The Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King Lecture Series on Nonviolent Social Change is proud to welcome

2023 KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Timothy Tyson

"Love, Power, and Nonviolence: The Utterly Unacceptable Philosophy"

Timothy B. Tyson is Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.  His 2017 New York Times bestseller, The Blood of Emmett Till, won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. 

Tyson’s Blood Done Sign My Name was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won the Southern Book Award and the Grawemeyer Award from Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.  Hollywood screenwriter Jeb Stuart directed a 2010 feature film based on Blood.  Tyson’s Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for best book in United States history and the James Rawley Award for best book on race from the Organization of American Historians and became the basis for a 2006 PBS documentary, “Negroes with Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power.”  His 2006 Ghosts of 1898: Wilmington’s ‘Race Riot’ and the Rise of White Supremacy won the Excellence Award from the National Association of Black Journalists. In 2002, he served as editor for The Black Power Movement, Part 2: The Papers of Robert F. Williams. 

Tyson teaches African American and Southern history, culture, and politics to students at Duke, UNC, Durham Technical and Community College, and the public. He works with Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II and serves on the executive boards of the  N.C. NAACP, the UNC Center for Civil Rights, and Repairers of the Breach.