Hogan Tyson NC Award nomination 2019

April 9, 2019

Nomination of Dr. Timothy Tyson for the North Carolina Award in Literature

When I think of Tim Tyson’s Blood Done Sign My Name, I am reminded of Kafka’s maxim: “A book should be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Tyson’s genre-defying memoir/history certainly chopped its way through North Carolina and beyond. Blood is among the most influential books on race by a North Carolinian since Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman in 1905, which D.W. Griffith transformed into the virulent poison of “Birth of a Nation.” Both the novel and the film positioned the Ku Klux Klan as redeemers and transformed the healing of the Civil War scars of the white North and South into a national race war against African Americans.

Beyond page or screen, this violent crushing of the dreams of Reconstruction, including the 1898 slaughter in the streets of Wilmington, erected a new Jim Crow social order marked by segregation, disfranchisement, electoral fraud and lynching; in short, Tyson teaches us, by using any means necessary to reinstitute what News & Observer editor Josephus Daniels called “permanent good government by the party of the White Man.”

Blood Done Sign My Name first clarifies and then defangs that narrative, centered on the story of a racially-charged murder in the author’s hometown of Oxford, North Carolina, and the violent and nonviolent upheavals in its wake, to fearlessly confront the history of race in America and in North Carolina.

A notable casualty of Tyson’s axe is the gooey-sweet but poisonous paternalism that remains the most common expression of white supremacy in the South: “For white people,” he writes, “paternalism provided a self-congratulatory sense of generosity and superiority; for blacks, it supplied dribs and drabs of material sustenance—shoes and books and hand-me-down clothes for their children.” But he does not stop there when he points to his own grandmother’s brand, always avoiding finger-pointing and happy-talk. “Paternalism strengthened the system of white supremacy by softening its sharper edges and covering its patent injustices with a patina of friendship. Accepting black expressions of gratitude at face value, whites congratulated themselves on their friendly relations with ‘their’ Negroes.” But paternalism rendered the candor that real friendships require virtually impossible.”

Tyson pulls back the covers on “the cheerful and cherished lies we tell ourselves about those years—that the black freedom movement was largely a nonviolent call on America’s conscience, which America answered.” For those who prefer to cling to a sugar-coated version, Tyson answers: “The conventional narrative is soothing, moving, and politically acceptable, and has only the disadvantage of bearing no resemblance to what actually happened.” He compares those who wring their hands and tell honeyed stories to “people who think that hiding the empty cake plate will make you lose weight.”

The freedom struggle in North Carolina, as in America itself, “did not take place in some ethereal realm, removed from the sins of the past, but in the fallen world, among the imperfect people who had inherited a deeply flawed history. Everyone in this struggle, adversaries and advocates alike, grew up steeped in a poisonous white supremacy that distorted their understandings of history and one another.” Blood did flow and people did die—and still do; our society is mired in a ruthless indifference to the most vulnerable among us, especially people of color. Every index of social wellbeing affirms this as true. Tyson closes: “But that blood, too, has the power to redeem our history. We only have to name it, and heed the call of justice that still waits for our answer. Like the nameless slave poets who wrote the spirituals, we must look our brutal history in the eye and still find a way to transcend that history together. I am standing here until the Lord takes me somewhere else, because the blood done sign my name.”

Blood Done Sign My Name inspired thunderous critical acclaim, not only in North Carolina, but across the country. David Maraniss, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, writes, “Tyson has written a brilliant work; part memoir, part history, part detective story—all equally compelling, all woven seamlessly through the reexamination of a racist murder in the small Southern town of his childhood. From its first unforgettable words, this book washes over the reader like a soaring spiritual.” The book’s avoidance of the usual finger-pointing and hand-wringing is one of its achievements and inspired admiration in some unlikely circles, notably the conservative Biblical Recorder: Journal of the Southern Baptist Convention of North Carolina. “As he relates the story of those bloody days in 1970s,” writes the editor, “

The University of North Carolina Summer Reading Program selected the book for its 2005-06 offering; the students found it compelling and revolutionary in its blues realism and gospel redemption. Dozens of other college and university reading programs followed suit, including the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Villanova University, and many other “One Book, One Community” programs sent him to cities and towns all over the US. “Not only did the book become a phenomenon,” writes the Raleigh News & Observer, “it also redefined his life and what it means to be a public intellectual.” Selected as the John Hope Franklin Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center, Tyson came home to North Carolina from the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dealing with the enormous response to Blood Done Sign My Name is perhaps the wellspring of Tyson’s work as a public teacher.

