Timothy B. TysonReseñas

I don't even know where to begin. The USA has come so far since 1955. But over the course of the past year, all the deaths, pain, hurt, protests, legislation have seemed to be for naught. We have a leader who yearns for the time so deftly described in this book. I am embarrassed for our country, for how our government and its citizens treated African-Americans in our past. And to a lesser extent, today.

This country owes a tremendous debt to Miss Mamie. For if she had not decided to let the world ”see what they did", I truly believe the Civil Rights Movement in this country would never have progressed as quickly as it did, although, not quickly enough IMHO.

I implore everyone to read this book.

This tragedy is a part of our history... a crime that can't be erased. Just a reminder that we must pay homage to the ones that came before us.
This book gave me new insight from different viewpoints. Very well-written.

A must read. Any review of mine could never do this book justice, so here is a quote from the book itself:

We are still killing black youth because we have not yet killed white supremacy. As a political program white supremacy avers that white people have a right to rule. That is obviously morally unacceptable, and few of its devotees will speak its name. But that enfeebled faith is not nearly so insidious and lethal as its robust, covert and often unconscious cousin: the assumption that God has created humanity in a hierarchy of moral, cultural and intellectual worth, with lighter-skinned people at the top and darker-skinned people at the bottom...

To see beyond the ghosts, all of us must develop the moral vision and political will to crush white supremacy — both the political program and the concealed assumptions. We have to come to grips with our own history — not only genocide, slavery, exploitation and systems of oppression, but also the legacies of those who resisted and fought back and still fight back. We must find what Dr. King called the “strength to love.” New social movements must confront head-on the racial chasm in American life. “Not everything that is faced can be changed,” Baldwin instructs, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

You can read a longer excerpt in the Atlanta Journal Constitution: http://specials.myajc.com/emmett-till/

Great, informative book. Storytelling and research are on point, the author ties everything together quite nicely. One of my favorite books, it's everything you want it to be. Complete, but not too much information, well-written and extremely touching and thought-provoking.

After growing up roughly 70 miles west of Oxford, North Carolina, I understand many of the customs and attitudes Timothy B. Tyson refers to in Blood Done Sign My Name. He is only a couple of years older than I am and our socio-economic backgrounds are fairly similar. It was surprising that Tyson provided so much insight into my childhood background static of racism.

He explains the insidiousness of paternalism, for example, and how people are dehumanized by it. Being nice to people does not make up for treating them as second-class citizens and denying them equal treatment.

Tyson does a great job of interweaving the events of this shocking, largely overlooked story with his own family and how it affected them. When a 23-year-old Black Vietnam veteran walked into a store in Oxford, North Carolina, on a May evening in 1970, he was quickly chased out by the store’s owner and two of his sons and was beaten and then shot to death in plain view on the street. Tyson was friends with the youngest son of the store’s owner.

The first line of the book is chilling enough. But the events that followed the murder affected the town and Tyson’s family make for riveting reading. His father was the minister of the town’s all-White Methodist church, and the family was forced to move by his father’s congregation. Many members, wanting to maintain the status quo, were simply unwilling to listen to a minister who believed in equal rights.

The author’s mother was a teacher and in the end, he realizes that by becoming a historian who covers the struggle for civil rights, he has followed in her footsteps as a teacher. But he also comes to embrace the evangelism he shares with his father. He, too, is on a mission to help us all understand the complicated and tragic events in America’s racial history and the fact that there is still a lot to be reckoned with.

Autographed by Author

A meticulously-researched book about the kidnapping and lynching of 14-year old, Chicagoan Emmett Till, while visiting his family in Mississippi in 1955. Sadly, the book was focused more on the consequences than the events, since the only living person who knows what actually happened (Carolyn Brant) won't say or doesn't remember. Only a few characters were developed, making the book largely uninteresting: mother, uncle, and the local Sheriff. I fear that the "us versus them" racist mentality of white Mississippi in this timeframe is on the rise again today in many places domestically.

