54 pages • 1 hour read
Timothy B. TysonBlood Done Sign My Name: A True Story
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “King Jesus and Dr. King”
Reverend Tyson survives the Proctor controversy and settles into a happy, comfortable life in Sanford. In 1966, visitors from Oxford’s Methodist pastor-parish relations committee offer him a new pulpit. Reverend Tyson sees it as a sign from God, prays over it, and decides to move his family to Oxford. Driving through the center of town, the Tysons catch their first glimpse of The Confederate Monument, a bronze statue erected like so many others long after the Civil War as a reminder of racial segregation. Reverend Tyson meets Thad Stem, a local author who will become his good friend and kindred spirit in the fight for civil rights. Young Tyson meets his future playmate, Gerald Teel.
Tyson describes Oxford’s history of segregation, focusing in particular on the efforts and experiences of Black veterans both during and after World War II. Beginning in the 1950s, Black veterans and Black churchwomen rally to the call of King’s SCLC. Oxford’s Black youths organize sit-ins at local businesses. Reverend Tyson tries to work with local liberals, but Stem grows frustrated with their useless and self-serving committees. Stem was born and raised in Oxford, son of a prominent Democrat in state politics. The irascible Stem “had taken Chesterton’s advice to learn to love the world without trusting it” and “was proud of his position on the margins of small-town Southern life” (98). A political liberal who had no illusions about the darkness in human nature, Stem nonetheless was a colorful figure who loved liquor, pretty girls, and the written word. Stem’s example convinces young Tyson that being a writer is possible.
Meanwhile, the Black freedom movement continues to encounter resistance. Reverend Tyson again faces backlash for inviting a Black Methodist minister, Reverend Gil Gillespie, to preach at his church. King’s April 1968 assassination increases tensions. Reverend Tyson holds a memorial service for King over the violent objections of segregationist parishioners. Young Tyson’s vivid memory of the King assassination involves Mrs. Roseanna Allen, a Black woman who cleaned the Tysons’ house. At eight years old, Tyson sees Mrs. Allen standing over an ironing board and sobbing. Though devastated and angry, she tries to explain to the boy what happened to King and what it meant. Tyson recalls telling Mrs. Allen that Jesus died on the cross and that that turned out well for us, so maybe this would too, prompting an embrace and more tears from the grieving woman. As an adult, Tyson reflects on his own self-congratulatory memories of the exchange, as well as the real distance between himself and Mrs. Allen.
Chapter 6 Summary: “The Death of Henry Marrow”
At 23, Henry Marrow Jr., whose friends and family called him Dickie, is a soft-spoken young man from a broken family, an Army veteran who somehow avoided Vietnam, and a newlywed with two very young daughters. Late in the evening on Monday, May 11, 1970, Marrow approaches Robert Teel’s store. Teel’s son Larry, 18, and Larry’s wife, Judy, 19, are outside. Marrow says something to Judy that the younger Teel interprets as flirtatious. Larry confronts him. A fight ensues. Robert Teel and his stepson, Roger Oakley, appear with a shotgun and a rifle. Marrow flees. The two Teels and Oakley chase Marrow and shoot him from behind. Marrow falls to the ground and begs for his life. The assailants punch and kick Marrow as he lies prone and wounded on the side of the road. Someone pulls the trigger. The assailants calmly leave the scene. Marrow’s friends appear and rush him to the hospital. Marrow dies in an ambulance on his way to Duke Medical Center. A witness to the murder, Marrow’s friend Boo Chavis, tries to file a police report, but the police have no interest in interviewing him. Young Blacks seethe with rage. The lack of an immediate arrest triggers a riot in Oxford the next night.
The murder of Henry Marrow prompts young Black leaders to take action. Ben Chavis, a teacher at the local all-Black high school, leads a student walkout and protest march to the courthouse on Wednesday, two days after the murder. According to family lore, Chavis, 22, is a direct descendant of John Chavis, a Revolutionary War veteran and one of the most accomplished free Black men in early America. Already radicalized by the events of 1968, including the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., Ben Chavis had helped organize the Granville County Steering Committee for Black Progress. After the Marrow murder, Chavis emerges as a leader in the Oxford Black freedom movement. The mayor imposes a strict curfew. State police set up roadblocks outside the town. At the preliminary hearing, a judge orders Robert and Larry Teel held without bond. Inexplicably, the police had not arrested Roger Oakley, the third assailant. On Thursday, Reverend Tyson and Thad Stem attend a Human Relations Council meeting. Some of the moderate, middle-class Black individuals who attend the meeting begin to walk out when the committee chair admits that Oxford’s municipal government has delayed implementing certain aspects of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Most of the Black people in attendance, however, focus their anger on the police department. Outside, the attendees hear Ben Chavis’s students chanting for freedom.
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
Chapters 5 and 6 work together to paint a picture of violence, injustice, and futility.
In the final section of Chapter 5, Tyson explains the impact of the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination on himself and his father. Then, in the opening pages of Chapter 6, Tyson reconstructs the events surrounding the Henry Marrow killing. By juxtaposing the murders of King and Marrow in this manner, Tyson highlights the intense violence that marked the final years of the civil rights movement, when King’s moral appeal gave way to Black Power militancy. Tyson neither endorses nor condemns the militants’ violent approach. He does, however, insist that sanitized histories of the era must yield to truth and that the truth involves cold-blooded murder followed by militant rage.
These chapters also illustrate the injustices that accompany a white-dominated municipal government and police force. In the hours following the murder, Boo Chavis could not find a police officer who wanted to interview him. Readers also should not overlook the fact that Oxford’s young Black residents rioted on Tuesday, May 12, 1970, because more than 24 hours had passed and police had not yet arrested Robert Teel or his sons—at least not to anyone’s knowledge. Likewise, the mayor imposed a strict curfew. While property owners no doubt appreciated the mayor’s decision, the curfew appeared as one more weapon of the white-dominated power structure, and it resulted in the arrests of dozens of young Blacks.
Finally, Chapters 5 and 6 demonstrate the futility of white liberalism in the face of Black rage. Thad Stem, Reverend Tyson’s friend and fellow liberal, helps illustrate this point, albeit indirectly. Stem himself rates as perhaps the book’s most colorful figure, a poet with a sharp wit and an appetite for the good life. He also has an eye for human folly, and among his fellow liberals he does not need to look very far. Still, he keeps believing that something better lay on the horizon. In Chapter 5, for instance, Stem mocks one of his fellow liberals who emphasized the need for communication between the races: “We’re about three hundred years late for the goddamn ‘Good Neighbor Council’” (97). Nonetheless, on Thursday, May 14, 1970—three days after the Marrow murder—Stem joins Reverend Tyson at a meeting of Oxford’s Human Relations Council. Predictably, the meeting degenerates into quibbling over the city’s delayed implementation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Meanwhile, the well-meaning attendees hear “the thunderous chants” of Ben Chavis’s Black freedom marchers coming from outside the building (144).
Related Titles
By Timothy B. Tyson
