Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

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When he was but 10 years old, Tim Tyson heard one of his boyhood friends in Oxford, N.C. excitedly blurt the words that were to forever change his life: "Daddy and Roger and 'em shot 'em a nigger!" The cold-blooded street murder of young Henry Marrow by an ambitious, hot-tempered local businessman and his kin in the Spring of 1970 would quickly fan the long-flickering flames of racial discord in the proud, insular tobacco town into explosions of rage and street violence. It would also turn the white Tyson down a long, troubled reconciliation with his Southern roots that eventually led to a professorship in African-American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison--and this profoundly moving, if deeply troubling personal meditation on the true costs of America's historical racial divide. Taking its title from a traditional African-American spiritual, Tyson skillfully interweaves insightful autobiography (his father was the town's anti-segregationist Methodist minister, and a man whose conscience and human decency greatly informs the son) with a painstakingly nuanced historical analysis that underscores how little really changed in the years and decades after the Civil Rights Act of 1965 supposedly ended racial segregation. The details are often chilling: Oxford simply closed its public recreation facilities rather than integrate them; Marrow's accused murderers were publicly condemned, yet acquitted; the very town's newspaper records of the events--and indeed the author's later account for his graduate thesis--mysteriously removed from local public records. But Tyson's own impassioned personal history lessons here won't be denied; they're painful, yet necessary reminders of a poisonous American racial legacy that's so often been casually rewritten--and too easily carried forward into yet another century by politicians eagerly employing the cynical, so-called "Southern Strategy." --Jerry McCulley

Book Description

"Daddy and Roger and 'em shot 'em a nigger."

Those words, whispered to ten-year-old Tim Tyson by one of his playmates in the late spring of 1970, heralded a firestorm that would forever transform the small tobacco market town of Oxford, North Carolina.

On May 11, 1970, Henry Marrow, a 23-year-old black veteran, walked into a crossroads store owned by Robert Teel, a rough man with a criminal record and ties to the Ku Klux Klan, and came out running. Teel and two of his sons chased Marrow, beat him unmercifully, and killed him in public as he pleaded for his life. In the words of a local prosecutor: "They shot him like you or I would kill a snake."

Like many small Southern towns, Oxford had barely been touched by the civil rights movement. But in the wake of the killing, young African Americans took to the streets, led by 22-year-old Ben Chavis, a future president of the NAACP. As mass protests crowded the town square, a cluster of returning Vietnam veterans organized what one termed "a military operation." While lawyers battled in the courthouse that summer in a drama that one termed "a Perry Mason kind of thing," the Ku Klux Klan raged in the shadows and black veterans torched the town's tobacco warehouses.

With large sections of the town in flames, Tyson's father, the pastor of Oxford's all-white Methodist church, pressed his congregation to widen their vision of humanity and pushed the town to come to terms with its bloody racial history. In the end, however, the Tyson family was forced to move away.

Years later, historian Tim Tyson returned to Oxford to ask Robert Teel why he and his sons had killed Henry Marrow. "That nigger committed suicide, coming in here wanting to four-letter-word my daughter-in-law," Teel explained.

The black radicals who burned much of Oxford also told Tim their stories. "It was like we had a cash register up there at the pool hall, just ringing up how much money we done cost these white people," one of them explained. "We knew if we cost 'em enough goddamn money they was gonna start changing some things."

In the tradition of To Kill a Mockingbird, Blood Done Sign My Name is a classic work of conscience, a defining portrait of a time and place that we will never forget. Tim Tyson's riveting narrative of that fiery summer and one family's struggle to build bridges in a time of destruction brings gritty blues truth, soaring gospel vision, and down-home humor to our complex history, where violence and faith, courage and evil, despair and hope all mingle to illuminate America's enduring chasm of race.

Customer Reviews:

Grippingly Written, Moving, and Historically Powerful.......2007-08-16

I finally got around to reading this memoir this summer and was in awe of the author's narrative gifts. This story reads like a novel and is full of plain human wisdom, an emotional openness combining humility and pride, wry humor, sharp political analysis, and a can't-put-it-down story line that comes to terms with America's number one cultural problem: racism. This is a book of local history that gets at the human condition, and a work of history that reads like great literature. I'm telling everyone I can to read it, and that includes whoever reads this. Don't pay attention to any of the so-called "corrections" made by some other reviewers here. This is a must-read historical work that shows an astute and perceptive ability to understand its widely varying participants' points of view and experiences, while not shrinking from the moral and historical obligation to draw judgments. There is only one word to use: *brilliant.* (I'm not one to use that lightly when talking about either autobiography or
history.)

Disclaimer: The writer of this review is a professional historian with a Ph.D., but one who has never met Timothy Tyson.

