Timothy B. Tyson Quote

So here is another shard of truth, which we must accept if we are to make sense of the trial: faith in our courts and our laws, in the statement chiseled above the columns of the U.S. Supreme Court building - 'Equal Justice Under Law' - can obscure the obvious, particularly with the passage of time. There was no equal justice, no universal protection of law in the Mississippi Delta, certainly not in 1955.

Timothy B. Tyson

So here is another shard of truth, which we must accept if we are to make sense of the trial: faith in our courts and our laws, in the statement chiseled above the columns of the U.S. Supreme Court building - 'Equal Justice Under Law' - can obscure the obvious, particularly with the passage of time. There was no equal justice, no universal protection of law in the Mississippi Delta, certainly not in 1955.

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About Timothy B. Tyson

Timothy B. Tyson (born 1959) is an American writer and historian who specializes in the issues of culture, religion, and race associated with the Civil Rights Movement. He is a senior research scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and an adjunct professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina.
His books have won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, the James A. Rawley Prize (OAH), the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion, and the Southern Book Award. In addition, two of his books, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (1998) and Blood Done Sign My Name (2004), have been adapted into films, and the latter was also adapted into a play.
In 2017, Tyson published The Blood of Emmett Till, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and was longlisted for the National Book Award, but which was later subject to controversy regarding a reported confession made by Till's accuser Carolyn Bryant to Tyson which could not be substantiated.