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.
[5] 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.
Meeting at the historic Williston School, participants explored the ways that Southern history and culture can illuminate efforts at racial reconciliation and healing in one community.
Tyson serves on the executive board of the North Carolina NAACP and the UNC Center for Civil Rights.
[8] Tyson's first book, Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy (1998), was co-edited with David S. Cecelski.
It won the Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America.
Soon afterward, the North Carolina General Assembly passed legislation to require the teaching in public schools of the white supremacy campaigns and the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898.
The following year, he published the book Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power.
Negroes with Guns, for which Tyson served as lead consultant, won the Erick Barnouw Award for best historical film from the Organization of American Historians.
Tyson authored Blood Done Sign My Name, published by Crown in 2004, a memoir and history of the killing by whites of Henry Marrow, a black Army veteran, in Oxford, North Carolina in 1970.