‘Blood’ brings back memories of a torn South

During Black History Month, a history lesson comes to the big screen. More teachable moment than must-see entertainment, “Blood Done Sign My Name” remembers an overlooked episode in the struggle for civil rights in America. As late as 1970 — years after the lunch counter-sit-ins, landmark federal legislation and the late Martin Luther King’s accomplishments — a young African-American man in Oxford, N.C., was killed after smiling at a white woman. It was a lynching, by gunshot and beating instead of a noose, but a lynching nevertheless.

The details leading up to the brutal event and its legal and social aftermath come from author-professor Timothy Tyson’s personal 2004 book, “Blood Done Sign My Name.” Directed and written with small-screen scale and production values by screenwriter Jeb Stuart (“The Fugitive,” “Die Hard”), this fictionalized adaptation of that memoir recounts the story from the point of view of Oxford’s then-still-subjugated black community and also from the perspective of a religious white family sympathetic with it. Unlike Sandra Bullock’s overrated “The Blind Side,” another movie with racial themes set in the South, this one seems less patronizing of its disadvantaged black characters.

Harking back to “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a small white child — author Tyson as a little boy, played by Gattlin Griffith — observes as his brave parent stands up for what’s right. Rick Schroder plays Tim’s father, Vernon, a progressive Methodist pastor who tries to fight attitudes in a town still ruled by de facto Jim Crow and an active chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

As Tim comes of age with his consciousness raised, so does young high school teacher Ben Chavis (“The Great Debaters’s” Nate Parker). This future executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People gets an early taste of political activism. Mentored by provocative civil rights protester Golden Frinks (Afemo Omilami), Chavis is rocked out of complacency after black husband-father-soldier Henry “Dickie” Marrow (A.C. Sanford) is mutilated and murdered by racist Robert Teel (Nick Searcy) and his two sons.

Despite witnesses, a travesty of a trial ensues. Though black residents comprised two-thirds of the jurisdiction, none served on the all-white jury trying the Teels.

But by the early ’70s, the disenfranchised had learned a lot about leveraging power. Similarly, we learn from “Blood” — even if the facts of the case are more gripping than this ho-hum treatment of them.