Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story » (Reprint)

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

The battle for civil rights was not won in the sixties - certainly not in many parts of the country. It never touched Oxford, North Carolina, where young Tim Tyson was growing up. In 1970, when a black man was killed in the town square by a Klansman and his sons, and an all-white jury acquitted the murderers, both blacks and whites were swept into a firestorm. Amid the violence and fear that enveloped the town, Tim's father attempted to bring the two sides together, only to be reviled as a traitor to both sides. Tim - now a professor of African-American studies at the University of Wisconsin - has written a memoir of that turbulent summer, and has gone back, thirty years later, to find a remnant of scorched justice

The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley

… on balance Tyson has written an honest book, far more so than most explorations of race in America. He understands that the true past -- to the extent we can ever know the "truth" about the past -- was vastly more complicated and bloody than the gussied-up past in which we so desperately want to believe, and that until we understand this, we will be incapable of redeeming ourselves and our country.