Tyson, Timothy B. 1959–

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Tyson, Timothy B. 1959–

PERSONAL: Born 1959, in Raleigh, NC; son of Vernon Tyson (a minister) and a teacher; married Perri Morgan; children: Hope, Sam. Education: Emory University, B.A., 1987; Duke University, Ph.D., 1994.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Wisconsin, White Hall, Helen C 4137, 600 North Park St., Madison, WI 53706. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: University of Wisconsin—Madison, associate professor of Afro-American Studies.

MEMBER: Organization of American Historians.

AWARDS, HONORS: James R. Rawley Prize and corecipient of Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians, both 2000, both for Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power; National Book Critics Circle Award nomination, 2004, for Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story; Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, 2005–06; Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights, for Democracy Betrayed.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with David S. Cecelski) Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy, foreword by John Hope Franklin, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1998.

Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1999.

Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story, Crown Publishers (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to periodicals, including Southern Cultures. Editorial advisor for The Black Power Movement. Part Two, the Papers of Robert F. Williams (microform), University Publications of America (Bethesda, MD), 2001.

ADAPTATIONS: Blood Done Sign My Name was adapted as an audiobook, Unabridged Books on Tape, 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: Timothy B. Tyson is a scholar of Afro-American studies who has published several books related to the subject. His first work, Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy, was edited with David S. Cecelski and contains a collection of articles and essays on the 1898 race riots in Wilmington, North Carolina, and their aftermath. Wilmington served as the Confederacy's major port during the Civil War, and it was the state's largest city at the time of the riots. Government leaders throughout the south did not want to openly exclude and disenfranchise blacks because they wanted to avoid federal enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment. Prejudice and racial hatred, however, still existed in abundance. Political turmoil was common, and as Democrats faced mounting political losses, they launched a statewide campaign of white supremacy in 1898. As Democrats planned violent takeovers in Wilmington, the party's terrorist arm, the Red Shirts, moved from South Carolina into North Carolina, intimidating blacks and their white supporters.

When black newspaperman Alex Manly reacted to a call by Rebecca Felton in Georgia to "lynch a thousand times a week if necessary" to protect white female virtue, he provoked the wrath of an already belligerent white population. Manly's suggestion that "not every liaison between black men and white women was forced" was considered "vile and slanderous," noted reviewer James W. Loewen in Southern Cultures. Democrats demanded that Manly's paper cease publication and that he leave town, but their reaction went far beyond such a demand. More than two thousand whites marched through downtown Wilmington and destroyed the newspaper office, missing Manly, who had already fled. Gunfights erupted, and the rioters moved into black sections of town, looking for targets. The mob forced the city's republican mayor and alderman to resign. "By 1900 Wilmington was majority white," Loewen noted. "In that year, under Aycock's leadership, Democrats disfranchised blacks statewide." The riot showed that Southern Republicans could not stand against determined racist Democrats. Wilmington tried to forget about the riot, but in 1998, the city formed the 1998 Centennial Foundation, which finally publicly addressed Wilmington's racist history and started a process of education and reconciliation for wrongdoings a century old. "Because it shows national trends and social processes with local concreteness, Democracy Betrayed will be useful in courses on southern history or U.S. race relations," Loewen stated.

Tyson expanded on his graduate research on the radical civil rights leader Robert F. Williams to write Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power. Williams served in the U.S. Army during World War II, then returned home to Monroe, North Carolina, where he formed a militant chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He rejected the nonviolent approach to civil rights advocated by Martin Luther King, Jr., instead calling for blacks to arm themselves in their fight for self determination. In the late 1950s, Williams and his followers confronted Ku Klux Klan vigilantes with machine guns and dynamite. Targeted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Klan, Williams fled to revolutionary Cuba with his family in 1961. There he broadcast his Radio Free Dixie through Radio Havana. His music and politics were picked up from as far away as New York City and Los Angeles. He talked about life in the South from the 1940s through the 1960s. Radio Free Dixie is the first full-length biography of Williams ever published.

Tyson's study contains quotes by Williams from interviews, radio show tapes, and Williams's unpublished autobiography. A Publishers Weekly reviewer averred that "Tyson's firecracker text crackles with brilliant and lasting images…. The book is imbued with the man's voice and his indefatigable spirit." Library Journal reviewer Charles C. Hay called Tyson's work "groundbreaking, skillfully written," and added, "Tyson resuscitates Williams as an important forefather of Black Power."

