DURHAM - On a sweltering summer day in 2001, Vernon Tyson turned up the heat as he and his son Tim strolled through New Orleans' Garden District.

"What do you want to do?" the father asked.

The men had come to the Deep South as part of an innovative history class Tim was teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The father, a United Methodist minister, often cut to the human heart of matters, so his son knew this question wasn't about where they should eat.

"At first I thought it was strange," Tim Tyson recalled. A 42-year-old father of two, professor of Afro-American Studies and author of the prizewinning biography "Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power," he was not exactly adrift. But his father rightly suspected that his son had broader aspirations.

Before he could answer, something even stranger happened. A huge mockingbird -- "twice as big as any you've ever seen" -- swooped down three feet in front of them. It started singing, loud as could be, in music Tyson could only describe as jazz. They stood there, astonished.

"That's what I want to do," Tim declared.

In the seven years since, Timothy B. Tyson has gathered the chords of his life into a powerful theme that has proved more resonant than he or his father might ever have imagined.

In 2004, he published "Blood Done Sign My Name," a history/memoir about a 1970 racial murder in Oxford, N.C. Not only did the book become a phenomenon; it also redefined his life and what it means to be a public intellectual.

Tyson returned to North Carolina in 2005 to serve as John Hope Franklin Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center, a post that quickly turned into a joint appointment at Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill. Since then, rather than just retail his research into Southern history from the lectern and in print, Tyson has rolled up his sleeves to work with churches, schools, political leaders and others who share his desire to build community across the lines of race and ethnicity.

He appears free -- often two or three times a week -- at elementary schools and churches, from Asheville, Charlotte and Winston-Salem to Goldsboro, Greenville and Wilmington. Instead of giving talks, he holds conversations aimed not just at sharing what he knows but moving his audiences to grapple with difficult subjects and recognize their common humanity.

And first among equals in his efforts is the visionary class, "The South in Black & White," that he teaches at the Hayti Heritage Center in Durham. Students come from Duke, UNC, N.C. Central University and throughout the community and leave with more than the credit hours they earn for the history lessons.

"The value of historical research is in how it helps us live our lives and shape the future together," he said. "I'm trying to change the conversation by helping people recognize the complexity and truth of our past but also the very hopeful fact that we can change."

A voice to lead

A hush falls over the crowd as gospel singer Mary D. Williams breaks into the great old song about the need for talk and the need for action:

The meeting at the building will soon be over,

Soon be over, soon be over.

The 300 students join in, smiling, singing and clapping along in the weekly ritual that opens each class.

The meeting at the building will soon be over all over this world,

All over this world, all over this world.

On this April day, Williams, a Raleigh resident who teaches the class with Tyson, sings two more songs before ending with the hymn that provided the title for Tyson's book. It promises that our earthly trials will lead to heavenly rewards.

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."

Growing up in Oxford

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.

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?