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“Blood Done Sign My Name” is not a great movie.

It is not even a good movie.

But it wears its considerable heart on its sleeve like a badge of honor.

And it’s hard not to be touched by the true story of racial injustice in Oxford, N.C., based on a Duke professor’s award-winning memoir by the same name.

“It’s a movie you can feel good about feeling bad about,” a Washington Post critic writes.

The independent movie was written and produced by Jeb Stuart (pause for ironic sigh here), whose name you may recognize not only because it is the same as the Civil War general’s, but because Stuart also wrote the screenplays for “The Fugitive” starring Harrison Ford and Bruce Willis’ “Die Hard.”

The film is set in 1970 and concerns the killing of Dickie Marrow (A.C. Sanford), a recently returned black Vietnam veteran, was shot, beaten, and shot once more in front of multiple witnesses, for alleged remarks he made to a white woman.

For those of you who read Tim Tyson’s book or know the history, it does not spoil things to say that justice is not served.

What is most compelling is the helplessness black residents feel in any getting any semblance of a fair shake from the law, the courts or even Gov. Bob Scott, who snubs Marrow’s widow.

“Blood” also features a young school teacher named Benjamin Chavis who went on to become executive director of the national NAACP.

The movie, filmed in North Carolina, probably won’t be here long. There were fewer than 10 of us in a cavernous Grande Theatres auditorium Saturday at Friendly Center.

There are no blue aliens or vampires, but it’s still worth two hours of your time, if only for the history lesson alone.

Plus, there are some strong links to Greensboro in the movie.
A major character in the movie is activist Golden Frinks (Afemo Omilami), who wears a dashiki and describes himself as “a stoker.”
Frinks is the father of a former Greensboro City Council member, Goldie Wells, whose maiden name is Goldie Frinks.

Wells has written a biography of her father, “Golden Asro Frinks: Telling The Unsung Song.”

Frinks died in 2004.

And a scene in the movie depicts a college president daring to speak to a skittish all-white Methodist congregation at the urging of its idealistic young white pastor, Vernon Tyson (Rick Schroder), the father of Tim Tyson.

The college president was A&T’s Dr. Samuel Proctor.