Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

Without the sanitized history of the 19th century, North Carolina’s white-supremacist regime of the 20th century could not have taken root. This is not to suggest that 19th-century white North Carolinians or white Americans in general held modern views of race—far from it. It does mean, however, that segregation did not develop naturally from the Civil War’s aftermath. In the late 19th century, white supremacists actively smothered interracial coalitions, deprived Black men of the vote, ushered in the Democrat-dominated era of segregation, and then spun a historical narrative that linked white supremacy with a supposedly glorious Confederate past. Twentieth-century North Carolinians, Black and white, thus grew up with white supremacy. It seeped into every part of their lives and affected them in ways they did not recognize.

White supremacy’s most insidious quality was its silent and invisible pervasiveness. Reflecting on the Black freedom movement, Tyson notes that “[e]veryone in this struggle, adversaries and advocates alike, grew up steeped in a poisonous white supremacy that distorted their understandings of history and one another” (320). White supremacy was “both stark and subtle,” for it “permeated daily life so deeply that most people could no more ponder it than a fish might discuss the wetness of water” (17). People who lived under this regime seldom had occasion to step outside of it or think about its origins. Tyson traces these origins to the late-19th-century toppling of North Carolina’s interracial coalition and subsequent historical whitewashing. At that point, white supremacy “became the insoluble glue of civic life, and inseparable from the legacy of the Confederacy” (162).

The most routine interactions occurred in this white-supremacist context. Eddie McCoy, one of Oxford’s young Black Power militants, “traced his rage in 1970 to the ordinary, day-to-day humiliations that white supremacy imposed on his childhood” (164). Black women, for instance, never received the respect due them by age, accomplishment, or basic humanity. A white child might call a Black woman “auntie” but never “Mrs.,” “Miss,” or “Ma’am” (99). Martin Luther King Jr. noted this indignity in his legendary 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Tyson recalls with horror and shame his own participation in these “day-to-day humiliations.” As a six-year-old boy, Tyson and his close friend slammed a door on a younger Black child who annoyed them and then taunted the boy by repeating the n-word over and over again. For Blacks, there was no escape. Even police officers appeared to Black North Carolinians as “storm troopers for white supremacy” (137).

The softer side of white supremacy took the form of paternalism (See: Index of Terms). Tyson credits his mother, Martha Buie Tyson, with escaping her well-to-do family’s unthinking “white supremacist assumptions” (23). This was all the more impressive because Martha “grew up in the shade of that spreading paternalist oak of ‘good race relations’” (32). After the Civil War, wealthy Southerners produced a mountain of nostalgic memoirs contending that the individuals they enslaved had been happy all along. These same self-serving attitudes persisted into the era of segregation, where they manifested in the form of “a dance whose steps required” well-to-do white people “to provide charity to black people, as long as they followed the prescribed routine,” which always featured “effusive expressions of gratitude, and at least pretending to accept their subordinate position in the social hierarchy” (24-25). White benefactors could always cite “their” smiling and grateful Blacks as proof of “good race relations.” These kinds of exchanges “strengthened the system of white supremacy” by “covering its patent injustices with a patina of friendship” (25).

While paternalism might have softened a few degrading injustices, by far the ugliest aspect of white supremacy lay in its rules about sex. Since the 17^th century, Southern statute books had swelled with laws regulating or proscribing interracial sex. Under the slavery system, unscrupulous white men took sexual liberties with enslaved Black women, and their offspring inherited the mother’s enslaved status; the extent of the South’s mixed-race population testified to the frequency of these encounters. Under white supremacy, however, there was no greater taboo than sex between Black men and white women. This taboo lay at the heart of the book, for it was the cause of Henry Marrow’s murder. When Marrow appeared to make a flirtatious remark in the direction of Judy Teel, Robert Teel and his two sons sprang into violent retaliation without any thought. Reflecting on Robert Teel in particular, Tyson observes that “the white supremacy that clouded all of our minds back then must have raged like a tornado in his” (43).

Tyson’s emphasis on sanitized Southern history and pervasive white supremacy highlights the ordeal of white liberals in the second half of the 20th century. Ignorant of the region’s interracial past, and infected with unconscious white supremacy, white liberals often had no idea how to act or where to turn.

Genuine Southern white liberals often felt frustrated as much by their nominal allies as by their white-supremacist enemies. Thad Stem, in particular, took a dim view of all human nature and put little faith in “most liberals and do-gooders,” whom he regarded as “faint of will and fuzzy of purpose” (83). One such do-gooder was Dr. David Coltrane, head of North Carolina’s Good Neighbor Council, who prattled on about the need for interracial communication, “as if slavery and segregation had been some terrible misunderstanding” (97). Black militants held this sort of moderate view in contempt, and even Martin Luther King Jr. condemned many white liberals for their lack of a sense urgency. Tyson agrees that his fellow white liberals, “with their hesitancy and quibbling, were sometimes very little help” (248).

Ineffectiveness and moral preening often went hand in hand. In fact, Tyson recognizes the white liberal’s useless posturing in his own teenage behavior. Disillusioned with the world, young Tyson ran away from home and lived with older friends in a makeshift commune. Though these young, white, suburban exiles were surrounded by poor Black families, they nonetheless “did little to alleviate the abject deprivation all around us and rarely even contemplated it. It was enough that we were good, to say nothing of hip” (281).

Reverend Tyson appears in the book as the quintessential sincere white liberal, albeit with some important differences. Stem would never have mocked Reverend Tyson for his milquetoast views on the importance of “communication” between the races, for Reverend Tyson harbored no such illusions. Nor would Reverend Tyson have languished in a commune, congratulating himself on his moral superiority. Still, even Reverend Tyson could not escape the taint of white supremacy. As a white Methodist minister, for instance, Reverend Tyson had the luxury of preaching fine-sounding sermons about brotherhood, which is why “he was not hard-edged enough to make sense to someone like Eddie McCoy,” one of Oxford’s young Black Power militants (167). Notwithstanding his limitations, Reverend Tyson, “unlike some white liberals,” at least “had guts enough to speak and brains enough to listen” (263).

Perhaps the most confounding problem facing white liberals was the question of how to live day to day inside a system they knew to be unjust. Tyson’s parents hated segregation, yet Tyson’s explanations of his parents’ choices sometimes involve a mixture of truth and rationalization. His mother, for instance, hired a Black woman to clean the Tyson house. Many white women did likewise. Tyson correctly notes that “to refuse to employ Black household help would not have liberated anyone,” but he also acknowledges that “[t]here was nothing clean about the way white people’s houses got cleaned in Oxford, North Carolina, including our own house” (113). Likewise, while Reverend Tyson often preached about race, he also restrained himself when necessary for fear of backlash from congregants, for “the point was to lead the people as far as you could without losing influence or your livelihood. You wanted to remain true to your lights and yet avoid the fate of the irrelevant crusader” (64).

In short, white liberals always meant well and sometimes did good, but they also never fully transcended the evils they deplored. As Tyson explains in the Epilogue, “there is no clean place in this story where anyone can sit down and congratulate themselves” (317).