Historian stands by his words

The May 18 article on Timothy B. Tyson's efforts to promote racial reconciliation through Southern history elicited a few e-mail messages from readers who thought the story should have addressed Tyson's comments on the Duke lacrosse case. Staff writer J. Peder Zane shared the questions with Tyson, who answered via e-mail. The Q&A was posted on Zane's newsobserver.com blog, What's the Big Idea? Here are excerpts from the interview.

Q: In the days since we ran the story about your Southern history and racial reconciliation work, I have heard from a number of readers who thought the piece should have been more questioning. In particular, they wanted to ask about your statements on the Duke lacrosse case, which they see tend to see as a failure of vision on your part.

A: I agree with your critics that the piece you wrote on my work was incomplete and did not give a sufficiently complex picture of me. For example, I threw spitballs in Ms. Dorothy Ashley's English class in the seventh grade, and she was a saint, and also nearly blind. It was a low point. There have been others.

But I disagree with your critics that somehow my utterances on the Duke lacrosse fiasco represent a serious stumble. None of us has a crystal ball and, if I could have had a God's-eye view and seen all the way to the end of the story, if anything ever really ends, I might have spoken a little differently. But in all honesty, and with a little surprise, I still would not go back and change what I said very much. I could be wrong, but it appears to me that some who have complained about my words did not hear what I said or heard very selectively.

Following the first reports on the lacrosse incident, I made two public statements. One was printed in The News & Observer and the other broadcast on WUNC radio. In the newspaper piece, I criticized the Duke students for hiring strippers from across the tracks, which in my view put them in the position of using people as things, adding that "the question of whether they also committed rape is one we must leave to the courts and to the police." I also described the historical context in which these events occurred, which is not the same thing as saying precisely what occurred, which is not something I knew, even though I read all the press accounts, many of which turned out to be deceptive. But I am a historian and I do not believe everything I read in the newspaper.

In the WUNC radio piece, I stated that "it is important for us to remember that an investigation is pending, and the police are the only people qualified to figure out what happened in that house altogether, and we have to support [the police] as they do that dirty job of trying to figure out what kind of ugly things unfolded there. But it's clear even in the most favorable reading of this that what we have is young men of privilege who have somehow learned that other people could be treated as things." I acknowledged that the accused may not be guilty, but stated that "even if the charges of rape are not true, there was a terribly degrading spectacle unfolding that night."

This all seems fairly self-evident to me. In fact, given what was being printed in the newspaper and the statements issued by the district attorney, I am surprised that a person as impassioned and opinionated as me would have the presence of mind to consistently remind people to withhold judgment. Raising questions and making people think, as opposed to running for public office, for example, is the nature of my work, and "provocative" is not an insult to a teacher. But people are free to disagree. Your head is not just a hair farm and none of us is going to see things in exactly the same light.