I’ve just finished reading Timothy Tyson‘s Blood Done Sign My Name, and I feel like I need to shout about how great this book is.

I’ve actually been telling my friends about it since about chapter two, but it stayed strong all the way through. Tyson tells a story of a murder in Oxford, North Carolina, the town where he lived when he was eleven, but throughout managing to weave strands of the wider story of race in America.

Tyson is a historian, but this book isn’t formal history, and it makes no apologies. Tyson based his Master’s thesis on the same events, but he realized that an important part was missing when he wrote that entire paper without letting readers know about his personal connection to the story. His father was a Methodist preacher who considered all people God’s children, which sometimes caused some unrest in his churches. I found a profile of him on the Duke Divinity School’s web site.

I also found a seven-minute NPR report filed by Juan Williams, who went to Oxford with Tyson and talked to many of the people who lived there at the time.