Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

The murder of Henry Marrow in Oxford, North Carolina, on May 11, 1970, occurred more than two years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in Memphis, Tennessee. While King played no role in the events Timothy B. Tyson describes in Blood Done Sign My Name, King’s life and legacy nonetheless loom large over those events, as they do in modern memory of the civil rights movement.

Son of a Baptist minister in Atlanta, King studied theology at Boston University and became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama in 1954. He earned a PhD in 1955 (though many years later it came to light that he had plagiarized large portions of his doctoral dissertation). That same year, 26-year-old King emerged as a leader in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which began when a young Black activist named Rosa Parks defied segregation law by refusing to surrender her seat near the front of a bus to a white passenger. In 1957, King helped found the SCLC, an organization devoted to challenging segregation through nonviolent means.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, King rose to national prominence as the leader of the civil rights movement. He capped his meteoric rise with two dramatic events in 1963. In April, he organized a nonviolent protest against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, where he wrote his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” a classic and comprehensive statement of his philosophy, methods, and goals, as well as an urgent call for an immediate end to racial injustice. Birmingham’s segregationist city government responded with brutal tactics such as the use of police dogs and high-pressure water hoses against Black children marching in peaceful protest. Images of the unrest and segregationist wrath drew national attention to Birmingham and prompted a televised address from President John F. Kennedy. In August 1963, King led a triumphant March on Washington, where he stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial and delivered his legendary “I Have a Dream” speech.

King’s victories in 1963 resulted in landmark civil rights legislation, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which effectively restored the original intent of the century-old Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution. In popular memory, these laws represent the apex of the civil rights movement.

King did not rest, however. On April 4, 1967—exactly one year before his assassination—he publicly denounced the Vietnam War in a speech at New York City’s Riverside Church. He went to Memphis in late March 1968 to support striking sanitation workers and continue fighting economic inequality. On the evening of April 4, 1968, while King stood on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel, an assassin fired a bullet into King’s jaw. The civil rights leader died an hour later at St. Joseph’s Hospital.

King’s assassination, which decades later the King family regards as the product of a US government conspiracy, had a devastating impact on the civil rights movement and a delusive effect on American memory of that movement. King went from being a controversial antiwar figure and champion of an oppressed Black underclass to a universally revered martyr. Tyson argues that since 1968, Americans have “transformed King into a kind of innocuous black Santa Claus, genial and vacant, a benign vessel that can be filled with whatever generic good wishes the occasion dictates” (107).

In 1968, however, many young Black Americans had a different reaction to the King assassination. Whatever the actual motives behind the murder, Black militants interpreted it as proof that nonviolent resistance would accomplish only so much. Race riots broke out in cities across America. An assertive Black Power movement rose to demand respect and an end to white supremacy. At the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, US track medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos stood on the podium during the medal ceremony and raised their fists in the Black Power salute while the US national anthem played.

This is the context in which Oxford’s Black residents responded to the murder of Henry Marrow: diminishing support among young Black Americans for King-style, nonviolent solutions to problems of racial injustice.