I recently finished the book "Blood Done Sign My Name" By Timothy Tyson (2004) Fairly new book.
The book in short is a memoir about a son of a liberal minister in Oxford, North Carolina. Oxford is made up of indifferent citizens, Klan members, Ex Klan members, angry african american youths, and the future most threatening member of the Wilmington 10. An innocent African American man is killed after he supposedly flirts with a white woman at a convenience store. 3 men chase after 20 year old Henry Marrow and kicked him senseless till he lay on the ground close to death, next one of the men who will later testify that he "accidentally shot" aimed his gun and shot Marrow directly in the head killing him. This sends the town of Oxford up in flames- literally the African Americans of the town strategically start burning down the town's stores and warehouses, to the point where A million dollars worth of tobacco goes up in flames. The Mayor of Oxford can be seen in good form when he offers the colored community 7 basketball courts if they stop burning down the town.
Within the narrative of Tim's life and the town of Oxford's divide after the murder Tyson weaves in loads of "what I didn't learn in US history type facts." For example, Tyson proclaims that The Cape Fear 1898 Wilmington Race Riot's “omission from North Carolina History may have been the biggest of the lies that marked my [his] boyhood”
“North Carolina history textbooks never mentioned anything about either the massacre in Wilmington or the white supremacy crusade...The ghosts of 1898 walked among us in the 1970s, and the fact that so few of us knew the past did not loosen its compelling hold on the present” “Everywhere I turned a new falsehood seemed to stare me in the face...And it appeared clear to me- partly because of the lies that filled my history textbooks- that the intent of formal education was to inculcate obedience to a social order that did not deserve my loyalty.”275
“The problem is not that we cherish the story, exactly, nor is the story itself entirely false. Miss Amy’s witness is true, and many of the things we admire about Dr. King are factual. The problem is why we cherish that kind of story: because we want to transcend our history without actually confronting it...The self congratulatory popular account insists that Dr. King called on the nation to fully accept its own creed, and the walls came a-tumbling down. This conventional narrative is soothing, moving, and politically acceptable, and has only the disadvantage of bearing no resemblance to what actually happened,” (Tyson, 319).
