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With much of the filming taking place in the nearby town of Shelby

MONROE — Screenwriter Jeb Stuart was 14 years old in 1970 when a black man was shot to death on a public street as he begged for his life. The killing, trial, acquittals and race riots occurred barely 160 miles from his home in Gastonia, but the writer of such action flicks as “Die Hard” and “The Fugitive” was oblivious to the strife.

That was not the sepia-toned South of his youth.

“I grew up in the ’60s with the idea it was the most wonderful place in the world to live,” said Stuart, who was named for the Confederate cavalry general famous for riding circles around superior Union forces.

Now, Stuart is bringing the story of the slaying of 23-year-old Henry Marrow to the big screen by directing the movie version of “Blood Done Sign My Name,” author Tim Tyson’s story of race and retribution.

Tyson is a Duke University professor and former Fayetteville resident. In a past interview with the Observer, he said that Fayetteville “is where I learned to write at Terry Sanford (High School) from my teachers Helen Mask and Betty Grady.”

His father, the Rev. Vernon Tyson, served as a pastor at Hay Street United Methodist Church.

For both men — North Carolina natives and the sons of ministers — the movie is a chance to explore what Stuart now recognizes as a different history from the one he experienced: the lives of blacks in the South. “The Confederate soldiers and the Confederate flag and the Confederate monument did not really stand for the same things that it stood for me,” he said.

With much of the filming taking place in the nearby town of Shelby, the hometown of neo-Confederate icon Thomas Dixon, that history was hard to ignore.

Dixon was the author of “The Clansman,” the 1905 novel on which the white supremacist film “Birth of a Nation” was based. More than 90 years after the racially charged and historically flawed film helped give birth to the modern Ku Klux Klan, Dixon’s hometown served as the backdrop of a film about the dangers and legacy of racism.

Shelby hasn’t forgotten that history; a road named Dixon Boulevard (U.S. 74) still leads into town. And Dixon is buried in Shelby’s Sunset Cemetery, 50 yards from W.J. Cash, another North Carolina native who wrote the progressive, “The Mind of the South” in 1940.

“I felt like the Lord brought us to Shelby to do battle with our own pasts and with our own stories about our pasts,” said Tyson, who also teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, his alma mater.

“Blood Done Signed My Name” stars Rick Schroeder (“NYPD Blue”) as Vernon Tyson, and Nate Parker (“The Great Debaters”) as Ben Chavis, Marrow’s cousin who went on to become executive director and CEO of the NAACP. In between, Chavis was imprisoned as part of a group known as the Wilmington 10, convicted of conspiracy to commit arson and to commit assault after a race riot in 1971.

Tyson was 10 years old and living in Oxford, a tiny farming community about 40 miles north of Raleigh, when Marrow was killed. His father, the Rev. Vernon Tyson, had to leave his Methodist church because of his support for civil rights in the face of a community that eventually acquitted the two white men charged in Marrow’s death.

Those circumstances brought Stuart to question his father, who recalled the era as an uncomfortable time for people of faith, “ministers who were caught between doing what was the right thing to do in terms of their faith and keeping bread on their table and having a job.”

As fate would have it, Tyson’s family had moved from Oxford to Wilmington, where Vernon Tyson got a new post with the Methodist Church. As his son tells the story in his book, Vernon Tyson reached out to Chavis, but the time of blacks and whites locking arms and marching had long passed.

Tim Tyson said his book won’t become a movie in the vein of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” in which good white people stand up to bad white people “and the black people are in the middle singing hymns and getting lynched,” Tyson said. Instead, it tells the story of imperfect human beings making imperfect history.

“In this story, it’s human beings who are flawed, imperfect and caught in a hard history, and they are grappling to make sense of it and to fix what cannot be fixed,” Tyson said. “And it’s not about saints and heroes, but it’s about ordinary people like ourselves.”

Parker, who was born eight years after Marrow’s murder, got the script, read Tyson’s book and reread the script before accepting the part of Chavis. He said he turned down other, more lucrative roles.

“We really have to tell the story and tell it in a way that is correct, that is truthful and honest,” said Parker, who also stars in “The Secret of Life of Bees,” which completed filming earlier this year in North Carolina. “Hollywood has a way sometimes to kind of give people what they think people are ready for rather than what the truth is.”

Stuart, who describes himself as “a true son of the South,” said people often asked whether he wanted to make a movie that would dig up all the anger, hurt and frustration of almost 40 years ago.

But Tyson offers an all-too-universal scenario: a young black man is killed, there’s police and judicial malfeasance, riots occur, white-owned businesses are destroyed. That could be a story about Los Angeles, Detroit, Houston, Miami, Newark, Miami, Cleveland, New Orleans, Tyson contends, his voice trailing off as he ticked off the cities.

“In that sense, I hope that what we are telling is a kind of human history in which we can see the faces of people that we know and that we are and that as we struggle to find meaning in our past that we’ll manage to find hope in our future,” Tyson said.