During the summer of 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till and his cousins traveled from Chicago to Mississippi to visit extended family. Though cautioned by his mother beforehand about extreme social (i.e., racial) etiquette in the deep south, Emmett apparently committed a faux pas in the company of a young white woman, the precise nature of which is still unclear more than six decades later. Late that night, Emmett was kidnapped by the woman's family and mercilessly, brutally murdered. Though the outcome of the trial which followed took no one by surprise (and most would say it had been a foregone conclusion), the nationwide attention the murder case received was ultimately the catalyst for the civil rights movement. While author Timothy Tyson relates here the shocking and heartbreaking story of Emmett Till, he also provides historical background in an attempt to help the reader understand the sad state of affairs that made lynching a socially acceptable practice among white folks in a backward place like Mississippi. This is a distressing, heavy read made more so when one thinks about how little has changed in the intervening years.

Being familiar with the specifics of the Emmett Till lynching and trial doesn't make this any easier of a read. The brutality, willful ignorance, and complicity still brings me to my knees. And here, you really delve into the details. The number of times I was either shouting or crying throughout the book cannot be understated. Tyson presents the case masterfully and does a brilliant job couching it in the civil rights efforts of the 1950s and connecting it to how the movement developed in the '60s as well as the Black Lives Matter movement today. I would urge anyone who is struggling to understand why protests continue to read this book...the culture and series of events that led to Emmett Till's murder and its aftermath are every bit as relevant to the fight that continues (as Tyson states, "America is still killing Emmett Till"). I'm now inspired to reread King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail." And trying to understand more, more, more.

(Side note: I can't really recommend the audio. Side side note: UGH, why are male readers so frequently awful?? Especially when it comes to phrasing women's voices?? UGGGGHHHHGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGH. I get that many of them are actors so maybe they feel the need to do voices, but I don't need voices if you're gonna be like that. That's why authors write, "he said, she said." If the only way you characterize a woman's voice is to raise the pitch and make her sound like a shrinking violet, then you aren't a very good actor...or observer. I wish all audiobook samples used the reader reading from a section of dialog, so I could decide whether to continue from the get-go. /end rant)

This book is very interesting in what it is. I can’t say that it is… or will...or ever would be one of my favorites…or that I would want to read it again...but it IS honest and brutal about the nature of the historical interactions between black and white races. I grew up in the deep south in the 50’s and 60’s and can sadly say that it is indeed honest in the author’s assessment of the racial situation. Be aware that some of the content is extremely graphic and the story will not be suitable for everyone by any stretch of the imagination. The story is Tim Tyson’s account of going back and confronting many of his memories of this event and looking at them through the eyes of an adult instead of those of a child. It's a well written account and good as far as the writing is concerned but sad and tragic beyond measure in the reality. As I said it will NOT be for everyone.

Heartbreaking, but brilliant, it walks through the events and context surrounding the murder of Emmett Till and the influence it had on history. The ties linking it to today were a bit forced, at least as it came across in the audio, but, still, it's an important book.

I registered this book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/14598175

More than the story of one 14-year-old African-American boy who lost his life for saying a few unwelcome words to a white woman, this exhaustively researched tale takes us from Emmitt Till to the civil rights movement and up to today. Yet with such a wide breadth of coverage it is also very personal.

Emmett Till was a 14-year-old from Chicago who was excited about staying with his uncle in Mississippi for the summer. He wasn't there long, though, before he made the mistake that led to his death. In a little family-owned store he made some remark to the young woman at the counter and she was insulted by it. We can't say for certain what he said, as she later admitted that much of what she testified to in court was not true. Much later, though.

Carolyn Bryant waited until she was advanced in age before speaking publicly about what happened and what she had told others. Even then, as far as she could go was to say that what happened to Emmett should not have happened.

Carolyn, the young woman, told her family what the young black boy had said to her and suggested that he had touched her as well. Two men then took it upon themselves to find the boy and teach him some manners. They took it much farther than that, beating him with such viciousness that his body, when found, was not easy to identify.

