Timothy Tyson Wins Major Award for “Blood Done Sign My Name”

December 1, 2006

Visiting Professor of American Christianity and Southern Culture Timothy Tyson has won the prestigious Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion for his 2004 book “Blood Done Sign My Name.”

The award, presented annually by the University of Louisville and Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, carries a $200,000 prize.

Tyson’s book examines a racially-motivated murder in Oxford, N.C. and the following social upheaval in the early 1970s. “Blood Done Sign My Name” also won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, the 2004 Christopher Award and the North Carolinian Award, and it was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In addition to his work at the divinity school, Tyson is a senior scholar of documentary studies at Duke, has an appointment in the history department and is adjunct professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina. He previously was John Hope Franklin Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2004-05 and professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

His other books include “Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power,” which earned the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize and James Rawley Prize, both from the Organization of American Historians, and “Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy,” which won Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America.

Tyson is a founding member of the Harmony Bar Writers Collective and has been named a distinguished lecturer by the Organization of American Historians. He received the Guardian Angel Award from the Methodist Home for Children in Raleigh, N.C. in 2004, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Living Mentor Award from Manhattan Country School in New York City. In 1990, while still a graduate student at Duke, Tyson was named Volunteer of the Year by North Carolinians Against Racist and Religious Violence for infiltrating white supremacist groups and reporting on their activities.

A North Carolina native, Tyson received a BA from Emory University in 1987 and a Ph.D. from Duke in 1994.

Read more about the Grawemeyer Awards.