Blood Done Sign My Name

Blood Done Sign My Name is an autobiographical work of history written by Timothy B. Tyson while he was a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The book, published in 2004 and based in part on an M.A. thesis Tyson wrote in 1990 while attending Duke University, deals with the 1970 murder of Henry Marrow, a black man.

Since 2004, the book has sold 140,000 copies and earned awards including the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion. UNC-CH selected the book for its 2005 summer reading program.

The book deals with the 1970 murder of Henry Marrow, a black man. This case helped galvanize the African-American resistance movement in Oxford, North Carolina, where the book takes place, and across the eastern North Carolina black belt. It helped establish local civil rights activist Ben Chavis's leadership in the black civil rights movement, which eventually led to his becoming the executive director of the NAACP and later an organizer of the Million Man March. This episode radicalized the African American freedom struggle in North Carolina, leading up to the turbulence of the Wilmington Ten cases, which grew out of racial conflict in the port city and the trial of Ben Chavis and nine others on charges stemming from the burning of a grocery store.

Part autobiography and part history of the civil rights movement in the south, the book, which has sold over 150,000 copies and has been hailed as “one of the most powerful meditation on race in America” by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, recounts the small town murder of Henry Marrow, a 23 year-old black Vietnam veteran, who was shot and beaten to death by a prominent white businessman and his grown sons. In response to the crime, and the sham trial that followed, many young African American men took to the streets, engaging in riots and vandalism. However, Ben Chavis, Marrow's cousin, decided that the best way to protest the injustice would be to organize a peaceful march on the state capitol. What began as a small group of outraged friends and relatives grew to a crowd of thousands over the three-day, fifty-mile trek to Raleigh. Ten years old at the time, Tim Tyson watched as his father, pastor of the all-white Methodist church, tried to get his congregation to accept the inevitability of integration.

Tyson's books include Blood Done Sign My Name, published by Crown in 2004, a memoir and history of the murder of a black man, Henry Marrow, in Oxford, North Carolina in 1970. The book also documents the African American uprising that followed. This book was selected by UNC for its Summer Reading Program in 2005 and by community reading programs across the state. Blood Done Sign My Name was also selected for Villanova University's "One Book Villanova" Program in 2006-2007. The book also won the Southern Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2006, Tyson was awarded the Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion for ...