We the People: Required Watching Virtual Conversation: Monday, November 22 at 7:00pm. Registration is FREE.
MSP Film Society and Magers & Quinn Booksellers present a special We the People: Required Watching live virtual conversation with Wil Haygood, writer of the new book "Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World" and MSP Film Society Programmer Craig Laurence Rice.
Watch the Conversation
We the People: Required Watching is a screening series of films that speak powerfully to systemic inequality, followed by conversations with filmmakers and community leaders discussing ways we can support social justice and anti-racism efforts within our communities. The series is generously supported by the George Family Foundation and KNOCK, Inc. All We the People online discussions are generously supported by Kelly and Mike Palmer.
About the Book
Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World
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.
About the Author
Wil Haygood
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.
Partners
