This movie is an all too familiar one. We could do a similar movie for every city in the south between the end of the Civil War and... well... today really. Watching the events that unfolded in this movie I couldn't help but think of the Ahmaud Arbery case: one unarmed Black man, three white men (two armed), and an incredible sense of right and superiority. I'm just hoping that in 2021 there will be some justice.
"Blood Done Sign My Name" is based upon true events as written in a book of the same title by Timothy Tyson, a writer and historian from North Carolina who specializes in the issues of culture, religion, and race associated with the Civil Rights Movement. The book is about Henry Marrow, the Black soldier killed by three white men in Oxford, North Carolina for supposedly getting fresh with a white woman.
The events and the movie take place in 1970 in Oxford, North Carolina, a small tobacco town in Granville County. Henry "Dickie" Marrow (played by A. C. Sanford) had just returned home from Vietnam to a very warm welcome. He was a married man and by what we could see from his very brief respite home, he was a decent man.
The night of his homecoming he went by the local store to buy a soda for a neighbor. Before entering the store he saw a couple of younger Black girls and began playfully flattering them. At that moment, Larry Teel (Cullen Moss), a white man and son of the store owner, assumed that Dickie was talking to his wife and attacked Dickie with a two-by-four. When Larry's father Robert (Nick Searey) and brother Gerald (Michael May) saw the altercation they both rushed to aid Larry in his illegitimate attack. Seeing the overwhelming odds and a shotgun, Dickie began running. It was then that Robert shot him in the back, then the three of them beat him while he was on the ground, and one of them killed him with a .22 rifle.
It was murder no matter how you look at it.
Two of the three men were arrested and tried by a jury of their peers. It should be no surprise that they were all acquitted, but the Black folks of Oxford had been galvanized. This cold-blooded killing was one injustice they couldn't tolerate. They were no longer going to stand idly by and wait for things to change. From that day forward they were committed to making sure things changed in a county where they were 40% of the population, yet were totally marginalized.
This was a movie that served the purpose of not letting a man's death be in vain. Henry Marrow is not unlike many many Black men who were anonymously killed in the south for no other reason than their race. So, even though the three race soldiers in this case got off, "Blood Done Sign My Name" remembers what happened and didn't let such an atrocity quietly become one more notch on the Confederate belt.
"Blood Done Sign My Name" is based upon true events as written in a book of the same title by Timothy Tyson, a writer and historian from North Carolina who specializes in the issues of culture, religion, and race associated with the Civil Rights Movement. The book is about Henry Marrow, the Black soldier killed by three white men in Oxford, North Carolina for supposedly getting fresh with a white woman.
The events and the movie take place in 1970 in Oxford, North Carolina, a small tobacco town in Granville County. Henry "Dickie" Marrow (played by A. C. Sanford) had just returned home from Vietnam to a very warm welcome. He was a married man and by what we could see from his very brief respite home, he was a decent man.
The night of his homecoming he went by the local store to buy a soda for a neighbor. Before entering the store he saw a couple of younger Black girls and began playfully flattering them. At that moment, Larry Teel (Cullen Moss), a white man and son of the store owner, assumed that Dickie was talking to his wife and attacked Dickie with a two-by-four. When Larry's father Robert (Nick Searey) and brother Gerald (Michael May) saw the altercation they both rushed to aid Larry in his illegitimate attack. Seeing the overwhelming odds and a shotgun, Dickie began running. It was then that Robert shot him in the back, then the three of them beat him while he was on the ground, and one of them killed him with a .22 rifle.
It was murder no matter how you look at it.
Two of the three men were arrested and tried by a jury of their peers. It should be no surprise that they were all acquitted, but the Black folks of Oxford had been galvanized. This cold-blooded killing was one injustice they couldn't tolerate. They were no longer going to stand idly by and wait for things to change. From that day forward they were committed to making sure things changed in a county where they were 40% of the population, yet were totally marginalized.
This was a movie that served the purpose of not letting a man's death be in vain. Henry Marrow is not unlike many many Black men who were anonymously killed in the south for no other reason than their race. So, even though the three race soldiers in this case got off, "Blood Done Sign My Name" remembers what happened and didn't let such an atrocity quietly become one more notch on the Confederate belt.