Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

The Teels’ acquittal leads to a massive Black economic boycott in Oxford that produces tangible results, as white businesses begin to desegregate in earnest. Even the Confederate monument is relocated to a less conspicuous place. Meanwhile, exhaustion from the racial tension of recent years forces the Tysons out of Oxford altogether. The family moves to Wilmington, North Carolina, where Reverend Tyson begins preaching at a new church.

Still only 11 years old, Tyson becomes increasingly aware of racial tensions in his new city. School integration leads to periodic clashes between students along racial lines. Like much of the country, Wilmington teeters “on the edge of racial cataclysm” (258). Ironically, Ben Chavis also moves to Wilmington, where he becomes an ordained minister, opens a Black Power church, and drifts toward Maoist militancy. In hopes of bridging the divide, Reverend Tyson visits Chavis at the new Church of the Black Madonna. Chavis is “polite, even warm,” and yet “it would have been a shocking departure if he had not rejected my father’s liberal logic” (268). Tyson uses this incident and other parts of Chapter 11 to reflect on the limits of white liberalism, particularly when it is steeped in racial