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Film Based on Book by Duke Professor Opens Nationwide Friday

Duke connections helped bring "Blood Done Sign My Name" to big screen

The film version of Duke professor Timothy Tyson's best-selling memoir "Blood Done Sign My Name" opens nationwide in select theaters this Friday, Feb. 19.

Both the film and book focus on the racially motivated murder of a 23-year-old black U.S. Army veteran in 1970s Oxford, N.C., and the resulting social upheaval -- including riots, boycotts, marches and courtroom battles. Tyson's father, the pastor of Oxford's all-white Methodist church, attempted to foster dialogue and healing in the town, but he and his family were eventually driven out.

"This movie brings the complex battles of the Black Power era to vivid life, in which we can see the faces of flawed, well-meaning people like ourselves, snared in a hard history and trying to do the right thing, which often isn't enough," Tyson says.

Now a senior scholar at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies and visiting professor at Duke Divinity School, Tyson points to a number of connections between Duke and the film, especially that of Robert Steel, former chair of Duke's Board of Trustees, who grew up in Durham and is credited by Tyson for making the film a reality.

"This movie was really his idea," Tyson says of Steel. "He understood my work at a very deep level, and he also understood [director] Jeb Stuart's work, and perhaps only Bob Steel could have seen what a great combination that would be."

Several of the central characters in the story, including Tyson and his father, Rev. Vernon Tyson, are Duke alumni. Playwright and actor Mike Wiley adapted the book for the stage, bringing the one-man performance to Duke in 2008. Deceased historian John Hope Franklin, the former James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of History, also makes a cameo in the film.

Opening in select theaters nationwide, the film can be screened in several cities across North Carolina, including Durham, Chapel Hill and Raleigh, locally. Tyson says he hopes North Carolinians viewing the film experience an "honest confrontation with their own past, and see how it connects to their present and future."

"It is especially important to me that young people come away seeing themselves as capable of changing the world," he says. "But it is also important to understand that no one changes the world alone. Communities create their own history, not out of whole cloth, but from the living ingredients of our own lives."

For more information, including a complete list of local theaters showing the film, visit: blooddonesignmynamethemovie.com.