“A couple of the men were draped in white hoods and robes, but most of them looked for all the world like our own father when he went bird hunting.”

After dinner on the evening of Tuesday, May 12, 1970, Timothy B. Tyson and his younger sister, Boo, walk down to the corner of their street where they can get a view of the Teel house on the next block. On the previous night, Robert Teel and two of his sons had murdered 23-year-old Henry Marrow Jr. outside Teel’s store on the edge of Grab-all, a Black neighborhood in Oxford, North Carolina. Tyson and Boo see Ku Klux Klan members on Teel’s porch, presumably guarding the house. The arrest warrant shows that police waited until Wednesday morning to take Teel and his son Larry into custody. This quotation highlights not only the presence of the Klan, of which Teel himself might have been a member, but also the humorously innocent way in which two elementary school children interpret a group of men who look as if they are dressed for “bird hunting.” Tyson’s book describes the shattering of that innocence.

“Above all, perhaps, I had to listen carefully to the stories of black men who had referred to one another fondly as ‘bloods’ in Vietnam and ponder why they had returned to Oxford ready to burn it down, if that was what it took to end the racial caste system.”

Tyson describes the process by which, as a grown man and budding historian, he came to understand what happened in Oxford in the spring and summer of 1970. As a young boy, Tyson heard the sirens and saw Oxford burning on many nights after Henry Marrow’s murder.