J. Peder Zane, the conservative columnist for the News & Observer, wrote a full two-page story on Tim Tyson entitled “Minister of History: Preacher’s son Tim Tyson explores North Carolina’s racial past—and uses it to change hearts and minds.” Zane observes that after he returned to his ancestral home and took appointments at Duke and UNC, “rather than just retail his research into Southern history from the lectern and in print, Tyson has rolled up his sleeves to work with churches, schools, political leaders, and others who share his desire to build community across the lines of race and ethnicity.”

Tyson “appears free—often two or three times a week—at elementary schools and churches from Asheville, Charlotte and Winston-Salem to Goldsboro, Greenville and Wilmington,” Zane continued. “ Instead of giving talks, he holds conversations aimed not just at sharing what he knows but moving his audiences to grapple with difficult subjects and recognize their common humanity.” To this day, this remains an apt description of Tyson’s lifework in North Carolina.

When Tim met Mike Wiley, brilliant African American playwright and actor, his work as a public teacher took a new and compelling turn. They decided to adapt Blood Done Sign My Name for the stage. With Tyson as sounding board, historian and executive producer, Wiley’s literary and dramatic genius lifted the hard-edged blues of this story to a gospel vision of redemptive love. The resonant voice of North Carolina-based gospel singer Mary D. Williams added soul-fire and pointed to the traditions of struggle that gave the play its life. It opened at Shafer Theater at Duke on November 9, 2008, to packed houses and rave reviews.

A few months later, this trio of North Carolina public intellectuals opened “Blood Done Sign My Name” in the auditorium at city hall in Oxford, North Carolina, the small town where this 1970 story of racial murder, violent confrontation, widespread arson, political upheaval, and brutal injustice occurred. By that time, many people in town had had an opportunity to read the book, and it was a matter of great controversy, especially among those who had not read it. Every seat in the place was sold, the house evenly divided between African American and white townspeople. A deep and thoughtful public conversation ensued, with many of the characters in the book and the play onstage for the discussion. People did not want to go home. Here is the power of art and scholarship to mend the broken world.

In the months ahead, Wiley, Mrs. Williams, and Tyson presented “Blood Done Sign My Name” on stages from the coast to the mountains: the Hayti Heritage Center in Durham; Gerrard Hall at UNC Chapel Hill; the Imagenon Theater in Charlotte; Thalian Hall in Wilmington; the Old Theater in Oriental; the Temple Theater in Sanford; Diana Wortham Theater in Asheville; the Booth Theater in Charlotte; and theaters at Meredith College, Wesleyan College, UNC-W, Central Carolina Community College, and Fearrington Village in Pittsboro. Tyson gave the curtain speech, joined by Mrs. Williams and Mike Wiley on stage for a discussion with the audience. In each town, they also engaged local high school audiences with separate performances of the play. A film clip is available at www.mikewileyproductions.com/play_blood.html.

Knowing that the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides would come in the spring of 2011, Wiley wrote The Parchman Hour, an account of the Freedom Rides. Tyson helped Wiley research the history, served as sounding board throughout and edited drafts of the play; he was listed as executive producer. The Parchman Hour premiered at UNC’s Paul Green Theater in the fall of 2010, toured Mississippi over spring break of 2011, and provided the culminating keynote event at the 50th Freedom Rider Reunion in Jackson, Mississippi, on May 26, 2011. Wiley and Tyson are currently collaborating on a play based on the life and work of James Baldwin.

