Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

Blood Done Sign My Name (2004), by Timothy B. Tyson, is a nonfiction work of history centered on the racially motivated 1970 murder of Henry Marrow Jr. in Oxford, North Carolina. The killing occurred after Marrow, a 23-year-old Black Army veteran, husband, and father of two, allegedly made a flirtatious remark in the direction of a 19-year-old married white woman. The woman’s husband, brother-in-law, and father-in-law chased Marrow down the street, shot him from behind, beat and kicked him as he lay wounded, and then shot him to death. When the police failed to make a timely arrest, Oxford’s young Black residents rioted. While city officials tried to maintain order, Black Vietnam veterans conducted military-style firebombing operations against high-value, white-owned economic targets such as tobacco warehouses. For Oxford’s Black community, the Marrow murder unleashed years of pent-up rage in a place where, notwithstanding the 1964 Civil Rights Act, White Supremacy still reigned.

Tyson has a rare perspective on the events of 1970 in Oxford. A professional historian who has held appointments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Tyson has spent his career teaching and writing about race and civil rights in his native South.