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54 pages 1 hour read

Timothy B. Tyson

Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2004

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Chapters 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 7 Summary: “Drinkin’ That Freedom Wine”

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). Before the march reaches the Confederate monument downtown, the two white men duck out and head home.

Tyson explains that the Confederate monument, erected in 1909, is a monument not to the Confederacy but to white supremacy. Furthermore, it obscures a period of time in the late 19th century when Black and white populists made common cause in North Carolina politics and even won control of the governorship and state legislature. In 1898, a violent coup orchestrated by Democrats destroyed the interracial populist movement, deprived Black men of the right to vote, and ushered in the era of Jim Crow. On the day of Marrow’s funeral, mourners and protesters gather at the monument to hear Frinks and Ben Chavis denounce segregation. The chapter concludes with reflections from Eddie McCoy, one of Oxford’s Black Power militants, who spoke to Tyson’s students in 2003. McCoy explains that poor Black people had nothing to lose, so in 1970 they were more willing to go beyond King’s program of nonviolent direct action. “It wasn’t no nonviolence in Oxford,” McCoy recalls (166).

Chapter 8 Summary: “Our ‘Other South’”

Chapter 8 represents a break in the narrative of events surrounding Henry Marrow’s murder. Tyson describes both his own family history and the history of Southern dissent from slavery and segregation. Above all, the Tyson family held “a vision of the love of Jesus that emphatically included everyone of whatever color” (170). Tyson’s great-great-grandfather William Tyson named his two sons George Washington Tyson and Henry Clay Tyson after two of the early republic’s great unionists. The poor people of eastern North Carolina in general resisted the Confederacy. Jack Tyson, the author’s grandfather, “rejected white supremacy and began to preach a strange new gospel of equality” in the early 20th century (173). Although Jack Tyson briefly joined the Ku Klux Klan as millions of other white Americans did in the 1920s, he saw what it was and left after only a few weeks. Jack Tyson also abandoned the fundamentalist Free Will Baptists and became a Methodist preacher. Tyson describes his grandfather’s North Carolina as a place where poor whites and Blacks lived in close proximity under something like the same material conditions. Tyson reflects on the differences between his own father and Robert Teel, who grew up only a few miles apart and started out in life with very little. Jack Tyson’s break with fundamentalism led him to conclude that the Bible does not in fact authorize segregation as many white Southerners liked to believe. Jack Tyson did not often preach about racial equality. When he did, however, local textile-mill owners accused him of stirring up Communist agitation, and his church opted not to renew his contract. As an acknowledgement that darkness runs in every family, Tyson tells the story of his second cousin Elias Tyson, aka “The Gator,” a drunkard and a womanizer whose violent streak landed him on the wrong side of the law. The chapter concludes with the story of Earl Tyson, the author’s uncle and another of the family’s Methodist ministers, who ran afoul of segregationists in 1957, when he sat down in the Black section of a courtroom and refused to relocate to the white section. The move prompted threatening phone calls and cost Earl Tyson his pulpit.

Chapters 7-8 Analysis

Although Chapter 8 presents an abrupt shift in the narrative from the aftermath of Henry Marrow’s murder to the white South’s history of dissent, several of the book’s major themes unite these two chapters in subtle yet important ways.

The Confederate Monument in Oxford, which looms over much of the action described in earlier chapters, finally receives extended treatment in Chapter 7. The monument, in fact, appears so ubiquitous that it supports two other themes while serving as a separate theme unto itself. Oxford’s Confederate monument, like similar monuments across the South, stands as a tribute not to the Confederacy but to segregation. It honors white supremacy and represents A Sanitized History. Tyson explains how and why Southerners erected such monuments in the first place. His description of interracial coalitions winning political power in North Carolina and elsewhere in the late 19th century has tragic elements, for it shows that Democrats first imposed White Supremacy by violence and then built monuments tying segregation to the Confederacy’s legacy. Meanwhile, terrorized Blacks lost the right to vote, and their white populist allies had nowhere to turn.

In Chapter 8, Tyson maintains this interracial theme by describing poor whites and Blacks living and working under similar material conditions well into the 20th century. In rural North Carolina, however, white supremacy gave the Blacks’ former allies an artificial feeling of superiority, “a bone-deep sense of themselves as white Southerners, tied to a bloody history that usually pitted them against African Americans, even in opposition to their own interests” (178).

Chapters 7 and 8 also illustrate The Ordeal of the White Liberal. In a self-congratulatory narrative, Tyson would have simply noted that his father and Thad Stem were the only white people who attended Henry Marrow’s funeral. This would have scored moral points, but it also would have obscured the full truth. Instead, Tyson goes on to explain that his father and Stem ducked out of the funeral march because they did not feel they belonged, though they had no idea where to go in the midst of a Black Power revolution. This feeling of isolation dovetails with Tyson’s broader narrative of the decades-long frustrations often experienced by dissenting white Southerners, including Tyson’s direct ancestors. Tyson never claims that anti-Confederate or anti-segregation white Southerners constituted a silent majority, but he does argue that dissenting white Southerners were always far more numerous than sanitized histories have allowed.

Golden Frinks and Ben Chavis personify the Black freedom movement in 1970. A veteran of Martin Luther King Jr.’s SCLC, Frinks nonetheless understands and even fuels the militants’ anger. The younger Chavis, meanwhile, personifies that anger and over time will move in a more violent direction, but in Oxford he acts as a moderating influence. Tyson describes the civil rights movement as fractured along generational lines, but Frinks and Chavis represent the movement’s best efforts to unify.

The appearance of two Black FBI informants at the roadblock outside of Oxford reminds readers of the lengths US government agencies will go to undermine movements their leaders regard as hostile to US government interests. In the 1960s, longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover developed an obsession with Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. The sinister FBI chief even convinced himself that Communists controlled both King and the movement. In light of King’s Christian beliefs, this rates as one of the more irrational conclusions any government official has ever reached. Nonetheless, FBI agents spared no effort in trying to infiltrate and discredit the Black freedom movement. 

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