Tyson’s public teaching, independent preaching, documentary theater work, and political labor has required a different kind tenacity from his rigorous scholarship—emotional and spiritual, as well as intellectual. It proceeds on new ground. He has said, “I see the peculiar job of public work that I do the way Ned Cobb sees farming. “God ain’t goin to come down here and run nary a furrow out there in that field, plow that ground up—He ain’t goin to do it. He give you the wisdom and knowledge to do it,” Cobb declares in All God’s Dangers. “It takes sunshine and water to make vegetables come up—sunshine there and do your part, what He put you here to do, because god ain’t goin to do your labor, He ain’t goin to do it.” I show up and get behind the mule, and trust that a wisdom deeper than my own will help me plow to the end of the row.”

Yet Tyson’s public teaching work is hard to separate from his scholarly engagement and his indelible mark on the historiography of Afro-America, the South, North Carolina, and the history and culture of the United States in the twentieth century. For him, it has all grown out of his historical work and artistic collaboration with respect to the interracial Fusion Movement of the 1890s, the White Supremacy Campaigns of 1898 and 1900 that crushed it by force, fraud and racial demagoguery, and its capstone, the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898.

To mark the centennial of the most important event in North Carolina’s history between the Civil War and World War II, Tyson and his close friend and collaborator, David S. Cecelski, published Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot and Its Legacy (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1999), which won the Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Injustice in North America. The book became the occasion for a national symposium on race sponsored by the National Commission on Race, headed by Dr. John Hope Franklin, who also penned an eloquent introduction to Democracy Betrayed, a symposium attended by several thousand people in Wilmington.

A few years after Democracy Betrayed, Tyson reached a larger audience with Ghosts of 1898: Wilmington’s Race Riot and the Rise of White Supremacy, published by the Charlotte Observer and the News & Observer and printed in virtually every daily newspaper in North Carolina; the initial printing ran to eight hundred thousand copies, and it continues to be distributed in public schools across the state and college classrooms around the country; it is also available online. The National Association of Black Journalists awarded Ghosts of 1898 with its 2006 Excellence Award.

Tyson’s historical work in Democracy Betrayed, Radio Free Dixie and Blood Done Sign My Name are extraordinary, yet in his most recent book, The Blood of Emmett Till, one can see the arc of his own relentless kind of research and writing that catapulted this latest achievement onto the long-list for the National Book Award. The New York Times and Washington Post named it as a Notable Book, and NPR, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Los Angeles Times put it on their Best Book list of 2017, and it won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. Based on a rich trove of oral history, meticulous archival research, and propelled along by a writing style that “unfolds like a movie,” The Blood of Emmett Till not only illuminates the nation’s racial history, but as Reverend William Barber Jr., notes, “calls us to the cause of justice today.” Tyson’s work as an historian is truly remarkable.

Since arriving at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies fifteen years ago, Tyson has often taught one large lecture class and then small seminars each year. Unlike many in the university world, he's brilliant at both. I've seen him hold classrooms of 100 students absolutely enthralled. What's most impressive is that he does this while ushering them into the world of serious history. While he makes judicious use of his gifts as a storyteller, he chooses the stories with absolute precision. Typically, he'll catch the students' interest with an anecdote, provide the historical context necessary for them to understand the story, and then complicate their comprehension by suddenly turning the tale on its interpretive head. By the time Tyson finishes, the students will have been introduced to the major sources and understand both points of agreement and points of dispute among scholars. It's a true pleasure to have students who have taken his South in Black and White classes because you never have to spend time correcting for bias in what they've learned. They'll have a perspective, and they will also understand that there are others and be able to justify their views with evidence.

Tyson is a much-treasured man of letters and an utterly vital public intellectual, and it is with great enthusiasm and gratitude for our state’s highest aspirations that I nominate him for this award. Please do not hesitate to contact me if I can be of further assistance.

With sincere regards,

Wesley Hogan
Director, Center for Documentary Studies
Research Professor, Franklin Humanities Institute and History
Duke University