Justice Delayed, Justice Denied: Constance

Justice Delayed, Justice Denied: Constance Curry's Silver Rights And Tim Tyson's Blood Done Sign My Name

Both the nonfiction narratives of Constance Curry's Silver Rights and Tim Tyson's Blood Done Sign My Name are tales of mob violence and hatred. But Curry's story is a tale about the ability of the human spirit to overcome negative forces of racism and mistrust. Tyson's tale is a story of how violence begets violence. Both stories are unsentimental in that they show how racism can foster violence, although in the case of Silver Rights, the determination of the Carter family to ensure that their children receive the best education possible, as entitled to their children by law, ultimately makes the tale a triumph. In the case of Blood Done Sign My Name, the determination of the author to research a long-standing crime, becomes a tragic tale of how South Carolinian blacks, long socially and legally oppressed, eventually used street violence to ensure that the violence done unto them was punished.

Silver Rights specifically grapples with the complicity of the state's legal system in African-American disenfranchisement. When Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted as part of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 it prohibited "discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance" and its implications for student education were profound ("Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 2007, U.S. Department of Justice Website). In an attempt to circumvent the strictures of the federal law, the state government of Mississippi passed a "Freedom of Choice" law. To keep de facto if not de jure segregation county officials in Mississippi asked parents to "sign papers designating which schools they wanted their children to attend...The Carters were the only African-American parents in Sunflower County who dared to choose the white schools of the Mississippi Delta," which happened to be the best local schools in the state ("Silver Rights Book Tour Begins in Clarksdale," 1995, the Southern Register).

For Curry, a white Quaker activist, the decision of the Carters embodies what she calls the Silver Rights movement. The movement gets its title from the fact uneducated blacks over misheard 'civil rights' as silver rights. Bertha Mae and Matthew Carter were sharecroppers, possessed no economic opportunities or education, yet they were determined that their children would get their 'civil rights' or silver rights, in the form of economic mobility through education. "Eventually, seven of the Carter children graduated from the University of Mississippi, including Deborah Carter Smith, who is an accountant in the grants and contracts office at Ole Miss" ("Silver Rights Book Tour Begins in Clarksdale,"1995, the Southern Register).

The words 'silver rights' still exists as a code name for the fusion of economic and political empowerment, or translating political and educational opportunities into upward mobility. When a summit was held on inner-city financial literacy it was described as thus in the Wall Street Journal: "Borrowing a page from the civil rights movement, Washington, D.C., is hosting a summit on silver rights -financial literacy and access to capital -- for poor inner-city communities" (Roberts, 2006).

The Carters, in the process of gaining an education for their children, lost their jobs, and the family and their children suffered harassment, to the point where the children wanted to turn back, although they never did or let their parents know how much the insults to which they were subjected offend their pride. But the focus of Tim Tyson's book, the North Carolinian veteran Dickie Marrow was attacked and murdered by a gang of white men. The police and the jury system, much like the legislature of the state of Mississippi were complicit in the violence, and eventually the African-Americans of the community rioted in response to the delay and the fact the men were not convicted. On the pretext that Marrow had made an inappropriate comment towards a white woman, he became a subject of vengeance, recalled the author in a 2004 interview with NPR, a white man whose father was an anti-segregation minister, and African-Americans, after initially cooperating with the investigation, felt that they had no other recourse but street violence ("Tim Tyson, 'Blood Done Sign My Name,'"2004, NPR: Morning Edition).

Marrow's death came to symbolize all of the oppression and injustice inflicted upon African-Americans, and the deferred promises of the civil rights movement, summed up in the word on Marrow's grave -- Vietnam -- even though he did not serve in Vietnam although he did serve in the army ("Tim Tyson, 'Blood Done Sign My Name,'" 2004, NPR: Morning Edition). Sadly, the sense that conventional methods of empowerment and resistance, like education and the ballot box could not free African-Americans was also symbolized during the riots, as "demonstrators burned down Oxford's tobacco warehouses, which represented the heart of its economy" (Winkler, 2004: 1).

Reading these two books is a difficult emotional experience, for while it is heartening to cheer the Carters, and their refusal to bow down to violence, it is also difficult to condemn the anger of the African-Americans in Tyson's narrative. At least Tyson himself, an adolescent during the riots, used his experiences in a positive manner. He was friends with the son of the man who committed the murder, yet today this white man is a professor of African-American studies, still struggling to understand the complex interplay between race and community relations in America. "The story has been burning in my brain since I was eleven years old," Tyson stated in an interview ("Tim Tyson -- Audio Interview," 2004, Eye on Books).