Blood Done Sign My Name by Tim Tyson

With personal inventory and painstaking detail, Tim Tyson awakens readers with the passionate authenticity of a memoir and the provocative insight of an editorialized historical narrative in Blood Done Sign My Name. Tyson unmasks the manufactured summary of Civil Rights that solely embraces nonviolence, government action, and human freedom but mitigates defensive violence and the imbedded hatred of oppression. Instead, reality is replaced with consolation in this factual yet explorative summary. Tyson probes the ability of Americans to reconsider their simplified and confined views of not only the era but also the mentality that produced it. He invites readers to cast off the distorting blinders and confront the past as it sincerely was, in order to surpass the faults and anguishes still inhabiting America today. Unveiled, the Civil rights movement can bee seen as more of a “revolution" than a “movement.” Although vastly different in time, exact explanations, methods, and so forth, like the French Revolution, Haitian Revolution, and American Revolution, violence was demanded to overthrow a suffocating environment of cultural imperialism. “Unjust social orders do not fall merely by appeals to the consciences of the oppressor... they fall because a large enough number of people organize a movement powerful enough to push them down” (317). In this powerful coming of age story, America is able to garner maturity and initiate progress enabling it to shake off the imprudence of its past, only through addressing the tender inner turmoil of violence, confession, and restoration.

“What the white business community did, excluding backs from employment and stigmatizing them with segregation, was a different kind of racial violence...

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...ory justice. Certainly, the subjects of slavery and entrenched racism must not be excluded; these “warts” on the American legend of blameless grandeur are the fundamental explanations for and factors in racial profiling, overt discrimination, economic inequality, and the sundry other race-based issues of today. Keeping our history, blemishes and all, on the lips and in the minds of people is the key to constructing vital advancements. History contemplates how we constitute our identity as a nation and as individuals. History is about who we once were, now are, and can become. History does not chain America to the bygone era; it unbolts the doors to the future.

Works Cited

Brinkley, Alan. Ameican History: Connecting with the Past, Volume 2. 14. The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. , 2012.

Tyson, Timothy B. Blood Done Sign My Name. New York: Crown Publishers, 2004.