Timothy B. Tyson

Timothy B. Tyson (born 1959) is an American writer and historian who specializes in the issues of culture, religion, and race associated with the Civil Rights Movement. He is a senior research scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and an adjunct professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina. His books have won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, the James A. Rawley Prize (OAH), the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion, and the Southern Book Award. In addition, two of his books, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (1998) and Blood Done Sign My Name (2004), have been adapted into films, and the latter was also adapted into a play. In 2017, Tyson published The Blood of Emmett Till, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Early life and education Tyson was born in Raleigh, North Carolina. His parents are Vernon Tyson, a Methodist minister, and Martha Tyson, a school teacher. In his youth, the family was living in Oxford, North Carolina, in 1970, when Henry Marrow, a 23-year-old black veteran, was killed by three white men. The suspects were acquitted by an all-white jury. Blacks organized a boycott of white businesses in the mostly segregated town, and achieved integration after 18 months. Tyson's father was driven out of his church because of his support of the civil rights movement. Tyson attended the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Emory University in 1987. He received his PhD in history from Duke University in 1994.