Evangelical Pastor - 63 years old.......2007-07-29

Few books are as challenging for me as this one. I lived through the years of this story and consistently refused to believe that our racism was as extensive or deeply rooted as it was. Take away: the challenge to see it in our present day and to do something about it.

A mixture of polemic, interesting recollections, and accounts of questionable credibility.......2007-07-18

I was born and grew up in Oxford, North Carolina as a white boy, and graduated from the
University of North Carolina in 1949. I have lived in a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland for many
years.

Tyson deserves credit for deploring the murder and acquittal of the murderer in the book.
However, he tends to be polemic: all black people in it are noble; all but a few white people are
some combination of racist, ignorant, or narrow-minded. (It is similar in that respect to Leon
Uris's novel "Exodus", in which all Jews are noble and bigger than life, while all others are hateful
or, at best, not very bright.)

He often uses a down-home style of writing, calling his parents "Daddy" and "Mama" and being
addressed as "Little Buck" by his father, which he apparently feels makes him and his family seem
to be folksy, good plain people.

However, the book is not without its shortcomings.

Accounts of questionable credibility:

¶¶He states that tear gas was used by Oxford police in 1944 to dispel a crowd of black people
who were protesting the arrest of two men. I witnessed the event and remember no tear gas--had
there been, I think I would never have forgotten it.

¶¶An account of the torching of buildings in Oxford on May 25, 1970 by angry black people
following the killing of Marrow describes two tobacco warehouses which were among
them:"Inside these warehouses were eight hundred thousand pounds of golden cured tobacco, a
known flammable substance, with a total value of more than a million dollars." I find it hard to
believe that any tobacco would have been in those warehouses in May.

Tobacco was brought by the farmers to Oxford warehouses from mid-September through
mid-November, where it was sold at auction and immediately taken by the buyers to their Oxford
processing plants, and then shipped off to the cigarette manufacturers. By some time in late
November, all of the warehouses became empty.

Although the whole procedure I describe above could have changed somewhat by 1970, I still
find it hard to believe that there would have been tobacco in the warehouses in May, by which
time it would have probably become dry and crumbly.

¶¶The following exchange supposedly took place during the 1930's between Major T.G. stem (a
prominent white man in Oxford) and a man described in the book as "a local white bootlegger."
Having occurred long before Tyson was born, it was recounted to him by Thad Stem, the Major's
son and a close friend of the Tyson family.

"Major Stem was leaving Hall's drugstore with his son (Thad) and they passed Mrs. G. C. Shaw,
the wife of the principal at Mary Potter High, the local Negro high school.

'Good afternoon, Mrs. Shaw,' the Major said, tipping his hat.

A local white bootlegger, idling under the store awning, accosted Major Stem. 'Why'd you call
that [...] woman Mrs. Shaw'?" he demanded.

'Well, Mrs. Shaw's older than I am,' he began softly. 'She's better educated than I am,and she has
more money.' Then, thrusting the bootlegger away from him, the major exploded: 'But more to
the point, what I call Mrs. Shaw is none of your goddamned business, you low-life taxidermist,
you two-for-a-nickel jackal, you knee-crawling [...], net.' These were the days when
people really knew how to cuss. Back then, the appendage 'net' meant a real [...]...on the
way home (Thad) asked his father why on earth he had called the bootlegger a 'taxidermist.' The
major said quietly that a taxidermist is a man who mounts animals."

If not a total fabrication, the story seems to me to have been mostly made up.

In those earlier times, I never heard any white person in Oxford address or refer to a black person
as Mr./Mrs./Ms. (However, by some strange logic, a black doctor was referred to as Dr. X by
white people. Dr. Ellis Toney was a black practitioner there for many years and was so referred
to. The same was the case for some black ministers, who were referred to as Pastor or Reverend
such-and-such.)

¶¶In writing about the slave trade, Tyson speaks of "the dark Atlantic, where the bones of
somewhere around ten million Africans settled into the sand, thrown overboard by the slave ships
that plied those waters in the early days of the republic (the USA)."

Where did this 10 million figure come from? Tyson provides no source. One reference, "Slavery:
A World History", by Milton Meltzer, says that about 2.2 million died that way.

Degrading most of Oxford's black people by stereotyping them as uncultured:

The most puzzling aspect of the book is: On the one hand, Tyson makes the legitimate point that
black residents of Oxford and Granville County, after long having been subjected to a segregated,
inferior status in society, deserved to be recognized as having equal rights with white citizens.
Yet, at the same time, he consistently shows these same black people as being crude and unable to
say anything without massacring English grammar.

