Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

Timothy B. Tyson argues that white Southerners have sanitized their own history on two different fronts. First, with respect to the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s, they have exaggerated the degree of voluntary desegregation that occurred in those years. Time and guilt have obscured the intensity of resistance to integration, as well as the amount of violence that ensued. Second, by the time the civil rights movement began, white Southerners had already sanitized their distant past. Neither the Confederacy nor white supremacy commanded unanimous support in the white South, but the agents of segregation advanced a contrary myth, and all traces of the South’s interracial past vanished from memory.

Many history books might suggest otherwise, but Tyson shows that white Southerners did not rise en masse to answer Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for justice. Nor did nonviolent moral appeals produce voluntary desegregation. Granville County’s chamber of commerce sponsored a local history in which the author makes this claim, which Tyson dismisses as “one big white lie” (247). Blood Done Sign My Name exposes these “cheerful and cherished lies we tell ourselves about those years” (10).