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2005 Carolina Summer Reading Program Selection Featured on UNC-TV Literary Series!
Author Timothy Tyson Shares His Haunting Chronicle of a
North Carolina Murder
On North Carolina Bookwatch, Sunday, August 14, at 5 PM

On May 11, 1970, Henry Marrow, a twenty-three-year-old black veteran, walked into a crossroads store in Oxford, NC, owned by Robert Teel and came out running. Teel and two of his sons chased and beat Marrow, then killed him in public as he pleaded for his life.

Like many small Southern towns, Oxford had barely been touched by the civil rights movement. But in the wake of the killing, young African Americans took to the streets. While lawyers battled in the courthouse, the Klan raged in the shadows and black Vietnam veterans torched the town's tobacco warehouses. Timothy Tyson's father, the pastor of Oxford's all-white Methodist church, urged the town to come to terms with its bloody racial history. In the end, however, the Tyson family was forced to move away.

Today, Tim Tyson's riveting narrative of that fiery summer- Blood Done Sign My Name- brings gritty blues truth, soaring gospel vision, and down-home humor to a shocking time of American history. In the upcoming episode of UNC-TV's literary series North Carolina Bookwatch, Sunday, August 14, at 5 PM, Tyson joins host DG Martin to discuss his engaging book-this year's selection for UNC-Chapel Hill's Carolina Summer Reading Program.

In Blood Done Sign My Name, Tyson returns to Oxford thirty years later to make sense of what happened and how the events of May 11, 1970, changed his own life-interviewing both an unapologetic Robert Teel and local black radicals, aware of the bitter truth of local race politics.

"We're all runaway slaves from our own past and we can't escape the dogs of history unless we turn and confront them," says Tyson. "I guess the burden of my work in some ways is trying to get people to have an honest confrontation with their past and not just tell a story that's comfortable that they want to hear."

In trying to get an honest conversation about the past, UNC-Chapel Hill has asked all of its incoming students to read Blood Done Sign My Name over the summer for future discussion and dialogue about the racially-divisive past that surrounded small Southern towns like Oxford, NC. With this type of discussion, Tyson hopes to add perspective to his startling insights of a white person touched in many ways by both the overt and subtle aspects of the racial tension that permeated the Jim Crow South.

"Oxford was really no worse than the rest of the country; in 1970 the United States was on fire," admits Tyson. "But, I'm proud of Oxford.for now trying to find a redemptive path out of this type of trouble."

Timothy B. Tyson is a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Don't miss DG Martin's thought-provoking interview with Timothy Tyson on North Carolina Bookwatch, Sunday, August 14, at 5 PM, only on UNC-TV!

During this season of North Carolina Bookwatch, guests also include: Shannon Ravenel (New Stories from the South, 2005), Emily Herring Wilson (No One Gardens Alone), Randall Kenan (Walking On Water), Ann B. Ross (Miss Julia's School Of Beauty), Lawrence Earley (Looking for Longleaf), Peter Perret (A Well-Tempered Mind), Moreton Neal (Remembering Bill Neal: Favorite Recipes from A Life in Cooking), Quinn Dalton (Bulletproof Girl), Henry Petroski (Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering), Bill Morris (Saltwater Cowboys), Amy Tiemann (Mojo Mom), Robert F. Irwin (Robert F. Irwin 40 Years), Tommy Hays (The Pleasure Was Mine), Mary Kay Andrews (Hissy Fit), Jerry Shinn (Loonis! Celebrating a Lyrical Life), Michael Parker (If You Want Me to Stay), Lawrence Naumoff (A Southern Tragedy, in Crimson and Yellow), Martha Witt (Broken As Things Are) and Gerhard Weinberg (Visions of Victory: The Hopes of Eight World War II Leader).

Funding for North Carolina Bookwatch is provided by UNC-TV members and by Quail Ridge Books and Music, Raleigh's independent, full service bookstore, bringing readers and writers together since 1984.

North Carolina Bookwatch is part of UNC-TV's ongoing commitment to produce programs for and about North Carolina. UNC-TV is the statewide 11-station broadcast network of the University of North Carolina. For more information, please visit www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch.

For more information about North Carolina Bookwatch and UNC-TV's other local productions, please visit our website at www.unctv.org.

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