MOVIE REVIEW

Blood Done Sign My Name

A Town Torn Asunder by Racial Killing in ’70

By A. O. SCOTT

Jeb Stuart’s “Blood Done Sign My Name” scrupulously examines a page from the recent history of the South — a racially charged murder that took place in Oxford, N.C., in 1970. The details of the case resemble those of many similar events that took place across the region at the height of the civil rights movement. A black man, Henry Marrow, was brutally killed and his accused murderers, members of a family of white business owners, were acquitted by an all-white jury as the town seethed and its leaders panicked. There were peaceful marches to the state capital, and also acts of looting, vandalism and arson.

The film, based on a book of the same title by Timothy B. Tyson, a scholar of African-American history (and, as a boy, a character in the story), reminds us that such episodes did not end with the passage of civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s. Early scenes emphasize that to many of its black residents, Oxford, a tobacco-growing hamlet not far from Durham, seemed at the end of that decade to be frozen in a Jim Crow past. Whites might have agreed but found more cause for complacency than frustration.

Ben Chavis (Nate Parker), a son of a well-to-do local African-American family who has come home to teach school and later reopen his father’s restaurant, is startled at how little appetite for change there seems to be. Meanwhile, on the other side of town, an idealistic minister takes up a post at the Methodist church and startles its all-white congregation with his rather moderate invocations of racial equality and his insistence on inviting a prominent black educator to speak at Sunday services.

In a more conventional telling of the story, the preacher, Vernon Tyson (who is the father of Timothy, and who is played with amiable understatement by Ricky Schroder), would have been the hero of the story, the white man whose awakened conscience drives history forward. But neither he nor Mr. Chavis — who after the events depicted in the film would go on to become the executive director of the N.A.A.C.P. many years later — quite fills that role. They are both portrayed as thoughtful, morally serious men, but “Blood Done Sign My Name” is not really concerned with their inner struggles or psychological motivations.

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