And here is where the story really begins. For in Mississippi in the early 1950s it was still common for African-Americans to be "lynched" for supposed crimes, many of them not crimes at all. "Lynched" in this case is a generic term for a killing done in vengeance, usually an African-American killed by a European-American.

It was common but Till's mother was determined that it not be swept under any rugs, not ever forgotten. She insisted that her boy's body be brought back to Chicago rather than buried in Mississippi, and she insisted on an open-casket at the funeral. She went further, notifying people she knew would spread the word, and spread the word they did. Without her actions we would likely never have heard of Emmett Tlll.

Thus he takes his place among the early cases that spurred the civil rights movement. Tyson takes us through many of the others and up to today, placing them all in context. It is more than a simple history, though. It is emotionally charged and inspiring. A must-read.

This book is a fantastic read about a particularly amazing person, and the horrific circumstances of the Jim Crow South. It takes as its thesis that the traits of the Black Power movement in the 70s existed indigenously within the black freedom struggle throughout the 50s and 60s, despite the popular narrative of Civil Rights history. The thesis is framed by a biography of Robert F Williams, a surprisingly uncompromising and militant black liberation leader whose chapter of the NAACP was one of the only chapters to embrace poor blacks, and organize for self defense against marauding Klansmen.

The popular narrative is that Black Power was an aberration, that the Civil Rights struggle was tainted by troublemakers, and that some of the worst injustices of the Jim Crow South included being forced to sit in the back of the bus. The reality is that the roots of Black Power were being practiced (not even pioneered) by Williams in the 50s and 60s as well, and that blacks witnessed or fell victim to vigilante brutalization encouraged and empowered by white supremacist law enforcement that maintained an order where blacks were subhuman.

Breathtaking descriptions of mob violence against peaceful demonstrations leading into car chases and fire fights are made all the more intense because the reader is forced to acknowledge that this isn't a movie: That shootouts with the Klan, or threats of the same were regular occurrances for Williams.

Given the popular narrative's carefully sculpted ignorance of the indigenous nature of black militancy in their liberation struggle, this book is required reading.

I was familiar with only the bare outline of the murder of Emmett Till before reading this book, but I leapt to read it when I saw it was by Tim Tyson, author of the astounding "Blood Done Sign My Name," about a widely witnessed murder of a black man by a white man in 1970s North Carolina. This newest book is not as strong as that one. The strong writing and novelistic recreation of the way Tyson tells history are here; the complications of too easy narratives that this true historian won't ignore are here; but despite the inclusion of the widely publicized interview Tyson had with Carolyn Bryant ("victim" of Till's possible whistle, silent in public from the 1954 trial to this publication), there is not much new here in terms of the facts of Till's lynching. And when the narrative ends, the implication piece gets a bit flowery in its prose, even when the content remains quite strong. (That alone is why four stars instead of five.)

Really well done book. I was not super informed of the Emmett Till case. And it is fascinating - and frightening. Only 1955? yikes. Author tackles a lot of angles about how the murder changed America and all the fallout from it. Enjoyed his analysis of the consequences of the event as well. Recommend to all.½

The murder of Emmett Till is well-known to many who are aware of the state of affairs in the country during the civil rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's. The brutal torture and murder of a fourteen-year old sparked a national and international reaction that fueled the rise of opposition to the systemic discrimination and oppression of African-Americans for so many decades, centuries really.

The story is well-known. Till was visiting his cousins from Chicago in the heart of the Mississippi delta. He allegedly insulted and physically assaulted Carolyn Bryant who was behind the counter at her husband's store. For this he was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by Bryant's brother-in-law and husband. His body was recovered from the Tallachatchie River several days later. His mother in her grief and anger made the brave decision to display his gruesome body in an open casket. A photo was published across the nation and world and brought about an enormous reaction to this horrendous act.

