Please join us for the next Dayton Literary Peace Prize Virtual Book Club. We will be reading Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World by Wil Haygood. The discussion will be held on Wednesday, March 2 at 7:00 p.m. EST. Ron Rollins, former editor of Ideas and Voices for the Dayton Daily News will be moderating and the author will be joining us virtually for the discussion.

Wil is well-known to the Dayton Literary Peace Prize readers as his 2015 book, Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination that Changed America was a finalist for the 2015 DLPP Nonfiction Award (this would be an especially important book to read in light of the upcoming Supreme Court nomination). Wil was a featured speaker in our “Evening for Peace and Justice” at the Victoria in 2017.  His book Tigerland: 1968-1969: A City Divided, a Nation Torn Apart, and a Magical Season of Healing was the DLPP Nonfiction Runner-up in 2019 and was the DLPP Author Series book read by hundreds of Dayton area students in 2020. Wil has also served as a presenter and an MC at our awards ceremonies and is a member of our Honorary Advisory Board. We are delighted that he will be joining us for the discussion on March 2.

A New York Times Critics’ Top Book of the Year • Booklists’ Editor’s Choice • One of NPR’s Best Book of the Year

“At once a film book, a history book, and a civil rights book.… Without a doubt, not only the very best film book [but] also one of the best books of the year in any genre. An absolutely essential read.”
—Scott Neumyer, Shondaland

“This unprecedented history of Black cinema examines 100 years of Black movies—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.”
—From the author of The Butler and Showdown

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—Wil 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 makes clear the effects of changing social realities and events on the business of making movies and on what was represented on the screen: from Jim Crow and segregation to white flight and interracial relationships, from the assassination of Malcolm X, to the O. J. Simpson trial, to the Black Lives Matter movement. He considers the films themselves—including Imitation of Life, Gone with the Wind, Porgy and Bess, the Blaxploitation films of the seventies, Do The Right Thing, 12 Years a Slave, and Black Panther. 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, and Jordan Peele, among many others.

An important, timely book, Colorization gives us both an unprecedented history of Black cinema and a groundbreaking perspective on racism in modern America.Before the discussion, if you have time make sure to watch these five must-see movies the celebrate black film history.

• Imitation of Life: Based on the novel Imitation of Life by Fannie Hurst, this film offers “a very heartbreaking, searing look at the interior of a Black family” by presenting a young woman who is “passing” as white and the effect that has on her relationship with her mother.
• The Lilies of the Field: In this historic film—for which Sidney Poitier became the first Black man to win a leading actor Oscar—”race is never mentioned. And that’s very interesting, because at the time the film came out in 1963, race was everywhere in American society.” The fable-esque story about an itinerant worker and a group of nuns is based on a 1962 novel by William  Edmund Barrett.
• Shaft: There’s nothing like a good detective story—and until 1971, there was really nothing like Shaft, the film based on Ernest Tidyman’s book of the same name. “American audiences had been used to seeing white detectives. But now you had on a sixty-foot screen a Black detective who had a swagger about himself.”
• Do The Right Thing: Spike Lee is a director who needs no real introduction today, but his third full-length feature, Do the Right Thing, made him an icon to audiences of all races. “A film about race and ethnic rivalries . . . you see the rivalries and the misunderstandings between Italians and Blacks . . . that really helped ignite Spike Lee’s career.” Don’t miss the companion book penned by Spike Lee and Lisa Jones.
• Lee Daniel’s The Butler: Inspired by Haygood’s Washington Post article “A Butler Well Served by This Election,” and subsequent book The Butler: A Witness to History, this “big, sweeping Civil Rights movie” holds a special place in Haygood’s heart: “I had a chance to meet the real-life butler that the character is based on in the movie.”

Read the NYTimes review of Colorization by Dwight Garner.