Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 overturned nearly a century of Southern legislation and custom by making racial segregation a federal crime in places such as schools and public facilities, as well as in employment practices and voting. In truth, the Civil Rights Act merely restored the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which required equal protection for all citizens under the law. Segregation had obscured that original meaning by replacing equality with white supremacy. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is widely regarded as the central legislative achievement of the civil rights movement. By 1970, however, the municipal government of Oxford, North Carolina had done everything possible to avoid complying with the new federal law.

The civil rights movement was a decades-long struggle for Black equality in the United States. Some might date the movement’s origins to as early as 1947, when Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier and President Harry Truman integrated the armed forces. The movement certainly began no later than 1954, when the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of schools as part of its Brown v. Board of Education decision, or 1955, when Rosa Parks’s arrest after refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger sparked the yearlong Montgomery Bus Boycott. Either way, the civil rights movement certainly captured national attention no later than 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr. fought segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, and then delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Blood Done Sign My Name describes the movement’s waning years, after King’s assassination, when Black militancy replaced nonviolent direct action as the movement’s dominant feature.

The Ku Klux Klan was a terrorist organization designed to preserve white supremacy in the South and elsewhere. The Klan had so many different manifestations and revivals in so many different places that it defies easy summary. In popular memory, the Klan evokes images of racist militants in white sheets and hoods burning crosses on Black people’s lawns. Aside from its general terroristic purposes, the Klan from its inception existed primarily for two reasons: to keep Blacks from voting Republican and to keep Black men away from white women. On the night after the Marrow murder, young Timothy B. Tyson and his sister Boo observe a group of Klansmen on Robert Teel’s front porch.

Paternalism refers to a condescending assumption of responsibility for the welfare of another, always a presumed inferior. In a relationship based on equality, concern for the other’s welfare constitutes a manifestation of love. By its very nature, however, paternalism implies an unequal relationship. Tyson describes the South of his childhood as steeped in racial paternalism. It was not intended as vicious, but it was demeaning in the extreme. For instance, most well-to-do white people considered it their duty to look after their poor Black neighbors through generous acts of charity, provided, of course, that the Black beneficiaries showed appropriate deference and gratitude. It was not the most brutal aspect of white supremacy, but it was among the most insidious. Tyson cites his own maternal grandmother, an otherwise decent woman, as so immersed in racial paternalism that she would not even have noticed it. Tyson also credits his mother, Martha Buie Tyson, with escaping the paternalistic cycle at a young age.

Segregation refers to the legal and customary separation of people based on the color of their skin. The segregation-era South is also widely known as the “Jim Crow Era,” a time when Southern state legislatures required that whites and Blacks attend separate schools and occupy different railroad cars or later different parts of a bus. Segregation prevailed in the South from the late 19th century until well into the second half of the 20th century. Segregationists adopted the fiction of “separate but equal,” and yet everyone knew that segregation relegated Blacks to second-class citizenship. By 1970, Oxford, North Carolina, had yet to fully integrate.

Founded in 1957 by Martin Luther King Jr. and others, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference emerged as the most prominent and successful civil rights organization in America. In its challenge to segregation, the SCLC adopted King’s program of nonviolent direct action. This meant sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, peaceful protest marches, and in many cases prison for the protesters. Golden Frinks of the SCLC arrived in Oxford on the day of the Marrow funeral. By then, nonviolence was giving way to a more militant form of Black protest.