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Tyson rises from his rocking chair. Dressed as usual in a blazer, open-collar shirt, jeans and brown work boots, he tells the students they're going to learn a poem by Langston Hughes: "Folks I'm telling you/ Birthing is hard/ And Dying is mean/ So get yourself/ Some loving in between."

He leads the class through repetitions of Hughes' poem about struggle, life and love until it's committed to memory. Like his father, Tyson has a voice that puts people at ease, though he hardly sounds like the preacher. Where Vernon Tyson's deep drawling cadence is richly authoritative, Tyson's midrange voice is smart, slightly mischievous, seemingly always on the brink of laughter. Student Carlisle Harvard said Tyson has "a gift of expression that helps you search your heart in front of other people without feeling threatened or defensive."

At previous sessions, students have heard Tyson and other prominent guests talk about slavery, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. They have also seen Triangle actor-writer Mike Wiley perform his play about Emmett Till, the black teenager murdered in Mississippi in 1955 because supposedly he whistled at a white woman.

This week's class features a panel discussion with two figures from "Blood": Vernon Tyson, who was a minister in Oxford when Henry Marrow was murdered for allegedly saying something untoward to a white woman, and Eddie McCoy, a black resident of the town who participated in the African-American uprising that followed the crime and the acquittal of Robert and Larry Teel by an all-white jury.

Music, poetry and art -- and also barbecue -- play large roles in Tyson's course because they help students feel their powerful and unifying past.

"For all that separates white and black in the South, we are far less segregated than it appears," Tyson said. "Our food is the same. Our music is much the same. So are the cultural touchstones that define us. That's why culture is at the core of the course."

The music in the class particularly touched Harvard, 67. "Music has a way of expressing deeper feelings, things you really weren't allowed to say," she said. "It haunted you and helped you understand the historical facts."

"The class changed my life," Harvard added, "helping me be far more aware of white privilege, the obstacles African-Americans still face and our need to solve these problems together."

Tyson is a teacher, not a preacher, but he hopes to convert people through his course. If he teaches it for five years, he said, "we'll have more than a thousand people who have gone through this same experience, who have the same cultural and historical grounding for understanding the world. A thousand crazy people can change the world."

His gospel is spreading. Pender and New Hanover counties District Attorney Benjamin R. David's mother signed up for the course last year, then convinced her son that the class would help his efforts to build trust across communities.

"Most of the people working in the court system are white and the vast majority of defendants we prosecute for violent crimes are African-American," David said. This year he brought about 75 local leaders to the class and is working with Tyson on plans to teach it in Wilmington in the fall. He and Tyson are also part of a group called the Big Picture Talkers, who are working to achieve racial reconciliation.

"I can't credit Tim with all of these efforts," David said. "But he has encouraged a great debate among people who are not usually in the same room. ... He gives us a chance to rally around the great moral issue -- how we treat one another."

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