Timothy Tyson

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Timothy B. Tyson (born 1959) is a writer and historian from North Carolina, 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 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 university distributed the book to every student, faculty, and staff member. 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. [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.

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]