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 9-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “The Cash Register at the Pool Hall”
Oxford residents in 1970 experience first-hand the transition from King-era nonviolence to Black Power militancy. This transition is anything but seamless, however, as Black leaders are often divided along generational lines between those who idolized or even marched with King and those who came of age in the Vietnam era. Even among younger militants, the movement is not monolithic. Ben Chavis, the public face of Oxford’s Black militancy, actually plays no direct role in most of the violence against white-owned property. Black Vietnam veterans, armed with firebombs, conduct military-style operations against high-value targets such as tobacco warehouses.
Meanwhile, on Sunday, May 17, 1970, the day after the Marrow funeral, Chavis joins Golden Frinks, Eddie McCoy, and others in organizing the first in a series of post-church marches. These are all-Black affairs, as white liberals such as Reverend Tyson and Thad Stem have no real place in a Black Power movement. The Ku Klux Klan organizes counter-rallies. With schools set to integrate in the fall and with tensions worsening, Chavis and Frinks plan a 50-mile march to Raleigh, the state capital. The march begins on Friday, May 22. Willie Mae Marrow, Henry Marrow’s pregnant widow, sits atop a mule-drawn wagon surrounded by a growing throng of marchers. Eddie McCoy recalls that the march was nonviolent, but everyone was well armed in case they encountered trouble. Nearly a thousand people march into Raleigh, but the governor does not meet with them. On Sunday night, back in Oxford, flames engulf a white-owned lumber company’s two-story building.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Perry Mason in the Shoeshine Parlor”
On Monday, May 25, the night after the lumber building burned, a group of Black veterans firebomb two tobacco warehouses. The flammable product produces soaring flames and destruction estimated at more than $1 million. A Raleigh newspaper reports that part of downtown Oxford looks “like Berlin following the Allied bombing raids of World War II” (223). Police never identify the culprits, in part because of the arsonists’ military-style efficiency. These attacks are partly a response to the governor’s snub, but in reality they come from a deep-rooted belief that the legal system will never convict Robert Teel and his sons of Henry Marrow’s murder.
The trial will commence later that summer, but the legal controversy begins on the night of the murder and especially the following day, when Oxford’s Black residents wonder why the police have not yet arrested the Teels. According to the arrest warrant, police wait until Wednesday morning to arrest Robert and Larry Teel. Tyson describes the twists and turns of a trial that begins with jury selection on July 27. Veteran prosecutor W. H. S. Burgwyn faces challenges. The jury pool favors the white defendants. One of his witnesses, Boo Chavis, has a criminal record. The judge once campaigned for an ardent segregationist. All of these handicaps, however, pale in comparison to the inexplicable fact that police failed to arrest and charge Roger Oakley, Robert Teel’s stepson and accomplice in the murder. Defense attorneys strike every potential Black juror, resulting in an all-white jury of seven men and five women. Billy Watkins, lead defense attorney, has carefully managed the Teels’ every move since the night of the murder. After the prosecution witnesses testify to what they saw, Watkins surprises the court by calling Larry Teel to the stand. In a move that would make sense the following day, the younger Teel, unquestionably coached by his attorney, testifies that he had no idea who fired the fatal shot but that he recalls hearing the voices of his father and a third man whom he could not identify. The next day, Watkins calls Roger Oakley to the stand. Teel’s stepson testifies that someone bumped his shoulder and the gun went off accidentally. During cross-examination, an incredulous Burgwyn tries to rattle Oakley by accusing him of being complicit in lawyer’s tricks, since all the witnesses have testified to Larry Teel being the one who held the gun, and Oakley knows that if he claims Marrow’s death was an accident, then Robert and Larry Teel might go free. Oakley repeatedly pleads the Fifth Amendment. Over the next two days, Burgwyn and his fellow prosecutor, the civil rights attorney James Ferguson, expose contradictions in the defense’s case and even create several dramatic moments during summation, but the surprise Oakley maneuver gives the all-white jury the excuse it needs to return verdicts of not guilty. The young Blacks in attendance file out of the courtroom, most either weeping or overcome with rage.
Chapters 9-10 Analysis
The events of late May highlight the dual nature the Black freedom movement had acquired by 1970. On one hand, Golden Frinks, Ben Chavis, Eddie McCoy and hundreds of others make the nonviolent 50-mile march from Oxford to the state capitol in Raleigh. Henry Marrow’s pregnant widow sits atop a mule-drawn cart, a powerful symbol on three different levels. Tyson explains:
The mule cart echoed the one that had hauled Dr. King’s coffin through the streets of Atlanta two years earlier. The mule was a Southern-inflected symbol of the fact that the humble Jesus had ridden into Jerusalem on a donkey; and also of the menial labor that white supremacy had imposed on black people (212).
This is the tone the civil rights movement had acquired under King’s leadership. On the other hand, Eddie McCoy recalls that the nonviolent marchers packed weapons just in case. Then, when the governor failed to meet with the marchers in Raleigh, violence erupted back in Oxford.
From Chapters 9 and 10, one receives an overall picture of a system that must have struck every Black Southerner as calculated for no other purpose besides oppression. The governor’s refusal to meet with the marchers illustrates as much, but it only hints at the depth of the injustice. At the Teels’ arraignment, the judge denied bond and left the defendants in prison until trial. Otherwise, at no point in the entire sequence of events, from Marrow’s murder to the Teels’ acquittal, did Black Southerners find reason to believe that the justice system would work toward finding the truth. Police officers and other officials later would claim that the Teels turned themselves in to law enforcement on Monday night or Tuesday morning after the murder, but the arrest warrant shows that police waited until Wednesday to take the Teels into custody. Defense attorneys struck every potential Black juror from the available pool. The judge had political connections to segregationists. The police failed to arrest Roger Oakley. Even if the police made honest mistakes, Oxford’s Black residents could not help but notice that every mistake worked in favor of the white supremacists. Worst of all, perhaps, defense attorney Watkins’s lawyer tricks seem so obvious in hindsight that they must have appeared that way to everyone in the courtroom at the time. Still, Watkins’s use of confounding testimony from Larry Teel and Roger Oakley merely gave the jury an excuse to acquit.
Any one of these developments in isolation might not have roused such anger from Oxford’s Black residents. All of them together, however, from the governor’s snub to the all-white jury’s verdict, confirmed what they already knew about a system that treated them as second-class citizens.
Related Titles
By Timothy B. Tyson
