Blood Done Sign My Name

1. Blood Done Sign My Name Timothy B. Tyson

2. Quart. 1 Section 1 • Racism in the United states is still a big problem despite slavery laws being abolished a long time before • A black man (later to be recognized as a Vietnam veteran) was shot and killed in Oxford, North Carolina • Timothy Tyson was a young boy when this happened. The book explore his experience with racial discrimination (and this incident).

3. Quart. 1 Section 1 • Upon being threatened by the KluKlux Klan, nobody wanted to confront the perpetrators. • This infuriated blacks causing riots and rampage. (breaking of shops, houses setting fire to various “white” locales etc.) • The mayor, despite being overwhelmed did nothing about the whole ordeal.

4. Quart 1 Section 2 • Timothy was part of a religious family. His father was a minister who often found it hard not to preach about equality, and his mother was a poised and very well educated woman. She also believed in helping blacks (not enough to make them better than her though.) • Tyson expresses that he and his family never felt “from the south” as it was understood to be.

5. Quart. 2 Section 1 • Dad took them to a Klan rally to show them “what hatred looks like.” • Teel was “would have been rich if he had stayed out of trouble” (P.49) • Although there is no written record associating Teel as a member of the Klu Klux Klan, Tyson speculated that he was a very important member of it. (received support, seen at meetings)

6. Quart. 2 Section 1 • Provides the reader with first hand stories with reasons not to fear the Klan like his father and a judge (roasted wieners in the burning cross on his lawn) • States contextual evidence to embody how colloquial racism was (reverend James Cole in the klan) • Cole’s army grew got actively violent. People started getting armed.

7. Quart. 2 Section 2 • Tyson shows his repentance as he tells the reader that he gave in to “white supremacy” at a young age. “I knew that what I was doing was wrong” P.63 • His father’s education, family and upbringing molded him into a defender of civil rights to a degree that he couldn’t say “with liberty and justice for all”(p.65) because it wasn’t true.

8. Quart. 2 Section 2 • Birmingham riots that lead to his father, Vernon’s letter to the paper saying that “a 14 year-old boy spent his first night in jail… his only real crime is that he had the wrong mother.”(72) • He invited a black minister to his church… and received death threats but also support from his congregtion.