< Previous page
Next page >

Vernon Tyson, like his father and grandfather, was a Methodist minister, subject to moving about every four years to lead a different church in North Carolina. He landed in Oxford in 1966 with his wife, Martha, and three children.

Sitting with his parents around the kitchen table in their Raleigh home last month, Tim recalled that he disliked school, even though his mother was a teacher.

"Because they expected you to attend," his father interjected.

"It was too regimented," his mother added.

As a third-grader, he read books under his desk, especially during math -- "To Kill A Mockingbird" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" were particular favorites. Instead of punishing him, he and teacher Emily Montague struck a deal: Tim could read in the library as long as he told the class what he had learned.

"One classmate dubbed me Little Professor," Tyson said with a smile.

His fourth-grade teacher was less understanding. When Tim corrected her claim that Hitler had risen to power during World War I, she exploded, sending him to the principal's office. "They called Daddy in, and he didn't completely take their side so there was some daylight between my parents and authority."

Tim was 10 -- about the age of Scout Finch in "To Kill a Mockingbird" -- when the pivotal event of his life occurred that inextricably linked morality, history, community and truth.

After Henry Marrow's murder, violence erupted in Oxford. Vernon, whom his son describes as "an Eleanor Roosevelt liberal," went against the white tide with his efforts to bring blacks and whites together. The church reassigned him to Wilmington.

The episode left Tim confused and angry. He didn't understand how the perpetrators avoided jail and was bitter that his father appeared to have been run out of town for trying to make peace. "I wanted to say, 'Look, my daddy was right.'"

When the Tysons arrived in Wilmington in 1971, the city was convulsed by arson and murder stemming from efforts to integrate the schools.

"I was beat up at school just because I was white," Tim said. "I wanted to say, 'Hey, I'm on your side,' but there was no time to talk, just racial anger."

Few seemed willing to explore the turbulence, and he was further disillusioned by the "muted, garbled, dishonest" history books he was assigned. Instead of going to college right after high school, he and some friends shared a farmhouse in the Gates County crossroads of Flat Branch.

Their parties often involved interracial dancing and kissing. Tyson had an odd feeling in the pit of his stomach after one of them -- "like I was part of something perverted. It was because I lived in a society that couldn't imagine love across the color line. Some of that sickness was inside me."

Tyson's hippie dropout phase makes less sense to him now. "I had decided I didn't want to sell out -- I wanted a kind of purity," he said. But his life experience and growing political activism -- he joined efforts to stop the draft in the 1970s, to freeze nuclear weapons in the 1980s and oppose the first Gulf War in the early 1990s -- taught him that "you're always part of the game, whether you think you're playing or not."

Digging up the past

At 23, Tyson enrolled at UNC-Greensboro. There he found the beginning of a path that might lead him through history to truth.

When he learned that the library had old issues of The News & Observer on microfilm, he immediately called up May 12, 1970 -- the day after Marrow was killed. He was still reading when the library lights went out at midnight. He hid himself in the bathroom until everyone left and then continued to read until dawn.

< Previous page
Next page >