| Timothy Tyson | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1959 |
| Occupation | Historian, Author |
Timothy B. Tyson (born 1959) is an American writer and historian from North Carolina. Tyson attended the University of North Carolina at Greensboro before he earned his B.A. at Emory University in 1987 and his PhD at Duke University in 1994.
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Tyson launched his teaching career at Duke University, where he taught "United States History from the New Deal to the Present" for two years while finishing his doctorate in 1994. During that time, he was named Research Fellow at the Center for Ethical Studies at Duke University, for his work, "Dynamite: A Story from the Second Reconstruction in South Carolina," which was later published in Glenda Gilmore, et al., Jumpin' Jim Crow: The New Southern Political History (Princeton University Press, 2000.) He also won the Mattie Russell Teaching Fellowship for his course, "And Still I Rise: African American Culture in the Twentieth Century."
In 1994, he became assistant professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he taught "Introduction to Afro-American History," "Race and American Politics," and "Freedom Stories: Writing Movement History," and won the Lilly Teaching Award for 1996-97. With three colleagues, Professor Craig Werner, Professor Steve Kantrowitz, and graduate assistant Danielle McGuire, Tyson led a series of busloads of students from Madison to Chicago, Illinois and Nashville, Tennessee, and then on to Birmingham, Selma, and Montgomery, Alabama, Jackson, Hattiesburg, and Duck Hill, Mississippi, and New Orleans, Louisiana. This course was called "Freedom Ride: The Sites and Sounds of the Civil Rights Movement," and won the 2002 Best Course Award from the North American Association of Summer Sessions. Tyson soon became full professor of Afro-American Studies. From 2002 to the present, Tyson was named Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians.
Tyson won a position as John Hope Franklin Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2004-05. Tyson currently serves as Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, with secondary appointments in the Duke Divinity School and the Department of History. At the Divinity School, he teaches "Christianity and Civil Rights" and "The Christ-Haunted South: Race and Christianity in the Twentieth Century American South."[1] He also has a position in the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In 2007, Tyson taught an experimental course entitled "The South in Black and White" that met at Hayti Heritage Center in downtown Durham, for students of Duke University, North Carolina Central University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.[2] In the fall of 2008, Tyson and Mary D. Williams, a leading gospel singer, led a community-based course in Wilmington, North Carolina, called "Wilmington in Black and White," which met at the historic Williston School and sought to explore the ways that Southern history and culture might illuminate efforts at racial reconciliation and healing in one community.
Tyson's books include Blood Done Sign My Name, published by Crown in 2004, a memoir and history of the murder of a black man, Henry Marrow, in Oxford, North Carolina in 1970. The book also documents the African American reaction that followed. This book was selected by UNC for its Summer Reading Program in 2005 and by community reading programs across the state. Blood Done Sign My Name was also selected for Villanova University's "One Book Villanova" Program in 2006-2007. The book also won the Southern Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2006, Tyson was awarded the Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion for the book from the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, which carries a $200,000 cash prize. "Blood Done Sign My Name" was selected by dozens of college and community reading programs, including those at the University of North Carolina, Villanova University, the University of Iowa, Guilford College, the University of North Carolina-Asheville, and Greensboro College, and also "One Book, One Community" reading programs in Wilmington, Rocky Mount, Wake County, and other North Carolina communities.[3] Hollywood screenwriter and director Jeb Stuart, best known for The Fugitive and Die Hard, wrote a screenplay based on Blood Done Sign My Name and filmed the movie in Shelby, Charlotte, Gastonia, Monroe, and Statesville, North Carolina, in the summer of 2008. Nate Parker, the star of The Great Debaters, plays Ben Chavis. Rick Schroder of NYPD Blue fame stars as Vernon Tyson. An independent film, Blood Done Sign My Name was released in February 2010. Mike Wiley, playwright and actor, premiered his play, "Blood Done Sign My Name," based on the book, at Duke University's Shaefer Theater in November 2008. It played to a packed house and a standing ovation at city hall in Oxford on February 13, 2009.
In 1998, Tyson published an influential article in the Journal of American History, "Robert F. Williams, 'Black Power,' and the Roots of the Black Freedom Struggle." The following year, his Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power, published by UNC Press, won the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for best first book in U.S. history from the Organization of American Historians, as well as the James A. Rawley Prize for best book on the subject of race. "Radio Free Dixie" provided the foundation for "Negroes with Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power," a documentary film made by Sandra Dickson and Churchill Roberts at the University of Florida's Documentary Institute and broadcast on national television in February 2007. "Negroes with Guns," for which Tyson served as lead consultant, won the Erick Barnouw Award for best historical film from the Organization of American Historians.
Tyson's first book, Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy, published by UNC Press in 1998, was co-edited with David S. Cecelski and marked the centennial of the massacre and coup d'état in Wilmington. It won the Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America.
In 2006, Tyson wrote a special section on the events in Wilmington for the Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News and Observer. This 16-page special section made its way to roughly 700,000 households in the state and has been used in a great many schools. Soon afterward, a bill made its way before the North Carolina General Assembly that would require the teaching of the story of the white supremacy campaigns and the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 in public schools. "Ghosts of 1898" won an Excellence Award from the National Association of Black Journalists.[4]
Tyson was arrested on June 15, 2010 by Raleigh police on charges of second-degree trespassing. He, along with the President of the North Carolina Chapter of the NAACP, Rev. William Barber, and two others were protesting a Wake County school board meeting and took over the seats of several school board members. They were opposing the decision by the school board to change the diversity policy that is currently in place, which buses students to try to balance socio-economic diversity. The school board recently decided to change to a community school system, which Tyson believes will lead to re-segregation.[5]