"I knowed him right good, and I liked him all right. He didn't hurt nobody." "Yeah, we was
listening to TV, that's how we got involved in the first sit-ins in Oxford, because we saw on TV
they was doing it up in Greensboro." "Me and a guy named Ronald Jordan, me and him climbed
up on the Confederate soldier..." And there are many more.

I know from personal experience that many black people in Oxford, then and now, are much more
cultured than Tyson portrays them. I also know from my volunteer work at the Helping Up
Mission in Baltimore, where I tutor men who are recovering from drug and alcohol addiction in
the 3R's (all of whom to date have been black), that most black people, like anyone anywhere, will
grasp an opportunity to become more cultured.

Heartbreaking and Revelatory.......2007-05-18

An essential history and memoir of a time whose facts are often forgotten and even actively repressed. The present doesn't make sense without honestly examining the past, and this book does that with humility and emotional power. Even if you think you know this history (as I did) you very well may not.

essential.......2007-03-15

For those of us who think we understand by reading about racial prejudice and thinking about what it must be like, should read this book. We still won't really understand, but we will be a much closer than we were before.

American Abstract Art of the 1930's and 1940's (Art History)

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Great coffee table book on Non-Objective Art Movement
Lost and Found
Lost and Found

American Abstract Art of the 1930's and 1940's (Art History)
Robert Knott
Manufacturer: Harry N. Abrams
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Customer Reviews:

Great coffee table book on Non-Objective Art Movement.......2006-06-16

Liked this book quite a bit for the quality of the images and the breadth of the artists covered. The biographies are very clear and interested. My interest in this book stems from my purchase of a picture from one of the artists in the book (http://www.dinesfamily.org/DinesArt.htm).

Good purchase for anyone interested in this narrow spectrum of modern art

Lost and Found.......2000-06-11

Before the Second World War, while the "Ash Can" school was stealing the cultural limelight, a group of European immigrants brought the abstract European tradition to America. Their work is still exciting and fresh, as this skillfully assembled collection makes clear. Unless you have studied the period extensively, you're likely to recognize only a handful of names, Calder and Stuart among them. What a wonderful surprise this book is. How could we have overlooked these gloriously gifted artists?

Lost and Found.......2000-06-11

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AN AMAZING STORY OF LIES AND DECEPTION
Very predictable
It Didn't Click
Mediocre editing and a boring delivery
You might want to read it just for laughs.

Dance Of Death
Dale Hudson
Manufacturer: Pinnacle
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0786017295

Book Description

LETHAL BEAUTY Kimberly Renee Poole, 21, led a double life. The Winston-Salem, North Carolina area housewife and mother was also a topless dancer at a strip club. She craved jewelry, designer clothing, and adulterous affairs with both men and women. Brent Poole, her hopelessly devoted spouse, could deny her nothing. But that wasn't enough for Renee. She wanted his money and his life.
INFERNAL TRIANGLE Murder moved from fantasy to reality after Renee Poole began an affair with John Boyd Frazier, a patron at the Silver Fox Gentleman's Club, where she worked. On the night of June 9, 1998, on the pretext of celebrating their wedding anniversary, Poole lured her husband to an oceanfront hotel in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. While their young daughter slept in the hotel room, Renee made love to Brent on the deserted beach-then delivered him to Frazier, who shot him dead.
AMERICAN NIGHTMARE From the start, police knew Renee's story didn't add up, and the investigation that followed exposed the dark details of how Brent Poole's marriage to his dream woman ended in cold blood.
Customer Reviews:

