘girls’ until they were old enough to be called ‘auntie,’ but they could never hear a white person, regardless of age, address them as ‘Mrs.’ or ‘Miss’ or ‘Ma’am.’ But Major Stem made his own rules.”

Denying Black women their proper respect, even from a white child, reinforced their second-class citizenship. Martin Luther King Jr. refers to this customary degradation in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” as one of the “ordinary, day-to-day humiliations” that enraged and radicalized Eddie McCoy (164). Major Stem, Thad Stem’s father, once addressed the principal of the local Black high school as “Mrs. Shaw,” prompting a rebuke from a “local white bootlegger” who overheard the comment (99). Major Stem shoved the bootlegger, told him to mind his own business, and cussed at him in colorful language.

“In truth, to refuse to employ black household help would not have liberated anyone, and having a maid, ironically, freed up my mother to teach school.”

On several occasions in the book, Tyson wrestles with his own family’s complicity in the South’s racial caste system. He does not exempt his parents from participation in the day-to-day exercises of white supremacy such as hiring Blacks as domestic help. This quotation reveals an uncomfortable paradox in the ordeal of Southern white liberals. On one hand, they used Black labor to make their own lives more comfortable. On the other hand, it is difficult to see any tangible way in which refusing to employ Black domestic workers would have helped anyone.

“But what strikes me most is the soothing and self-congratulatory way that I interpreted the moment in my memory, and how much greater was the distance between us than I could possibly comprehend.”

One day, in April 1968, eight-year-old Tyson saw Mrs. Roseanna Allen, the family’s maid, standing over an ironing board and weeping. The boy asked what was wrong, and Mrs. Allen replied in anguish: “What’s wrong? What’s wrong? They gone and killed Martin Luther King, that’s what’s wrong!” (114). Young Tyson tried to console Mrs. Allen by suggesting that maybe it would be OK, prompting an incredulous remark from the grieving woman. When the boy reminded Mrs. Allen that Jesus died on the cross, and people grieved, but that that turned out for the best, Mrs. Allen hugged the boy and rocked him back and forth “in a muttered mixture of tears and prayers”: “Oh, child. Oh, baby” (115). While the eight-year-old boy could not possibly comprehend the moment, the adult Tyson recognizes that his own “soothing and self-congratulatory” memory obscures the enormous actual “distance” between himself and Mrs. Allen.

“Even black North Carolinians who wanted no part of radical politics tended to view the patrolmen as storm troopers for white supremacy.”

After the May 1970 murder of Henry Marrow, young Blacks rioted in Oxford, prompting the state police to set up roadblocks outside town. Tyson notes that whites and Blacks had very different experiences at those roadblocks, which often seemed like little more than excuses for harassing Blacks about breaking curfew or some other trivial thing. Above all, though, Blacks throughout the state regarded the police with suspicion, and for good reason. Nearly all were white, and many were in the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, segregation could not have been enforced anywhere in the South without policemen who operated on Klan precepts as “storm troopers for white supremacy.”

“Years later, FBI files and their own courtroom testimony revealed Washington and Hood to be police informants, and each received thousands of dollars and legal immunity from the U.S. Treasury and Justice Departments as part of the FBI’s notorious Counter Intelligence Program—COINTELPRO—in exchange for testimony against Ben Chavis and Jim Grant.”

At a roadblock outside Oxford, in the middle of the May 1970 riots, police stopped a car carrying rifles and dynamite. They arrested the driver and passenger, Walter David Washington and Theodore Albert Hood, two Black men with extensive criminal records. A confiscated map of the town suggested that Washington and Hood planned to bomb the local white high school. The revelation years later that both men were working for the FBI, however, shows the lengths to which that bureau and its agents would go to undermine a movement that threatened the interests of the status quo. Under longtime director J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI identified Martin Luther King Jr. in particular and the Black freedom movement in general as threats to the established order. Ben Chavis and Jim Grant were Black radicals whom the FBI hoped to entrap, arrest, and prosecute.

“My father and Thad Stem appear to have been the only white people who came to the service.”

At the funeral service for Henry Marrow, Reverend Tyson and Thad Stem joined “about all of black Granville County,” according to Ben Chavis (154). The author notes this fact about his father and his father’s friend not for self-congratulatory purposes but because it refutes the sanitized historical argument that many conscientious white Southerners took part in the civil rights movement with enthusiasm and thereby opened the doors of integration. Reverend Tyson and Stem did not even march with the mourners all the way to the cemetery, for they felt out of place. White sympathizers could extend little more than good wishes. The Black freedom movement was, in many ways, an all-Black affair.

“But neither white supremacy nor the Confederacy had always unified the white population.”

