One of the best books I have read about the civil rights era is Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story by Timothy Tyson.
Tyson grew up in Oxford, North Carolina, the son of a Methodist minister. The book is built around the murder of a young black man in Oxford when Tyson was a child, but it tells the story of the civil rights movement along the way.
Of all the accounts I've read of this era, this one comes closest to the way I remember it. I'm sure that's mostly because it is told from the perspective of someone who, like me, was a white Southerner, and, like me, saw much of it through the eyes of a child.
I think maybe it's also because, like me, Tyson was not actually involved in the movement himself. That is another shared perspective, but it also eliminates what I think is a common bias in first-person accounts of historical events and eras told by those who were involved in them. In telling the tale, they are laying down their personal legacies. Tyson's book undoubtedly has its own biases, but this is, first and foremost, a story of his childhood.
Book review excerpts on the flip...
In this outstanding personal history, Tyson, a professor of African-American studies who's white, unflinchingly examines the civil rights struggle in the South. The book focuses on the murder of a young black man in 1970, a tragedy that dramatically widened the racial gap in the author's hometown of Oxford, N.C. Tyson portrays the killing and its aftermath from multiple perspectives, including that of his contemporary, 10-year-old self; his progressive Methodist pastor father, who strove to lead his parishioners to overcome their prejudices; members of the disempowered black community; one of the killers; and his older self, who comes to Oxford with a historian's eye. He also artfully interweaves the history of race relations in the South, carefully and convincingly rejecting less complex and self-serving versions.
--Publisher's Weekly
If you want to read only one book to understand the uniquely American struggle for racial equality and the swirls of emotion around it, this is it.
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
When he was but 10 years old, Tim Tyson heard one of his boyhood friends in Oxford, N.C. excitedly blurt the words that were to forever change his life: "Daddy and Roger and 'em shot 'em a nigger!" The cold-blooded street murder of young Henry Marrow by an ambitious, hot-tempered local businessman and his kin in the Spring of 1970 would quickly fan the long-flickering flames of racial discord in the proud, insular tobacco town into explosions of rage and street violence. It would also turn the white Tyson down a long, troubled reconciliation with his Southern roots that eventually led to a professorship in African-American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison--and this profoundly moving, if deeply troubling personal meditation on the true costs of America's historical racial divide.
--Jerry McCulley, Amazon.com