07014
January 5, 2007

Grawemeyer Award goes to Duke scholar

by Daniel Burke
Religion News Service

LOUISVILLE — The 2007 Grawemeyer Award in Religion has been awarded to a North Carolina scholar for writing a memoir that explores themes of social and spiritual tension in the wake of a racially motivated murder.
   
     Timothy Tyson, author of Blood Done Sign My Name and a senior scholar of documentary studies at Duke University, will be awarded $200,000 by the University of Louisville and Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary as part of the prestigious prize.
   
     Tyson was 11 when two white men murdered a black man in Oxford, NC. The two men were later acquitted, provoking riots, according to a news release from the seminary. Tyson’s book intersperses historical events and recent interviews, as well as personal accounts, such as the forced resignation of his father, a progressive white Methodist minister.
   
     “The book explores issues of sin, loss, redemption, conscience, and human decency, and has the gripping, convicting effect of a truthful story,” Susan R. Garrett, director of the religion award and a professor at the seminary, said in a news release.
   
     “Tyson reminds us that changes in race relations have not come about peacefully or quickly, and provokes us to see how much remains to be done,” Garrett said.