Washed in the blood

By Tony W. Cartledge

BR Editor

In 1979, I moved to a North Carolina town with a violent past that lived beneath an uneasy rug.

Just nine years before, a white merchant, his son and a stepson mercilessly beat and shot a black Vietnam veteran to death. The man, who died pleading for his life, had reportedly flirted with the son's wife. A younger black man happened to be in the wrong place, and was shot in the face.

That night, hundreds of people in the town's majority black community took to the streets. Rage boiled. White-owned businesses were looted and burned. Heavily armed members of the Ku Klux Klan stood guard at the storekeeper's home while local chapters of the "bedsheet brigade" held rallies outside of town, burning wooden crosses to invoke their belief in divinely ordained white supremacy.

Local police seemed hesitant to arrest the killers, but after a strategy session with the family lawyer - who happened to be one of the state's most powerful politicians - two of the three turned themselves in. A clear preponderance of evidence pointed to guilt, but a slick trick by the lawyer and a surprise "confession" by the uncharged third man enabled an all white jury drawn from nearby counties to render a verdict of "not guilty."

More riots erupted, more firebombs, more marches. A loose network of black Vietnam veterans employed their combat training to burn several businesses, including two warehouses stacked high with nearly a million dollars' worth of cured tobacco. A black boycott of white businesses followed, along with a perilous march to Raleigh, where leaders sought an audience with a governor who refused to meet with them.

It was an ugly, shameful chapter of North Carolina history, a year that the town would never forget - not that it hasn't tried.

I moved to North Carolina less than a decade later, and lived in that same town for more than five years. I served a church as pastor, learned about tobacco by helping out on the farms, and listened to the auctioneer chant over the golden leaf in local warehouses. I taught school for a year, visited in the hospital, and made many friends.

Even so, I never heard one person talk about the tumultuous events of just nine years before. Perhaps that is why I was so surprised by the depth of feeling that erupted after I encouraged our deacons to invite a local football team - black players and chaperones included - to worship together with our church.

Once the team buses drove in, several church members were ready to drive me out.

I understand better now, thanks to Blood Done Sign My Name, a powerful book by Timothy B. Tyson (New York: Crown Publishers, 2004). Tyson, whose father was pastor of the local United Methodist Church, was 10 years old when the shooting and the riots took place. He heard his best friend confide, "Daddy and Roger and 'em shot 'em a nigger!" He stood on the porch and watched the night sky glow an angry red. And in the years since, he has sought to understand.

Tyson is now professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an accomplished historian. In Blood Done Sign My Name, he builds on a deep and impressive array of research, interviews and personal memories to reconstruct the events that a town tried so hard to forget. Tyson discovered that all copies of the local paper from that period had been "lost," for example - including copies at the newspaper office, the local library, and even the state archives in Raleigh.

As he relates the story of those bloody days in 1970, Tyson labors to unearth the roots of our prejudices and lay them open to the light. The digging is marked by moments of confession in which he examines the culturally inbred racism of his own childhood, gently challenging the reader to do likewise.

Along the pathway to understanding, Tyson draws on insights and incidents from the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960's and 70's, including historic events across North Carolina that many tried vainly to ignore at the time, and have since sought to forget.

Tyson's book is not for the squeamish, for the bloody ground beneath the innocent and the bloody hands of the guilty speak in words as profane as the actions they describe. But they are powerful words.

The title of the book is drawn from the chorus of an old Negro spiritual that finds hope for a better life in believing that "The blood done sign my name."

In the aftermath of my own small attempt at promoting racial harmony, I overheard an elderly farmer teaching his Sunday School class. Knowing that the teacher was opposed to "race-mixing" of any kind, another farmer posed the question of how he might respond to finding black people in heaven.

"That won't be a problem," the teacher replied, "because then they'll be washed in the blood, and they'll be white."

Both men have died in the years since, so I suppose they've had an opportunity to learn the truth.

The blood of Christ may wash away our sins (if not our color), and it may forgive us of our ignorance, but it does not absolve us of the responsibility to do better, and to be better.

Tyson does not pretend to be a saint and his book is not written as a sermon, but it has convicting power.

Given the uniform color palette found in most of our congregations, the evidence suggests that, 50 years after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision first put a chink in the walls of segregation, conviction is still in short supply.