In the best-selling book Blood Done Sign My Name, author and historian Tim Tyson recounts the 1970 murder of Henry “Dickie” Marrow in Oxford, NC and the events that followed. Marrow, who was black, was chased from a local store by three white men after he reportedly made a crude remark to one of the men’s wives. They brutally beat Marrow then killed him with a bullet to the head in view of multiple witnesses. Despite the eyewitness reports, an all-white jury acquitted the men. The town’s black community responded to the events with an uprising that destroyed downtown businesses and several tobacco warehouses holding millions of dollars in harvested crops. Tyson, who was a ten-year-old child in Oxford at the time, recounts how the conflagration of events shaped his life and offers all of us an opportunity to examine our own roles in the complex and often confusing racial fabric of America.