AN AMAZING STORY OF LIES AND DECEPTION.......2007-08-30
I was so engrossed in Dance of Death that I read the book in two nights. What amazes me is that Renee Poole was so devious and evil that she could stand there on the beach and watch her boyfriend kill her husband, the father of her child. Even worse, she planned the trip and lured her husband to the beach, knowing all the time John Boyd Frazier would be there to kill him. How could one woman be so cold? Only Renee Poole knows the answer to that question. This is the second book I have read by author Dale Hudson and I have thorougly enjoyed both. Normally, I don't write reviews, but this author has been criticized very heavily for errors and misspellings in the book. Granted, they take away from the story, but I don't think it is the author's fault for these mistakes. Every book has them, it is just that this particular publisher has a few more errors than normal. But it still doesn't take away from the story that Hudson has written. True crime stories are always about mayhem and death, and this author does a super job capturing these moments. I would recommend this book to any reader.
Very predictable.......2007-08-23
The first half of this book was good. Interesting and well written. However, I felt it unnecessary to read the second half for I already knew what was going to happen.
It Didn't Click.......2007-05-25
In fairness to author Hudson, any suspense this reviewer might have enjoyed from "Dance of Death" was wiped away by an incident on the West Side of Manhattan in the winter of 1977. Back then, a couple emerged from a party, ready to return to their East Side apartment, only to find their car had a flat tire. (Hint: No one drives short distances here). While putting on the spare, the husband was murdered, with his spouse unharmed. It did not take NYPD long to smell the rat and soon wifey and the perp were on their way to the Big House. Transfer that scene to a nighttime beach in Myrtle Beach, SC and one has the crux of the DD story. This review won't give away the ending, but it must be obvious. And if it isn't then the front and back cover of DD spell it out! And Tundra will be reassured to learn that the "Ann Rule rule" is also in effect: those centerfold photos also divulge all. How any readers found any suspense in DD is beyond this observer. There is another critical problem: DD is too long! The tales of police investigations, interrogations and the prosecution are far too verbose. DD cries out for that proverbial stern editor with a sharp blue pencil to thin out the text. This reviewer has the following recommendations for potential readers: 1) Scroll down! Most reviews of DD are favorable! This is one of those pesky minority opinions. 2) Totally ignore the front cover, back cover and the centerfold. 3) Don't relate the incident herein to any other real life crime. Just start reading. Those who can follow this well-intended advice may enjoy DD. On a positive note, this does happen to be a well-researched and well-documented story. Also, author Hudson has does a fine job of interjecting local background and color; folks in the Carolinas should pounce. This reader enjoyed Chapter 4 which is devoted to the history and development of Myrtle Beach. The activities described in DD aside, the town appears to be a nice place to visit!
Mediocre editing and a boring delivery.......2007-05-07
I was excited to come across this book as I live about 2 hours from Myrtle Beach, yet had never heard of the Brent Poole case. I am halfway through the book and am disappointed so far.

I, personally, like a true crime book to really delve into the personal life and psyche of the main people involved. Most of the information this book gives regarding Brent and Renee Poole can be gleaned from the back cover. Brent was a young, loving father and husband; Renee was a stripper who had an affair. How about a few more details of their past?? Yes, the author does recount a few stories of when they met, when Brent proposed, their breakups, etc., but, in my opinion, a LOT more could have been divulged about their personalities and their past.

Instead, this book details AT LENGTH the interviews the police had with Renee, ad nauseum. Several key points are repeated when relaying interview information. I've skimmed quite a bit through this book.

This is nitpicky, but the editing leaves something to be desired. Incorrectly spelled words, awkward sentence structure, and strange eupehmisms are just a few examples of bad editing.
You might want to read it just for laughs........2007-03-29
I am a huge true crime lover. Occasionally, while a story may be interesting enough that I want to see how it ends, it is also flawed enough that I begin to skim the book. Dale Hudson's "Dance of Death" broke my record. It is 411 pages long, and I began to skim on page 23. Make no mistake - the story, of a woman, Renee Poole, and her boyfriend who conspire to kill her husband, is fascinating. The fascination is however marred by what must be some of the worst writing I have ever encountered. Almost every page contains examples, so let me begin:
1. Apparently Mr. Hudson had to complete a minimum number of pages. For example, chapter four is a brief history of Myrtle Beach, SC. It adds nothing to the story. But it provides four extra pages. Filler abounds.
2. Mr. Hudson uses quoted conversation to move the story along. There is nothing at all wrong with this device, but the quotes should be at least marginally believable. Here, too many are not, leading to dialog which feels forced.
3. On pg. 98, he writes, "(Altman) stared at her expressionless. Unsmiling, in a far seeing place." English is my native language, and I am quite sure that passage has no meaning in English. I don't believe "Renee was determined to override her her physical body." does either.
4. Then there are the CONSTANT similes. Hudson writes: "(Brown's heart)was pumping adrenaline to his brain like a two-horsepower sump pump."; "The long and thin man...looked as burdened as an old plow horse."; "The limp body sounded like a fallen sack of potatoes."; and, my personal favorite, "Renee cocked her head like one of the gray squirrels that scampered along the power lines from the tall oak trees to the police station." Hudson actually wrote those. These quotes sound like they were written by an 8th grader whose class has just learned about similes. It is almost laughable.
It is really too bad that this story was not written by someone else, because, as I stated, it really is interesting. But unless you are totally unconcerned about basic literary competence, I'd try to find the information somewhere else.