Referring to The Confederate Monument in the middle of Oxford, Tyson notes that the statue commemorates not the Confederacy but the racial caste system that segregationists imposed on North Carolina in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—long after the Civil War. Oxford’s Confederate monument dates to 1909, only 11 years after an 1898 political coup toppled the state’s interracial Fusion government, terrorized Black residents of Wilmington, and ushered in an era of white supremacy under the iron fist of the state’s Democratic Party. Here and elsewhere, Tyson argues that a substantial number of white Southerners supported neither the Confederacy nor segregation.

“The truth is that neither ideology nor sociology moved my family; instead, we found our footing in the Scriptures we were raised on and in the church that sometimes broke our hearts.”

After identifying a handful of Southern literary luminaries who dissented from the segregationist regime, Tyson notes that his own family’s rejection of segregation came from an understanding of the Bible. Christian love did for the Tysons what Enlightenment humanism might have done for others who arrived at the same conclusion. This quotation highlights both the strengths and limitations of a scripture-based quest for earthly justice. On one hand, Reverend Tyson embraced King’s call to nonviolent direct action, a philosophy now synonymous with King himself. On the other hand, this book also shows that Reverend Tyson and other white Southern liberals found themselves lost amid the often violent Black Power movement that rose after King’s assassination.

“Though people tend to think of poor, rural white Southerners as the worst racists in the country, these were not the people who redlined black folks out of their neighborhoods, the way northern bankers and real estate agents did. They were hardly in a position to keep blacks out of America’s most elite schools, the way northeastern academics did.”

Tyson hates racism and loves the South. His “poor, rural white Southerners” include both his father and the murderer Robert Teel, which Tyson regards as proof that poverty and Southern origins in themselves do not breed bigotry. Furthermore, the “people” who “tend to think” of those Southerners as “the worst racists in the country” are often descendants of those Northerners who kept Blacks out of Northern neighborhoods and institutions. Those “people” who look on the rural white South with such condescension are often the same ones who tout their own inclusive sensibilities while living in gated communities. In a book written by the son of a minister who believes deeply in original sin, no one is exonerated.

“Redeemed sinners, yes, but there are things can make a preacher lay that Bible down.”

Tyson tells the stories of his grandfather Jack and uncle Earl, both Methodist ministers. In between these two stories, he shares the cautionary tale of his second cousin Elias, aka “the Gator.” Charming and volatile, the Gator lived a life of self-indulgent drinking and womanizing, mixed with a bit of sadism. One day, in the midst of a drunken argument and fight, the Gator accidentally killed his own nephew. In prison, where he was sentenced to 30 years, the Gator felt sorry for himself but did not recognize his need for forgiveness: “I don’t want no mercy, all I want is justice and a fair trial” (190). Tyson uses the plight of the Gator to show that darkness lurks in his family, as it does in everyone, even in the preacher who can be tempted to “lay that Bible down.”

“The younger radicals had a magnificent ferocity that fueled the movement, but they did not always remember that they had inherited as well as energized the struggle.”

The “younger radicals” of the later civil rights era “fueled” the Black Power movement. In some cases throughout the 1960s, but especially after the King assassination, these young Black radicals turned to violence or the threat of violence to achieve their ends. Tyson recognizes the logic behind this desperation, for power seldom yields voluntarily. On the other hand, Black Power helped divide the civil rights movement “along generational lines” (200). With an intemperance and limited perspective characteristic of young radicals everywhere, the agents of Black Power often behaved as if they were the first to confront white supremacy, the first to feel anger, and the first to resist——none of which was true.

“I did not know enough history to understand what was happening, and it would be many years before I did, but Oxford would burn in my memory for the rest of my life.”

Here Tyson describes his childhood reaction to the fires that consumed several large tobacco warehouses on the night of May 25, 1970, two weeks after the Marrow murder and one day after the governor failed to meet with protest marchers at the state capitol. At 10 years old, Tyson had no idea how to process the “screaming sirens” and the “horizon lit up with a bright red glow” (222). Most important of all, he “did not know enough history to understand” these events. That was probably true of everyone in Oxford, none of whom was likely to have understood those events with the adult professional historian’s perspective Tyson brings to this book. As he explains elsewhere, Tyson became a historian because of these events.

“Both Ben Chavis and my father carried this poisonous lie deep in their minds, but there it operated in divergent ways that made it hard for them to work together.”

