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.

J. Peder Zane reports for The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC)

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Tim Tyson (temporary Website)

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