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He had hoped to find the objective truth of what happened that day, "what no one wanted to talk about," Tyson said. It wasn't there. A few weeks later the freshman went to Oxford and interviewed one of the killers, Robert Teel.

"Tim became a historian because he wanted to make sense of that murder and the struggle for civil rights he'd seen," his father said.

Tyson's work has often led him to challenge the conventional story of the civil rights movement, about how "heroic saints and crusaders" changed the world through nonviolence. In "Radio Free Dixie" he chronicled the life of Robert Williams, a black activist from Monroe, who was not afraid to match white racists weapon for weapon. In another book, "Democracy Betrayed," and the 16-page N&O special section published two years ago, The Ghosts of 1898, he has written extensively about the vicious white supremacy campaign that seized the state a century ago.

"The violence I had seen in Oxford and Wilmington helped me recognize the importance of these stories," he said. "The more I looked, the harder it was to find Southerners, black or white, who remained strictly nonviolent."

Tyson holds that the "sugarcoated confections that pass for history" are at the center of our problems.

"If we ignore or rewrite our history, we lose control of our greatest power -- the ability to shape the future," Tyson said. "Because we don't look at our history honestly, our conversations about race are often filled with false clichés. What we get is a lot of finger-pointing and hand-wringing, guilt, blame and shame. What we need to do is start thinking about what kind of community we want our children and grandchildren to grow up in."

By exploring the complex story that illuminates the good, the evil and the untapped potential in each us, Tyson sees the possibility of people answering the same question his father asked him: What do you want to do?

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