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Tar Heel Politics 2000
Paul Luebke
Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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The Tar Heel State: A History of North Carolina

North Carolina Government and Politics (Politics and Governments of the American States)

The Waterman's Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina

Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy

Nowhere Else on Earth

ASIN: 0807824526
Release Date: 1998-11-11

Book Description
Offering an insightful analysis of North Carolina political trends and personalities, Paul Luebke moves beyond the usual labels of Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal. In Tar Heel Politics 2000, he argues that North Carolina's real political battle is between two factions of the state's political and economic elite: modernizers and traditionalists. Modernizers draw their strength from the bankers, developers, news media, and other urban interests that support growth, he says. Traditionalists, in contrast, are rooted in small-town North Carolina and fundamentalist Protestantism, tied to agriculture and low-wage industries and threatened by growth and social change. Both modernizers and traditionalists are linked with politicians who represent their interests.
An updated and revised version of Luebke's Tar Heel Politics: Myths and Realities (1990), Tar Heel Politics 2000 highlights the resurgence of the southern Republican Party for the first time in a century and discusses a number of significant changes that have occurred over the last decade. These include the institutionalization of a viable two-party system in the General Assembly, the further shift of native-born whites throughout the South into the Republican voting column, and ideological conflict in North Carolina that parallels to some extent the post-1994 battles between the Republican Congress and the Clinton White House. In addition, the book provides a detailed analysis of the political appeal of Senator Jesse Helms and draws on Luebke's insights as a member of the North Carolina State House since 1991.

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A vanishing way of life.

SODOM LAUREL ALBUM

Junior,s great nephew

Sodom Laurel Album
Rob Amberg
Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0807827428
Release Date: 2001-10-31

Book Description
When photographer Rob Amberg first met Dellie Norton and her adopted son, Junior, in 1975, Norton was seventy-six years old and had lived most of her life in the small mountain community of Sodom Laurel, North Carolina, surrounded by close kin, tobacco fields, and the rugged wilderness of the southern Appalachians. Sodom Laurel Album traces the growing relationship between Norton and Amberg across the next two decades, years marked by the seasons of raising and harvesting food and tobacco and by the gatherings of family and friends for conversation, storytelling, and music.
Richly evocative images are interlaced with stories of the people of Sodom Laurel and with Amberg's own candid journals, which reveal his gradually growing understanding of this world he entered as a stranger. The book also includes a CD featuring Dellie Norton, Doug Wallin, and other singers of traditional Appalachian music. Through words, photographs, oral histories, and songs, Sodom Laurel Album tells the moving story of a once-isolated community on the brink of change, the people who live there, and the music that binds them together.
Sodom Laurel Album is the companion publication to a traveling exhibition that will open at the Asheville Art Museum in 2002.
Customer Reviews:

A vanishing way of life........2006-04-19
I first became aware of Dellie Norton because of the movie "Songcatcher" (available on Amazon). A friend suggested I see it. I really liked the music, and something seemed really familiar about it. Then, I heard my aunt talking about it being based on real life people and I start doing some research.

Back in the early part of the 20th century, an English music researcher and lecturer named Cecil Sharp traveled to the U.S. to track down old songs. He got more songs in Madison county than any other place in the country. Songcatcher is loosely based on those events. It was while I was researching that I happened across some articles about Rob Amberg, and I went looking for his book.

When I first ran across the Sodom Laurel Album, I ended up buying copies for all my close family members and friends. Like the other 2 reviewers, Debra and David, I am related to most of the people in the book and on the CD. In fact, my own father, Warren, was born right down the road from Dellie's house.

After reading their words and studying the pictures, I have an even greater respect for my kin than before, and I can't help but feel that we've really lost something important from our lives. Not just my family, but our entire nation.

If you want a really good look at the way life was for most of the nation less than a hundred years ago, the stark images of Rob Amberg have really captured it.

For even more detail about mountain life, you may want to read a couple of books by Sheila Kay Adams (she is in Sodom Laurel Album): Come Go With Me and My Old True Love. They are based on life in and around Sodom (Revere) and are available from Amazon.

Sheila also carries on Dellie's legacy; she is a traditional ballad singer (she was taught by Dellie Norton) and sells CDs on her web site, and performs in festivals around the country. Details on the web since Amazon doesn't seem to carry her CDs.
SODOM LAUREL ALBUM.......2003-01-01
I received this book as a Christmas gift and have loved every page. The stories and the photographs are great. I believe that anyone who is fascinated with mountain living as I am will love this book.
Junior,s great nephew.......2002-11-11
I'm David Norton Junior is my uncle. This is a great book if your intrested in the way we live in the mountains you should get this book full of great photos of my uncle and aunt Dellie and one great picture of my grandpa Willard.

