Civil rights historian Timothy Tyson will deliver a reading
and public lecture based on his forthcoming memoir,
Blood Done Sign My Name, on Thursday,
Feb. 14, at 5:30 p.m. in Arts 215.
Tyson, associate professor of Afro-American Studies at
the University of Wisconsin – Madison, will talk about the
need for, and read from his own efforts at what he terms “a
candid confrontation” with the violent legacy of racial conflict in
our hearts and heads, recent past and present.
In Blood Done Sign My Name, Tyson tells the story of how
the politics and violence of racial conflict surrounded and
permeated his life as a child, as the son of a white, pro-civil rights
minister, growing up in North Carolina during the late 1960s and
early 1970s. Author of Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots
of Black Power, the award-winning biography of the militant
freedom fighter, Tyson's new book confronts the tangle of personal
and political, local and national forces that swirl beneath the
too-often cleanly swept surface of contemporary recollections of the
era known as “the civil rights movement.”
The talk is sponsored by Africana Studies, the
English Department, American Studies, and the African and
Latino Alliance of Students.
