Blood Done Sign My Name

As the source of so many of our ideas about justice and heroism, the Civil Rights Movement would seem like an ideal subject for tough, complex filmmaking. More often than not, though, cinema has reimagined our nation's racial history as a string of misty water-colored memories, and has shown less interest in examining unhealed wounds than in immortalizing an image of one big American kumbaya. First-time director Jeb Stuart's Blood Done Sign My Name travels a similar path, opening with the requisite archival footage of hippies, James Brown, and the moon landing, and interviews of smiling North Carolinians reminiscing about the good ol' days. When it launches into the first of its multiple intertwining narratives, one would be forgiven for fearing yet another tale of valiant whites a la Atticus Finch or the FBI agents in Mississippi Burning. Based on the autobiographical recollections and research of historian Timothy Tyson, the film frames the murder of a black Vietnam veteran in Oxford, North Carolina, and the riots and legal battles it gives rise to, with a portrait of Tyson's progressive white family trying to take a strong anti-racist stance in their segregated town. [The rest of the post can be read at The L Magazine.]