The murder of Henry Marrow in Oxford, North Carolina, on May 11, 1970, occurred more than two years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in Memphis, Tennessee. While King played no role in the events Timothy B. Tyson describes in Blood Done Sign My Name, King’s life and legacy nonetheless loom large over those events, as they do in modern memory of the civil rights movement.

Son of a Baptist minister in Atlanta, King studied theology at Boston University and became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama in 1954. He earned a PhD in 1955 (though many years later it came to light that he had plagiarized large portions of his doctoral dissertation). That same year, 26-year-old King emerged as a leader in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which began when a young Black activist named Rosa Parks defied segregation law by refusing to surrender her seat near the front of a bus to a white passenger. In 1957, King helped found the SCLC, an organization devoted to challenging segregation through nonviolent means.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, King rose to national prominence as the leader of the civil rights movement.