The author's next book, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story, is about a racially motivated murder that occurred in Oxford, North Carolina, in 1970, but it also addresses Tyson's own maturation and the development of his views on race. When he was ten years old, Tyson experienced a traumatic "racial awakening," noted reviewer Fred Hobson in Southern Cultures. One May morning, Tyson's friend Gerald Teel declared that his father and brother had killed a black man. Shocked, Tyson found that the story was true. Robert and Roger Teel had indeed shot twenty-three-year-old Vietnam veteran Henry "Dickie" Marrow, for the dubious transgression of making a flirtatious remark to Robert Teel's daughter-in-law. When the woman's husband erupted with rage, the disturbance alerted the Teels, who shot at the fleeing Marrow with shotguns. Infuriated and determined, the men caught up with Marrow, beating and kicking him as he lay helpless on the ground. Without warning, fury gave way to murder when one of the men shot and killed Marrow. The incident sparked racial violence and rioting throughout Oxford. Marches and protests degenerated into mob violence and firebombing, with much property destroyed throughout the city, including two tobacco warehouses with millions of dollars worth of product inside. When the Teels were tried three months later, they were acquitted by an all-white jury.

Tyson and his family also felt the heat of the racial furor. His father, a pastor at the First Methodist Church of Oxford, encouraged racial understanding among the members of his congregation. However, this idea proved to be too radical for most Oxford residents. Vernon Tyson and his family were forced to leave the area when the local bishop transferred Tyson to another church well away from Oxford. The unspoken threat in Tyson's book is that his family, even though they were white, might well have also fallen victim to racial vindictiveness if they had not left when they did. Some thirteen years later, Tyson returned to his old home town as a freshman at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He was seeking not only closure to a traumatic episode in his past but also the material for an academic analysis of the events as he began his career as a historian. He researched newspaper reports and police records. He interviewed several participants, including Robert Teel himself, as well as Ben Chavis, a young black militant who lived in Oxford at the time. What Tyson found was that the City of Oxford continued to harbor guilt over the event and that officials of the time recognized that they had made grave mistakes, but Teel remained unrepentant. However, he also realized that there was probably little chance that the tragic scenario could have played out differently given the cultural and racial climate of the day. In the years following, Tyson credits militants and radicals of the 1970s with helping black Americans achieve greater social gains. "The indisputable fact was that whites in Oxford did not even consider altering the racial caste system until rocks began to fly and buildings began to burn," Tyson commented.

Library Journal contributor Stephen L. Hupp called the book "a significant work of memoir and social history." Traci Todd, writing in Booklist, described it as "a riveting memoir." Tyson's "avoidance of stereotypes and simple answers brings a shameful recent era in our country's history to vivid life," commented a Publishers Weekly reviewer, who concluded that "this book deserves the largest possible audience."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Tyson, Timothy B., Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story, Crown Publishers (New York, NY), 2004.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, October 1, 2004, Traci Todd, review of Blood Done Sign My Name (audiobook), p. 350.

Christian Century, November 2, 2004, Eugene H. Winkler, review of Blood Done Sign My Name, p. 37.

Emerge, October, 1999, Mark Anthony Neal, "The Southern Roots of Black Power," p. 67.

Entertainment Weekly, May 21, 2004, "A Clear 'Sign'; In a Powerful New Book, a White Southerner Examines a 1970 Lynching," review of Blood Done Sign My Name, p. 83.

Historian, summer, 2001, review of Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power, p. 808.

Journal of Negro History, spring, 2001, review of Radio Free Dixie, p. 193.

Journal of Southern History, November, 2001, Lance Hill, review of Radio Free Dixie, p. 900.

Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2004, review of Blood Done Sign My Name (audiobook), p. 216.

Library Journal, October 1, 1999, Charles C. Hay, review of Radio Free Dixie, p. 104; March 15, 2004, Stephen L. Hupp, review of Blood Done Sign My Name, p. 90.

Michigan Historical Review, fall, 2000, Mark D. Higbee, review of Radio Free Dixie, p. 186.

Publishers Weekly, September 27, 1999, review of Radio Free Dixie, p. 82; April 19, 2004, review of Blood Done Sign My Name, p. 56, and Leonard Packer, "Celebrating Rather than Understanding," interview with Timothy B. Tyson, p. 56.

Southern Cultures, fall, 2000, James W. Loewen, review of Democracy Betrayed, p. 90; winter, 2004, Fred Hobson, review of Blood Done Sign My Name, p. 86.

Touching History: A Journal of Methods, fall, 2001, Paul Gaffney, review of Radio Free Dixie, p. 107.