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‘Blood Done Sign My Name' going public
Oct 14, 2009
By: Cassie Tarpley
SHELBY — After more than a year’s wait, a movie shot partly in Shelby using scores of local extras will premiere for the public.
The film version of “Blood Done Sign My Name,” a Duke professor’s memoir of racial turmoil in Down East North Carolina, opens Friday, Oct. 23, at the Hayti Heritage Center in Durham.
Mary D. Williams, assistant to book author Dr. Timothy B. Tyson of Duke University, said director and screenwriter Jeb Stuart confirmed the date Monday.
In addition, a special screening of the Stuart-directed film, a true-story civil rights saga, highlights the 100th anniversary convention of the North Carolina NAACP.
The movie is scheduled Friday at 9:30 p.m. at the Hickory Metro Convention Center. Only paid convention participants (the fee is $45) can attend.
The theme, an “acknowledgement of America’s painful racial history,” according to a promotional flyer, fits well with the state convention’s focus. Delegates will have the opportunity to be filmed in a documentary meant to capture civil rights stories from North Carolina.
Tyson plans to speak at the convention Saturday, accompanied by Williams, who sings freedom songs and black sacred music in the film.
Tyson and Williams teach a course titled “The South in Black and White” at the Hayti.
In the spring of 2008, Shelby buzzed with excitement for weeks as the author, movie stars Nate Parker, Rick Schroeder and others came to shoot scenes at Central United Methodist Church, the court square and other uptown sites.
Local church singers and dozens of others bitten by the movie bug took part in the action.
“Blood Done Sign My Name,” published in 2004 and widely acclaimed, recounts a racial murder committed in Tyson’s hometown of Oxford in 1970 by the father of a childhood friend and the African American uprising that followed.
Stuart, best known for the screenplays of “The Fugitive” and “Die Hard,” wrote the screenplay and filmed the movie in Shelby, Charlotte, Gastonia, Monroe and Statesville in the spring and summer of 2008.
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