After the events in Oxford, both the Tysons and Ben Chavis moved to the much larger city of Wilmington, North Carolina, where Chavis established a Black Power church and turned far more radical, even to the point of violence. With the city teetering on the edge of a race war, Reverend Tyson went to see Chavis in hopes of bridging the gap. Chavis remembered Reverend Tyson and greeted him with warmth, but for Chavis the days of interracial bridge-building were over. The author regards this as a function of white supremacy, the “poisonous lie” that infected both the reverend and Chavis and “operated in divergent ways” on both of them. In Reverend Tyson, white supremacy bred well-meant paternalism. In Chavis, it bred an “insidious and deadly” belief that Blacks “could not stand up for themselves”—a belief Chavis was now actively working to expunge (268).

“The ghosts of 1898 walked among us in the 1970s, and the fact that so few of us knew the past did not loosen its compelling hold on the present.”

Tyson makes several references to the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot (See: Index of Terms), better understood as a political coup and racially motivated massacre that ushered in the era of segregation in North Carolina. The “so few” who “knew the past” were mostly white people like Reverend Tyson, who learned about 1898 from Black parents at an interracial meeting he hosted at his new church. Wilmington’s Black residents told stories about the massacre, but white students were victims of an invented segregationist consensus that sanitized history by blotting out all references to an interracial past.

“But we did little to alleviate the abject deprivation all around us and rarely even contemplated it. It was enough that we were good, to say nothing of hip.”

As a teenager in the mid-1970s, Tyson ran away from home and lived with several older friends in a makeshift commune in rural northeastern North Carolina. His parents knew about it, made sure of his well-being, and concluded that life on his own might be a good wake-up call for the meandering youth. At the time, Tyson and his fellow hippies took themselves very seriously: They believed in their hearts that suburban white America was corrupt and that they were the truly virtuous people who had recognized and escaped it. Even “poverty” to such self-obsessed children “could seem romantic” (281). They were not poor, however. Unlike the Black families who lived in the area, Tyson and his hippie friends had somewhere more comfortable to go when things got too rough. As an adult, Tyson recognizes that his youthful posturing “did little to alleviate” anyone’s actual suffering.

“When they discovered that the changes the black freedom movement brought did not land a black man in every white woman’s bed or have Granville County declared a Soviet republic, the white upper classes did not wish to be reminded that they had sanctioned public murder and had turned a violent tragedy into a late-model lynching.”

In the early 1980s, during his first year as an undergraduate student in history, Tyson returned to Oxford to conduct interviews and research the tragic events he had witnessed as a boy. He found that almost no one who had occupied a position of authority in 1970 was willing to talk to him in anything more than generalities. The former mayor proved useful, as did the murderer Robert Teel, but others had no wish to revisit those events, and the police even used intimidation tactics in an effort to dissuade Tyson from pursuing the research. Tyson explains all of this in the context of the white leaders’ abandonment of Robert Teel after the murder trial, which Tyson explains as a function of shame on the part of the “white upper classes” who rejected Teel because they “did not wish to be reminded” of their participation in a “late-model lynching.” Tyson also mocks the former segregationists’ fears of “race-mixing,” as well as their strange belief that the civil rights movement represented a Communist plot.

“That was the moment I became a historian.”

On a research trip to Oxford in the early 1980s, Tyson first visits Robert Teel’s barbershop. After giving Tyson a haircut, Teel agrees to talk about what happened in 1970, presses “Record” on Tyson’s tape recorder, and begins speaking: “That n***** committed suicide, wanting to come in my store and four-letter-word my daughter-in-law” (293). This was the “moment” Tyson “became a historian,” for he had to understand the roots of Teel’s way of thinking.

“Unlike my father, my mother was not a romantic liberal, looking for some kind of redemptive interpretation of a tragic past.”

Tyson’s mother, Martha Buie Tyson, disappears for long stretches of the book, and this quotation explains why. Like his father, the reverend, young Tyson came of age as a liberal. Unlike his father, Tyson did not have a Christian ministry to soften or at least channel his inevitable disillusionment. This book describes the Tysons’ liberal ordeal, but it also explains how the author discovered teaching as his vocation. Here Tyson acknowledges the influence of his mother, a fellow teacher from whom he inherited a no-nonsense “ability to confront uncomfortable truths” (312).

“The passionate intensity that the Tyson brothers carried into the pulpit on Sunday mornings was not entirely separate from the violent carnality that some of their kinfolks displayed on Saturday nights.”

In describing his own and his family’s dissent from the South’s segregationist regime, Tyson never resorts to self-congratulatory moralizing. In fact, while his father, grandfather, and uncle all rejected segregation (and pay the price for it in one way or another), Tyson acknowledges other family members who strayed from the Christian path. He also acknowledges the ways in which even he and his father internalized the white supremacy on which the system rested. This particular quotation follows a paragraph in which Reverend Tyson prays for the enslaved victims of Destrehan Plantation in Louisiana while reminding a group of college students that they, like the men who owned the plantation, are also sinners. The distance between light and darkness is never as great as we think.