Tyson's research shed new light on this story. He tracked down Carolyn Bryant, now almost eighty and living in Raleigh, North Carolina. Bryant revealed that her testimony that Till had physically assaulted her was false.

The pervasive discrimination in the South during this era was widely known. Even in the 1950's lynchings still occurred. The oppression of African-Americans was completely interwoven in Southern society at all levels of class in all components of social and civic institutions. African-Americans dared to attempt to vote only at peril for their lives. They could not serve on juries or give testimony in court against white people. There was a burgeoning civil rights movement whose leaders carried out their agenda at literal risk to their lives; a number were indeed assassinated. This book is much more than a true crime story; it gives a vivid picture of the relations between the white supremacist hierarchy and African-Americans in the South. Tyson does not let the North off the hook; he describes the pervasive, if somewhat more subtle, discrimination in Chicago where Till's family had migrated.

The almost instant acquittal of the defendants by an all-white, all-male jury was shocking but not unexpected. Tyson describes a bizarre tactic of the defense to convey to the jury that Till, by his actions toward a white woman, deserved his fate. He reminds us of the pathological obsession of white Southerners over the possibility of sexual relations between blacks and whites.

What is perhaps stunning to contemplate is that this systemic discrimination and injustice occurred within the lifetimes of many people living today. I was raised in the deep South during this era and remember vividly the overt signs and symbols of discrimination and subjugation of African-Americans. Even ten years after the 1955 Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision I did not see a single black face in any school I attended. Segregation in public transit was as complete as it was in Rosa Park's time. "Whites Only" signs were everywhere. I like to remember that due to the influence of my northern-born parents I was aware of and repulsed by this gross inequity; I hope my memory is accurate. I do know that racism and discrimination, while not as blatant as in Till's time, is still present in our society, expressed in "dog whistle" ways by many in private and public life, even at the highest levels.

"Daddy and Roger and 'em shot 'em a nigger" With that announcement from a childhood friend, a white preacher's son begins recounting that moment in 1970 (he was 10) and all that followed from the murder of Henry Morrow in Oxford, North Carolina. This is a startling, sad, and passionate book on American racism, and a warning to heed the events of history and remember. When the author presented his library with a copy of his dissertation on the subject, the pages recounting the killing were torn out, and the state archives & local archives are missing the newspapers that recounted events during that time. Essential reading. You will learn.

While I enjoyed the book and some of the new information that I learned, it was not a paper turner, it took me far far longer to finish this book than was necessary as it is not a long book.

In addition to discussing what happened to poor 14 year old Emmett Till in MS in 1955, most of the book is about how it came to be, the tradition of white supremacy, prior and later lynchings and murders and the generally deplorable way black folks were treated, so it is social history as well as a crime book.

I have the author's other book which will be more personal as it is a horrible story of a murder that happened when he was a child.

When asked to think of a picture of a truly heroic action, many people will think of the lone Chinese protester facing off a row of tanks in Tiananmen Square. After finishing Timothy B. Tyson’s magnificent new book, I now see a different picture.

As photographs go it isn’t much but the story behind it makes shivers run down my spine. The image is of Moses Wright, a lanky black sharecropper and great uncle of 14-year-old Emmett Till. In the photograph the 64-year old Wright, standing tall in a white shirt, black tie, and suspenders, pointing across a Mississippi courtroom at the two white men charged with Till’s kidnapping an murder. This may not sound like much, but many people sitting in that courtroom were convinced that they were witnessing an act of suicide. No black man who enjoyed living would ever testify against a white man. And yet he did it.

This is just one of many tremendous acts of courage described in this account of the lynching of Till and the trial that arguably served as a catalyst for the protests of the Civil Rights Era. I’ve often heard of the case but never knew before now how integral a part it played in the campaign to defeat Jim Crow. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. I sincerely hope that everyone reads it. This was a very dark time in our history that we should never forget.

