Thursday, February 11, 2010
Study Guide to Blood Done Sign My Name
As we are preparing for this summer's Freedom Ride 2010, each team members has been asked to read "Blood Done Sign My Name" and "Proud Shoes." This blog is a tool to help with encouraging discussion about these two books. I have asked Pete Crow to begin this conversation. Please add to and comment to his questions once they are posted.
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Hi folks. Beth asked me to post some thinking points for the various chapters of the two books we are reading. I am starting with Tyson's book and will post some talking points about one chapter at a time, with a new chapter every few days of so. Please jump into the blog with your own comments. Reading and discussing these books will increase the impact of the bus ride many fold. If you are not reading now, you should be able to jump into the blog at any time when you do begin.
ReplyDeleteBoth books are well written, true stories which complement each other nicely. Both use incidents from places close at hand--Oxford and Durham--to make broader points about racism in the United States. In Blood Done Sign My Name, Duke University Professor Tim Tyson, a white man, tries to understand the heritage of racial supremacy into which he was born, focusing on a racially motivated murder committed by a neighbor in 1970. In Proud Shoes, law professor and Episcopalian priest Pauli Murray, a black woman, fills a gaping void in American social history--what slavery and the Jim Crow South were like from the first-hand accounts of Afro-Americans, in this instance members of her own family.