“Blood Done Sign My Name” by Timothy B. Tyson, the true story of a black U.S. Army veteran killed by three white men in Oxford, N.C. in the early 1970s, is the 2007 selection for “One Community, One Book — All Johnson County Reads.”

The project promoting insights on human rights in the United States is coordinated by the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights (UICHR) in conjunction with other sponsoring organizations from Johnson County and the UI.

The goal of the project is to encourage people to read and discuss the selected book in order to develop a greater community awareness of human rights issues locally, nationally and internationally.

The book, published by Random House in 2004, is the true story of 23-year-old Henry Marrow, who was murdered in 1973. In the wake of the killing, young African-Americans took to the streets. The author’s father, the pastor of Oxford’s all-white Methodist church, urged the town to come to terms with its bloody racial history. In the end, however, the Tyson family was forced to move away.

Tyson returns to Oxford 30 years later to make sense of what happened and how the events changed his life. As he weaves together childhood memories with the realities of present-day Oxford, he sheds new light on America’s struggle for racial justice.

“Blood Done Sign My Name” won the Southern Book Award for Nonfiction. Tyson, a North Carolina native, teaches and writes about the history of African-American freedom movements in the 20th-century South. He holds appointments in the department of history at Duke and in the department of American studies at the University of North Carolina.

The “One Community, One Book” project will run from mid-September through mid-November. Teachers, students, librarians, book groups and others are encouraged to participate. By announcing the selection now, the project sponsors hope to allow time for groups to read the book and participate in fall community discussion forums, and for teachers to plan classroom discussions around the book.

The UI Libraries will host a community discussion of the book in the fall.