Timothy Tyson
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| Timothy Tyson | |
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| Occupation | historian |
Timothy B. Tyson (born 1959) is an American writer and historian from North Carolina, United States currently serving as Senior Scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, with secondary appointments in the Duke Divinity School and the Department of History. [1] He is also adjunct professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to accepting these positions, Tyson served as the John Hope Franklin Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2004-05 and Professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1994 to 2006.
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. He has published three books, including [Blood Done Sign My Name], published by Crown in 2004, a memoir and history of the murder of a black man, Henry Marrow, committed by the white father of a childhood friend in Oxford, North Carolina in 1970. The book also documents the African American uprising that followed. This book was selected by UNC-CH 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. [2]
His Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power, published by UNC Press in 1999, earned the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize from the Organization of American Historians, as well as the James Rawley Prize. "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" 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'etat 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. [3] 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.
In 2007, Tyson taught a course entitled "The South in Black and White" that met at Hayti Heritage Center in downtown Durham. Students from North Carolina Central University, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina enrolled, along with about 150 local citizens enrolled through Continuing Studies. All told, about 350 students took this experimental course. The course convened again for similar numbers in the spring of 2008.
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 announced that he would begin shooting the film in the spring of 2008.
