In conversation with Craig Rice. Presented in partnership with MSP Film Society

From Wil Haygood, the acclaimed author of The Butler and biographies of Thurgood Marshall and Sammy Davis, Jr., as well as an award-winning journalist of the Washington Post and Boston Globe, here is an unprecedented, groundbreaking examination of Black cinema—from Gone with the Wind to Blaxploitation films to Black Panther—using the struggles and triumphs of the artists, and the films themselves, as a prism to explore Black culture, civil rights, and racism in America.

Beginning in 1915 with D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation—which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and became Hollywood’s first blockbuster—which showed Black Americans that they “had yet one more enemy: cinema” Haygood gives us an incisive, fascinating, little-known history, spanning more than a century, of Black artists in the film business, on-screen and behind the scenes.

He considers the films themselves—including Imitation of Life, Porgy and Bess, Lilies of the Field, Blackboard Jungle, Shaft, Superfly, Roots, Do The Right Thing, 12 Years a Slave, Green Book and BlacKkKlansmen. And he brings to new light the careers and significance of a wide range of historic and contemporary figures: Hattie McDaniel, Sidney Poitier, Berry Gordy, Alex Haley, Spike Lee, Billy Dee Willliams, Richard Pryor, Halle Berry, Ava DuVernay, Jordan Peele, and Barry Jenkins among many others.

A fascinating and pioneering perspective on race and racism in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America.

WIL HAYGOOD is a former Boston Globe (where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist) and Washington Post reporter. Haygood has received writing fellowships from the Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Alicia Patterson Foundations. His biographies of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Sammy Davis Jr., Sugar Ray Robinson, and Thurgood Marshall have been widely acclaimed. Haygood also wrote the New York Times bestseller, The Butler: A Witness to History, which was adapted into an award-winning movie. Haygood is currently serving an appointment as Boadway Visiting Distinguished Scholar at his alma mater, Miami University, Ohio.