Timothy B. Tyson, author of the much-acclaimed Blood Done Sign My Name and other award-winning books, is senior scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and visiting professor of American Christianity and Southern Culture in the Duke Divinity School. Blood Done Sign My Name, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, winner of the Christopher Award, the North Carolinian Book Award. It was the 2005 selection of the Carolina Summer Reading Program at UNC Chapel Hill assigned to all new undergraduate students.
Tyson’s previous book Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power won the James Rawley Prize and was co-winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize, both from the Organization of American Historians. He also co-edited, with David S. Cecelski, Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy, which won the 1999 Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America. Tyson was a John Hope Franklin Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2004-05.
Mary D. Williams, a Raleigh native noted as one of the best gospel singers in the country, will perform spirituals and gospel classics and discuss the African American religious and cultural traditions from which these songs emerged. She has been an Afro American historian studies performer for over 20 years in song and narrative of the Black South. She has traveled to more than 35 colleges and universities, more than 30 public schools, and over 100 churches and libraries.
She has performed on the soundtrack for the upcoming movie, directed by North Carolina’s own Jeb Stuart, ”Blood Done Sign My Name” and the television movie “The Wronged Man” a lifetime movie. She has starred with Mike Wiley, an African-American genius playwright and actor, in his play “Blood Done Sign My Name,” at Shafer Theatre at Duke University and has been featured on Dick Gordon’s show, “The Story,” on National Public Radio.
Tyson and Williams have taught “The South in Black and White: History, Culture and Politics in the 20th Century South,” at Hayti Heritage Center in Durham, for undergraduates from North Carolina Central University, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 2008, they collaborated on “The South in Black and White” at the historic Williston School in Wilmington, North Carolina
