Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World - Paperback

by Wil Haygood (Author)

For decades, representation of the Black experience in films has been marginalized, stifled, inaccurate, and inadequate. In Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World, now available in paperback, cultural historian Wil Haygood places the Black experience in the foreground and examines the struggles and triumphs of Black actors and filmmakers as a window into Black culture, civil rights, and racism in America. This all-encompassing study provides an unprecedented look at the history of Black cinema in a white-dominated industry--from Hollywood's first blockbuster The Birth of a Nation (1915), which glorifies the Ku Klux Klan, to Gone with the Wind (1939), Imitation of Life (1959), the Blaxploitation films of the seventies, and contemporary films such as Do The Right Thing (1989), 12 Years a Slave (2013), and Black Panther (2018).Featuring a powerful new preface that addresses Black filmmakers' ongoing fight for inclusion and the continuing need for cinema to tell more compelling stories about being Black in America, this important, timely volume provides an exceptional history and groundbreaking perspective of Black cinema.

Author Biography

Wil Haygood is a former reporter for the Washington Post and the Boston Globe, where he was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist. In 2022 he received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize's Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. Haygood also wrote the New York Times bestseller, The Butler: A Witness to History. Haygood is currently serving as Boadway Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at his alma mater, Miami University, Ohio.