Sponsor love: West Virginia Wesleyan College’s MFA in Creative Writing
Become a Patron!Wil Haygood is here. I’m going to repeat that: Wil Haygood is here.
He’s here to talk about his latest book, Colorization: 100 Years of Black Films in a White World (Knopf, 2021).
This conversation I did as part of Goucher College’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction. It was a live event, rebroadcast with my slick editing skills for you.
Wil has been a long-time reporter for The Washington Post, where his piece on Eugene Allen, the butler for several presidents in the White House became a book and was the basis for Lee Daniels The Butler, starring Forrest Whittaker and Oprah Winfrey. You might have heard of them.
Wil has also written books on Sugar Ray Robinson and Thurgood Marshall and Sammy Davis Jr. His talent, ability, and rigor might only be surpassed by his generosity. How generous? He blurbed my book Six Weeks in Saratoga way back in early 2011 before the book came out that summer.
Wil came on the show to talk about his new book, which is so much more than a chronicle of influential Black movies. It weaves in the tumultuous past century, the current events of the time that informed the movies, the roles of Black actors and Black filmmakers have made, the slight moments of subversion, the strides and the back slides, and the tremendous work that still needs to be done. He begins the book with Birth of a Nation, an anti-Black film and ends the book, soberingly, with the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville in 2017 that revealed to many of us that maybe this country isn’t quite as enlightened as it purports to be. That’s only become more apparent over the past four years.
All that said, Wil’s book is sweeping and it’s fun. Sure, it can be grim and maddening in places (not the writing, just the sheer sadness of the atrocities this country and some of its people are guilty of). The story is handled by a master, and you’re about to hear how he got his start in journalism, and how a chance encounter with James Baldwin put Wil on the path to nine books and counting.
The show has a new Instagram handle, @creativenonfictionpodcast, and you can always keep the conversation going on Twitter @CNFPod.
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