This book was an interesting narrative take on the murder and subsequent trial, as well as the political organizing around the death of Emmett Till. I felt in some ways jerked around by this book, as a white reader--Tyson ends the book with a vivid call to action, but really doesn't posit the reader alongside Carolyn Bryant, asking the reader to challenge their own inner white supremacy (assuming a white reader, which, given the call to action, is who I think Tyson is aiming for.) There are some interesting things going on with rhetoric around how white supremacy functioned at the time of Till's death, especially given the messiness of the defense's claims during the trial, and it's probably a really good read for undergraduates or other non-historian folks looking to get a touch at how white supremacy has changed over time but also remained entrenched.

The Blood of Emmett Till by Timothy B. Tyson is an audible book I got from the library and I am not sure I am glad or not. I knew the story but not the details. I wanted to know but didn't want to know. It was so horrific, I didn't know if I could stand to hear it, to know that people stood by and let murderers go free. Did I want to live it? I did want to know because the world is turning backwards in any progress that has been made. Those of us that want the world to live in peace have to spread the word that Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr preached, not the trash that is vomited from the WH tweets.
I listened to the book and cried. The book may have pictures but since I had the audible version I googled Emmett's pictures. What a handsome young man! What a shame. The book is filled with details as to why he was there and not in Chicago. The "witnesses", later to claim it never happened. All the details of the times, the town, the people involved. How they got away with murder and three weeks later confessed but couldn't be convicted then. (Sold their story to Look magazine.)
All because he whistled at a woman.
I wonder what they would think if they knew we would have a rich, nasty man that brags about how many times he grabs women by their...
and people voted this same scumbag to be the leader of the country...what is wrong with this country?

In the not so distant past of 1954, Emmett Till a 14 years old boy visiting from Chicago was yanked out of his uncle's house in Mississippi and brutally murdered for the crime supposedly whistling at a white woman in a store. The murder of African Americans by whites was not uncommon at the time. However his mothers decision to have an open casket and allow the battered body of her son to be photographed changed everything. It put the world on notice about what life was like for African Americans in the south. Emmett Till's death became a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement and inspired people like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. to fight for justice. This book is an unflinching look at the crime that changed America.

Although I already knew the basics of the case I enjoyed the deeper look at the main players in the saga. The author actually spoke to Carolyn Bryant,, the woman who was supposedly harassed by Emmett Till, and she has now admitted that her accusations were false. The author goes on to the make the case that Emmett till was not killed for something he actually did but as a result of his killers dissatisfaction with the recent Brown vs Board of Education decision that desegregated schools.

It is important to remind people of Emmett Till, especially in this climate of heightened racial tensions. Today's generations need to learn about Emmett till because it is too easy to forget what the history has been for American Americans in this country. The recent events in Charlottesville completely boggle my mind. It seems like the events there took place in Emmett Till's time not in this decade. Too many good people have died to prevent this kind of thing from happening today. The fact that white supremacists feel that it is okay to march in public in 2017 makes reading this book even more important.

I don't rate many five stars. This is a model for historians, worth all the years it took Tyson to perfect it and get it published! Page-turning proof that truth IS more exciting than fiction.

An incredible history of the events surrounding the brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till and the impact of his mother's decision to open the coffin. First-and-second-hand accounts and news stories are woven together to bring this painful part of our history to life. The author's epilogue further explains the legacy of racism. A warning, the last chapter describes the beating death of Till in detail. The violence and vernacular of time did cause me to pause, but the story brought me back. It might be interesting to hear more stories about how people were impacted by the brutal murder.

Detailed review of the fact by Devery Anderson - https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Emmett-Till-Timothy-Tyson/product-reviews/147671484...

This one was just so-so for me. It isn't a terrible read, but I found the prose a bit stilted. I also found the author covered some background information that distracted from Mr. Till's story. I didn't feel a huge emotional connection, which I think the author had plenty to work with to give it more of a punch, and to relate it to modern times. I finished wanted more for my investment.

All in all, not bad, but not spectacular either.