Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

In 1970, a young black veteran was chased, beaten, and killed in public by three white men as he pleaded for his life.  Oxford, North Carolina had then been barely touched by the civil rights movement but in the wake of the killing, young African American youths took to the streets.  While lawyers battled in the courthouse, the Klan raged in the shadows and black Vietnam veterans torched the town's tobacco warehouses.  The author's father, the pastor of Oxford's all-white Methodist church, urged the  town to come to terms with its bloody racial history but, in the end, the family was forced to move away.