When "Miss Amy" Womble hobbled to the front of the room at Jonesboro Heights Methodist Church in Sanford to speak one day in 1965, the angry crowd fell silent. Miss Amy was, in the parlance of the times, an old maid schoolteacher who had taught nearly everyone there.

And now Miss Amy had a lesson for her church, which was in danger of being split apart by the pastor's invitation of a black minister to speak the next day. Many in the congregation were demanding that the minister rescind his invitation.

Tim Tyson knows the story well because his father, the Rev. Vernon Tyson, made the invitation. Tim Tyson tells the story of Miss Amy in a powerful new book -- part history, part memoir -- called "Blood Done Sign My Name."

Tyson, now a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, is coming home this week to hold book signings in the Triangle and get his barbecue and banana pudding fix.

It is a story filled with anger -- of whites who saw the world of their fathers crumbling and of blacks whose patience had run out. Although beautifully written, it is not easy to read.

The story revolves around the murder of a young black man in Oxford in 1970. He was gunned down in the streets after he made a flirtatious remark about a white woman, violating a deeply held taboo.

Despite North Carolina's reputation for racial moderation, Tyson's book reminds us that the civil rights revolution here was accompanied by dynamite-wielding night riders, fist fights in school hallways and torched tobacco warehouses.

North Carolina had the most active Ku Klux Klan chapter in the country, a congressional investigation found in 1965. On one night alone, May 28, 1965, the Klan burned crosses on the grounds of courthouses or city halls in Oxford, Currie, Wards Corner, Burgaw, Roxboro, Salisbury, Henderson, Statesville, Tarboro, Whiteville, Elizabethtown, Southport and Wilmington.

The book is also partly a tribute to the author's father, who sought to prepare his Eastern North Carolina flocks for the new day. His pulpit might have been hanging in the balance when Miss Amy stepped up.

She told parishioners the story of a teenage boy who rounded a curve too fast in Chapel Hill and was killed -- or so those on the scene thought. An airman from Pope Air Force Base stopped, dislodged the boy's tongue from the back of his throat and gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

"What I haven't told you is that the boy who had the wreck was white, and that airman that saved him was a black man," Miss Amy said. "But that's the truth."

"And I want all you fathers to tell me something," she continued. "Now, which one of you fathers would have said to that airman, 'Now don't you run your black fingers down my boy's white throat?' Which of y'all would have told the airman, 'Don't you dare put your black lips on my boy's mouth?' "

The church board voted 25 to 14 to stand with their pastor in letting the black preacher speak.

At Miss Amy's funeral, Tim Tyson's father recalled the moment this way: "I have never heard the voice of the Lord with such thunder, such wisdom, such love."