Timothy B. Tyson is author of The Blood of Emmett Till (2017), which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. "A critical book," writes the Atlantic Monthly, [that] manages to turn the past into prophecy and demands that we do the one vital thing we aren't often enough asked to do with history: learn from it." Tyson is Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and also holds a faculty position in the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina.
His previous book, Blood Done Sign My Name, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won the Southern Book Award for Nonfiction, the Christopher Award, and the Grawemeyer Award in Religion from the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power won the James Rawley Prize for best book on race and the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for best first book in U.S. History from the Organization of American Historians. Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy (1998), co-edited with David S. Cecelski, won the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award from the Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America. Ghosts of 1898: Wilmington's Race Riot and the Rise of White Supremacy won the Salute to Excellence Award from the National Association of Black Journalists.
Much of his work has also involved documentary and dramatic adaptations of his books. Playwright and actor Mike Wiley adapted Blood Done sign My Name as a play that premiered in 2008. Screenwriter and director Jeb Stuart turned it into a feature film of the same name, starring Nate Parker, which opened in theaters across the United States in 2010. Radio Free Dixie also provided the basis for a documentary film, "Negroes with Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power." which PBS broadcast on national television in 2006 and which won the OAH's 2007 Eric Barnouw Prize for best historical film.
Tyson serves on the executive boards of the North Carolina NAACP, the University of North Carolina Center for Civil Rights, and Repairers of the Breach. Since 2007 he has worked alongside many others in the Moral Monday movement and the Poor People's Campaign led by Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II. Tyson lives in Durham, North Carolina.
