Last spring the UI Center for Human Rights named Timothy Tyson’s Blood Done Sign My Name as this year’s selection for the One Community, One Book project.

As an on-campus sponsor of the project, the UI Libraries is hosting a discussion of this fascinating memoir on Wednesday, September 19th at 7:30 p.m. in the Main Library Second Floor Study Lounge, located directly above the North entrance of the library.

Blood Done Sign My Name, which won the Southern Book Award for Nonfiction and published by Random House in 2004, is the true story of 23-year-old Henry Marrow, who was murdered in 1970.  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.

The author, Timothy B. Tyson, a North Carolina native, is a senior research scholar of documentary studies at the History Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University; visiting professor of American Christianity and southern culture at Duke Divinity School; adjunct professor of history and adjunct professor of American studies at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.