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From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South 1938-1980
Bruce J. Schulman
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0822315378

Book Description
From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt investigates the effects of federal policy on the American South from 1938 until 1980 and charts the close relationship between federal efforts to reform the South and the evolution of activist government in the modern United States. Decrying the South’s economic backwardness and political conservatism, the Roosevelt Administration launched a series of programs to reorder the Southern economy in the 1930s. After 1950, however, the social welfare state had been replaced by the national security state as the South’s principal benefactor. Bruce J. Schulman contrasts the diminished role of national welfare initiatives in the postwar South with the expansion of military and defense-related programs. He analyzes the contributions of these growth-oriented programs to the South’s remarkable economic expansion, to the development of American liberalism, and to the excruciating limits of Sunbelt prosperity, ultimately relating these developments to southern politics and race relations. By linking the history of the South with the history of national public policy, Schulman unites two issues that dominate the domestic history of postwar Americaâthe emergence of the Sunbelt and the expansion of federal power over the nation’s economic and social life. A forcefully argued work, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt, originally published in 1991(Oxford University Press), will be an important guide to students and scholars of federal policy and modern Southern history.

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still relevant

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Beyond the Headline Makers

Armed Resistance to the Viciousness of Jim Crow

Read this book

Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power
Timothy B. Tyson
Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0807825026

Book Description
This book tells the remarkable story of Robert F. Williams—one of the most influential black activists of the generation that toppled Jim Crow and forever altered the arc of American history. In the late 1950s, as president of the Monroe, North Carolina, branch of the NAACP, Williams and his followers used machine guns, dynamite, and Molotov cocktails to confront Klan terrorists. Advocating "armed self-reliance" by blacks, Williams challenged not only white supremacists but also Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights establishment. Forced to flee during the 1960s to Cuba—where he broadcast "Radio Free Dixie," a program of black politics and music that could be heard as far away as Los Angeles and New York City—and then China, Williams remained a controversial figure for the rest of his life.
Historians have customarily portrayed the civil rights movement as a nonviolent call on America's conscience—and the subsequent rise of Black Power as a violent repudiation of the civil rights dream. But Radio Free Dixie reveals that both movements grew out of the same soil, confronted the same predicaments, and reflected the same quest for African American freedom. As Robert Williams's story demonstrates, independent black political action, black cultural pride, and armed self-reliance operated in the South in tension and in tandem with legal efforts and nonviolent protest.
Customer Reviews:

still relevant.......2007-04-03
A compelling look at a fascinating figure of the modern American civil rights movement whose story continues to be relevant. Particularly interesting is the nuanced and thoughtful treatment of the complex dialogue and tension between "nonviolence" and "self-defense" in the history of the Black freedom struggle in the US.

The period of Williams's life following his exile is only very tersely outlined (as the author himself admits), giving the book a bit of an abrupt end. More analysis of Williams's decision to renounce public life, of his scepticism about the later direction of the "Black Power" movement that had claimed him as one of its icons, and of his decision to seek an "understanding" with the US gov't enabling his return from exile, would probably make for most interesting reading.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.......2006-12-27
Mainstream history seemingly gets real nervous about who is carrying a loaded weapon and who one associates with. Combine the two and it will take an outstanding historian like Timothy B. Tyson to bring to life the tireless work and controversies surrounding civil-rights activist Robert F. Williams.

Williams brought the element of armed self-defense in seeking equal rights, especially in his hometown of Monroe, N.C. Though Williams, a military veteran, stressed that the specter of self-defense was necessary - and proven successful in confronting the KKK and other racists - his stance drew the ire of the NAACP's national office, the FBI and other government agencies & those in the civil rights movement who stressed non-violent actions no matter what the situation.

The book is more than a biography on Williams. It shows how his demands for equal rights meant something different to various individuals and groups, though Williams would not politically "fall in line" with any movement. It was the perceived idealism that drew many to Williams, but it was such a coalition - including Malcolm X and the Socialist Workers Party - that made him particularly dangerous in the eyes of federal officials.

While in exile from the U.S. after being erroneously charged for violating several federal laws, Williams was in Cuba after the revolution, North Viet Nam during the war, China as the Cultural Revolution caught fire and travelled to Africa. His independent thinking got him in trouble in Cuba; a radio show he conducted to the U.S., Radio Free Dixie, along with public comments he made, found Williams facing the wrath of Cuban government officials and ultimately led him to China.

The book also shows how his wife, Mabel and women in Monroe & in other cities not only demanded civil rights, but were willing to defend themselves and their families from violent attacks through the barrel of a gun. Mabel Williams was also an important person in the writing, editing and publishing of a newsletter that gained national and international attention.

Williams was an important catalyst for Huey Newton and the Deacons for Defense in their quests to skillfully confront the haters on the streets. In yet again another example on why we must continue to look past the history as it is written in textbooks, Robert F. Williams showed what can be accomplished when the intimidators become the intimidated while trying to perpetuate the myth of white supremacy.
Beyond the Headline Makers.......2006-11-05
The civil rights movement was not created by, lead by, or moved forward by the dozen or so media heros whose names we all now know. The civil rights movement succeed because so many ordinary people decided that they could no longer stand to live in the midst of injustice, and decided to step out of their daily lives and do something about it.

