Timothy B. Tyson was born in 1959 in North Carolina, the son of Reverend Vernon Tyson and Martha Buie Tyson. The family lived in several North Carolina cities, including Raleigh, Oxford, and Wilmington.
Timothy Tyson earned a B.A. from Emory University in 1987 and a Ph.D. from Duke University in 1994. He is professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2004 and 2005, he was Visiting Professor of American Christianity and Southern Culture at the Duke Divinity School and Senior Scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. He was also the John Hope Franklin Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center.
Tyson's books include Blood Done Sign My Name (2004), a personal history about a racial murder in Oxford, N.C., in 1970. This book was chosen as the selection for the 2005-2006 Summer Reading Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Tyson is also the author of Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (1999) and the co-editor of Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy (1998). Tyson has won numerous awards for his publications.
From the guide to the Timothy B. Tyson Papers, 1948-2012, (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Library. Southern Historical Collection.)
