Tim Tyson’s Books
A New York Times Best Seller
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A Washington Post Notable Book
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Longlisted for the National Book Award
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Winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award
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An NPR, Los Angeles Times, and Atlanta Journal-Constitution Best Book of the Year
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A New York Times Best Seller * A Washington Post Notable Book * Longlisted for the National Book Award * Winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award * An NPR, Los Angeles Times, and Atlanta Journal-Constitution Best Book of the Year *
The Blood of Emmett Till
New York: Simon & Schuster. 2017
In 1955, white men in the Mississippi Delta lynched a fourteen-year-old from Chicago named Emmett Till. His murder was part of a wave of white terrorism in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision that declared public school segregation unconstitutional. Only weeks later, Rosa Parks thought about young Emmett as she refused to move to the back of a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Five years later, Black students who called themselves “the Emmett Till generation” launched sit-in campaigns that turned the struggle for civil rights into a mass movement. Till’s lynching became the most notorious hate crime in American history—and crucial fuel for a mass movement for freedom.
But what actually happened to Emmett Till—not the icon of injustice, but the flesh-and-blood boy? Part detective story, part political history, The Blood of Emmett Till draws on a wealth of new evidence, including a shocking admission of Till’s innocence from the woman in whose name he was killed.
“A critical book... [that] manages to turn the past into prophecy and demands that we do the one vital thing we aren’t often enough asked to do with history: learn from it.”
Grawemeyer Award in Religion
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Finalist for the National book Critics Circle Award
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Southern Book Award for Nonfiction
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Winner of North Carolina Book Award
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Christopher Award
Grawemeyer Award in Religion * Finalist for the National book Critics Circle Award * Southern Book Award for Nonfiction * Winner of North Carolina Book Award * Christopher Award
Blood Done Sign My Name
New York: Three Rivers Press. 2004.
On May 11, 1970, Henry Marrow, a twenty-three-year-old Black veteran, walked into a crossroads store owned by Robert Teel and came out running. Teel and two of his sons chased and beat Marrow, then killed him in public as he pleaded for his life.
Like many small Southern towns, Oxford had barely been touched by the civil rights movement. But in the wake of the killing, young African Americans took to the streets. While lawyers battled in the courthouse, the Klan raged in the shadows and Black Vietnam veterans torched the town’s tobacco warehouses. Tyson’s father, the pastor of Oxford’s all-white Methodist church, urged the town to come to terms with its bloody racial history. In the end, however, the Tyson family was forced to move away.
“If you want to read only one book to understand the uniquely American struggle for racial equality and the swirls of emotion around it, this is it.”
Frederick Jackson Turner Prize
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for best first book in U.S. history and the James Rawley Prize
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for best book on race, both from the Organization of American Historians
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Outstanding Book Award
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Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America
Frederick Jackson Turner Prize * for best first book in U.S. history and the James Rawley Prize * for best book on race, both from the Organization of American Historians * Outstanding Book Award * Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America
Radio Free Dixie:
Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1999
This classic history tells the remarkable story of Robert F. Williams (1925-1996), one of the most influential Black activists of the generation that toppled Jim Crow and forever altered the arc of American history. In the late 1950s, Williams, as president of the Monroe, North Carolina, branch of the NAACP, and his followers used machine guns, dynamite, and Molotov cocktails to confront Klan terrorists. Advocating “armed self-reliance,” Williams challenged not only white supremacists but also Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights establishment. Forced to flee during the 1960s to Cuba — where he broadcast “Radio Free Dixie,” a program of Black politics and music that could be heard as far away as Los Angeles and New York City — and then to China, Williams remained an influential figure in the Black Power movement.
Radio Free Dixie reveals that nonviolent civil rights protest and armed resistance movements grew out of the same soil, confronted the same predicaments, and reflected the same quest for African American freedom. As Robert Williams’s story demonstrates, independent Black political action, Black cultural pride, and armed self-reliance operated in the South in tension and in tandem with legal efforts and nonviolent protest.
“Tyson’s main achievement, in addition to conquering the problem academics have in writing readable prose, is to put Williams’s Black Power ideology and actions into the larger context of the era — the Cold War, the nonviolent civil struggle, and the questions of gender and sexuality in racial politics. This is an interesting book about a captivating personality during a fascinating time of recent history.”
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1999 Winner, Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America
* 1999 Winner, Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America
democracy betrayed: The Wilmington “Race Riot” of 1898 and Its Legacy
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1998.
The tragic end of North Carolina’s experiment in interracial democracy.
At the close of the nineteenth century, the Democratic Party in North Carolina engineered a white supremacy revolution. Frustrated by decades of African American self-assertion and threatened by an interracial coalition advocating democratic reforms, white conservatives used violence, demagoguery, and fraud to seize political power and disenfranchise Black citizens. The most notorious episode of the campaign, the Wilmington Massacre and Coup of 1898, claimed the lives of dozens of Black residents and rolled back decades of progress for democracy in the state.
Published on the centennial of the Wilmington Massacre and Coup, Democracy Betrayed draws together the best scholarship on the events of 1898 and their aftermath. Contributors to this important book hope to draw public attention to the tragedy, to honor its victims, and to bring a clear and timely historical voice to the debate over its legacy.
The contributors are David S. Cecelski, William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, Glenda E. Gilmore, John Haley, Michael Honey, Stephen Kantrowitz, H. Leon Prather Sr., Timothy B. Tyson, LeeAnn Whites, and Richard Yarborough.
Coming Soon
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Coming Soon *
Mahalia Jackson, Moving on Up a Little Higher: The Story of an American Civil Rights Pioneer
Liveright, 2026
If Americans remember Mahalia Jackson at all, they know her as perhaps the greatest gospel singer to ever live. New York Times best-selling author Timothy B. Tyson and acclaimed gospel singer Mary D. Williams, however, bring Jackson back to soaring life by restoring her status as a major civil rights figure. The authors trace Jackson’s career from bitter poverty in New Orleans to global superstardom, revealing how, even after her meteoric success, Jackson maintained an unwavering devotion to Black freedom and racial equality. She worked for “independent Black political power” in the 1930s and 1940s and campaigned for FDR, Truman, JFK and Lyndon Johnson; performed for the Montgomery Bus Boycott; sang for civil rights campaigns in Birmingham, Selma and the Freedom Rides; and even sang at the 1963 March on Washington, where she prompted King to “Tell ‘em about the dream.” She raised vast sums for the movement and was central to Dr. King’s campaign for opening housing in Chicago in 1966. Weaving together Jackson’s inspiring life with her soulful music into one sonically transcendent text, this revisionist biography presents Mahalia Jackson as an interpreter of struggle and a guiding light for the Civil Rights Movement, one whose life still speaks to our ongoing struggles today.
“When times were hard, Martin Luther King Jr. often reached for the one voice that could comfort and strengthen him—Mahalia Jackson, the greatest gospel singer of her time and an overlooked leader in the civil rights movement. Mahalia’s voice seemed born of heaven. In MAHALIA: MOVING ON UP A LITTLE HIGHER, Timothy Tyson and Mary D. Williams reveal how she walked this earth, lifting hearts and a movement. By the end, this deeply felt biography will leave readers reaching for her voice, too.
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