Robert Williams did just that. An ordinary working class guy, he used his people skills to form a network of working class black people who did not have the patience of the old line leaders of the local NAACP chapter in his hometown. He got himself elected president of the chapter, and backed by dozens of local people, formed one of the most activist chapters in the country. The national NAACP never was comfortable with Williams or the work of his chapter, and at best held them at arms length.

Inevitably, Williams' hard pressure on local structures of racism lead to a backlash. When he was attacked and his family threatened with death, the local police did nothing. When he and his community defended themselves, by taking up arms to combat the armed violence of the white racists, he was charged with murder, and became the subject of a massive FBI hunt. Escaping to Cuba, he operated a radio station, beaming the "truth" along with progressive jazz and blues which would never be played on corporate radio in the south, to Dixie.

Ultimately, Williams' stance of self-defense was taken up by Stokley Carmichael in the South, and by the Black Panther Party in Oakland, and is now well known as the "Black Power" movement. But at the time, it was simply a slightly more hardline version of the NAACP. Local chapters of the NAACP, building on long traditions of mutual support in black communities throughout the south, supported by thousands of ordinary people, formed the backbone of the civil rights movement. Anyone who thinks otherwise should read the statements by Bob Moses and the other SNCC organizers, who readily admitted that they could never have accomplished anything at all if not for the decades of groundwork done by the local NAACP chapters throughout the south.

Great book, which everyone interested in the history of the Civil Rights movement, or just interested in the way social changes really happen, should read.
Armed Resistance to the Viciousness of Jim Crow.......2005-06-11
Ultimately, the notion of white supremacy and the so-called glory of the Lost Cause always devolved to the use of violence and intimidation against black people and any one who sided with them. Williams' is an amazing story of courage and determination as he challenged the KKK and assorted white rabble of rural North Carolina in the 1940s through the 1960s in his quest for racial justice.

Williams, a soldier during WW2, came back to Monroe, NC after the war and took on the clowns and goons of the KKK and the local and state white government. When they fired on his home, he shot back, upsetting the applecart of segregation.

Tyson's book is a powerful portrayal of a man quite willing to die for his rights, a man fed up with the violence degradation inflicted on him by southern society, and a man willing to kill to protect his property, his person and his family.

Tyson's realistic and entertaining portrayal of the stupid and inane actions of white southern racists in North Carolina is another reason to read this book. The local thuggery is almost comical, until one remembers they are well armed and prone to alcholism and violence. Tyson goes into great detail about a 1958 case where two black boys, 10 and 8 were BEATEN and IMPRISONED for kissing a white girl.

Williams and his wife are not well known heroes of the Civil Rights struggle. This book gave me a greater appreciation of the vicious hatred, violence, and stupidity they were fighting, and how disciplined and determined the Civil Rights struggle had to be in the face of overwhelming white resistance.
Read this book.......2005-05-07
highly recommended to anyone who enjoys U.S. history. I wish this book and Williams' life story and struggle were more well-known

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North Carolina History

Through Survivors' Eyes: From the Sixties to the Greensboro Massacre
Sally Avery Bermanzohn
Manufacturer: Vanderbilt University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0826514391

Book Description
On the morning of November 3, 1979, a group of black and white demonstrators were preparing to march against the Ku Klux Klan through the streets of Greensboro, North Carolina, when a caravan of Klansmen and Nazis opened fire on them. Eighty-eight seconds later, five demonstrators lay dead and ten others were wounded. Four TV stations recorded their deaths by Klan gunfire. Yet, after two criminal trials, not a single gunman spent a day in prison. Despite this outrage, the survivors won an unprecedented civil-court victory in 1985 when a North Carolina jury held the Greensboro police jointly liable with the KKK for wrongful death.
In passionate first-person accounts, Through Survivors' Eyes tells the story of six remarkable people who set out to change the world. The survivors came of age as the "protest generation," joining the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. They marched for civil rights, against war, for textile and healthcare workers, and for black power and women's liberation. As the mass mobilizations waned in the mid-1970s, they searched for a way to continue their activism, studied Marxism, and became communists.
Nelson Johnson, who grew up on a farm in eastern North Carolina in a family proud of its African American heritage, settled in Greensboro in the 1960s and became a leader of the Black Liberation Movement and a decade later the founder of the Faith Community Church. Willena Cannon, the daughter of black sharecroppers, witnessed a KKK murder as a child and was spurred to a life of activism. Her son, Kwame Cannon, was only ten when he saw the Greensboro killings. Marty Nathan, who grew up the daughter of a Midwestern union organizer and came to the South to attend medical school, lost her husband to the Klan/Nazi gunfire. Paul Bermanzohn, the son of Jewish Holocaust survivors, was permanently injured during the shootings. Sally Bermanzohn, a child of the New York suburbs who came south to join the Civil Rights Movement, watched in horror as her friends were killed and her husband was wounded.
Through Survivors' Eyes is the story of people who abandoned conventional lives to become civil rights activists and then revolutionaries. It is about blacks and whites who united against Klan/Nazi terror, and then had to overcome unbearable hardship, and persist in seeking justice. It is also a story of one divided southern community, from the protests of black college students of the late 1960s to the convening this January of a Truth and Community Reconciliation Project (on the South African model) intended to reassess the Massacre.
Customer Reviews:

North Carolina History.......2006-05-11
This story is compelling as it tells the story of six activists and how they are connected by the tragic Greensboro Massacre. I learned about the protests and history of activism in North Carolina and the injustices that these brave students and workers faced. I enjoyed reading the book because the voices changed throughout allowing the reader to understand how each character became involved in activism leading up to the Greensboro Massacre.

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North Carolina Fuel Gas Code- (2000 International Fuel Gas Code with North Carolina Amendments) 2002 Edition
International Code Council
Manufacturer: North Carolina Building Code Council
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Ring-bound
ASIN: B000KFP7LW

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Touching memoir of tenant farm life

Throwed Away: Failures of Progress in Eastern North Carolina
Linda Flowers
Manufacturer: University of Tennessee Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0870497677

Customer Reviews:

Touching memoir of tenant farm life.......2006-11-05
Nobody organizes tours to visit the old homes of Southern tenant farmers, unlike the mansions of the rich or even, these days, the shacks of the slaves. Not many outsiders even know the difference between sharecroppers and tenants, so Linda Flowers, daughter of tenant farmers in North Carolina, is at pains to distinguish between them.

A sharecropper owns little more than his overalls and, maybe, a mule. His landlord supplies tools, a house, seeds, fertilizer and food. A tenant is an independent businessman. He owns his own mule or a truck, maybe some furnishings and enough credit to capitalize a crop.

Materially, the difference in living standards may be small, but the difference in status is considerable. After the Civil War, tenants could make a living in North Carolina growing truck crops for expanding eastern cities. They were self-respecting people. After World War II, the terms of trade changed against eastern truck farmers on favor of latifundia in California.

The North Carolinians had not expected much. They did not demand much. They tended, often, to contrast their precarious economic state unfavorably with with that of the harvest laborers they hired: the pickers, Flowers notes, were paid so much per box by the tenant, a clear gain; while the tenant sometimes lost money on each box. (In `Cross Creek,' Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings makes the same point about her orange grove, though she was a hobby farmer; it did not matter if the bottom dropped out of the fruit market.)

About the time Flowers was ready to leave home, the tenants crossed over from barely making ends meet to a state of prolonged deficit. Again and again in `Throwed Away,' she regrets that farms of vegetables were turned over to grains (and, since this book was published in 1990, to hogs in confinement). Grain doesn't require a whole family's labor, so the tenants were displaced: th'owed away, as they would have said.

Children of tenants sought work in industry, mills in eastern North Carolina, furniture factories in the Piedmont. Flowers is bitter about this.

It is hard to see why. Her family cleared around $700 a year in the mid-1950s. Even accounting for housing and some homegrown food off the books, $15 a week was not much to brag about even in the poor South of that era. Certainly not enough to pay taxes to support universities, like UNC-Greensboro (Women's College, in those days), which Flowers was able to attend.

And what about those harvesters that the Flowers family hired seasonally? They were black people, and they had no assets to become tenants. If they were not strong, they could not even hope to farm on shares.

In the summer of 1966, U.S. Sen. Bill Spong of Virginia made a hunger tour of eastern North Carolina and found numerous black families (usually headed by a woman) whose sole opportunity for work was two months a year in a cannery.

Growing up tenants may have been a satisfying family experience, but this was not an economic system that was worth preserving, even if somehow California and its migrant workers had not offered competition.

`Throwed Away' is a heartfelt book, a well-written book, a valuable document from the inside; but the economic analysis is a travesty.

Linda Flowers herself escaped into academia. Most of her peers eventually escaped into a more humdrum life. By the 1970s, northern union organizers were frustrated and angry because they could not make any headway in signing up Southern factory workers who were making, perhaps, $5 an hour, when Ohio auto workers were making $17 or more.

They couldn't understand why these crackers were so loyal to their exploitative employers. Why wouldn't they be? $200 cash money a week was a long way up from $700 a year.
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